but somehow the difference reminds me of the difference between death by gunshot and death by knife--somehow a carriage seems more intimate.
It's not mechanized. There's no buffer of metal and futurism. It's hooves and wheels and human hands on reins. It does feel more raw.
What you say about Melitta makes her oddly sympathetic. Like, it's not her he's after, but she'll take being the replacement object of a passion that big.
Yes! I found her really interesting. It would have been easy to make her a seductive cheat, greedily exploiting Lorenz's romantic obsession, like Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945)—the false double of Veronika, the loose shadow of steadfast Marie—but her amorality, if that's what it is, is innocent. She doesn't tempt or corrupt him; that role is reserved for Wigottschinsky, constantly reminding Lorenz that he'll get nowhere in life without money, and perhaps also Melitta's mother, coolly equating her daughter's love affairs and her own business dealings. Melitta herself took a stranger home without even knowing his name, only the hungry, awestruck, vulnerable way he stared at her across the room. They met in the swankiest restaurant in town; he's wearing an expensive suit and he has Alfred Abel's sensitive, worn face; she bursts into delighted laughter at his claim to be something as common as a laid-off town clerk (she warns him not to try that joke on her mother, who might believe it) and believes him at once on his second, double-speaking try: "I . . . am a poet . . . a man with no luck . . . who chases after a shadow . . . a phantom!" Of course she likes him to buy her presents and take her out on the town, but he's a romantic figure to her, too. She disappears from the story after their last, blowout day together and I would love to have known her feelings when the truth about Lorenz came out. You can tell her mother would be disgusted and denounce him as a fraud, but I think Melitta might have been, however briefly, sorry.
The film doesn't demonize his aunt the pawnbroker, either. Lorenz's mother has nothing kind to say about her estranged sister and Wigottschinsky boasts about "old Schwabe"'s legendary hard heart, but she herself—a solid, handsome middle-aged woman—is sincerely, obviously fond of her nephew, the only person of her acquaintance she claims isn't a heel. She's delighted to hear that a famous publisher is looking at his poems. She hugs him, pours him a drink, wants to know all the details, agrees that he needs to look his best; she fusses as proudly over him as if he were her own child. The ultimatum she delivers in the third act is as much hurt and disappointment as it is the cold equations of cash. She doesn't trust easily. She trusted Lorenz. And when she went to check up on him, as it belatedly occurred to her that a person with a new book deal shouldn't have needed a loan of 60,000, she was shocked to find her sister alone in an unkept house, in illness and poverty, and the supposedly breadwinning son nowhere to be seen. Nearly the first words out of her mouth are "I thought Lorenz took better care of you." After that, she cuts him no slack. He's the cheat, the chiseler, the one who takes advantage of love. Abel as an actor is so good at conveying Lorenz's own horror (and increasingly unmanageable guilt) at the person he's becoming that he never lost my sympathy, but however tormented and obsessed he may be, he's still done wrong and the film knows it.
I think all of these choices are further reasons Phantom reminds me of film noir, because it's a nighmare taking place in a real world with real people in it—the story might be more symbolically charged if Melitta were an evil twin and the aunt a gatekeeper of the underworld, but it would also be much more morally stacked, much less like something that could happen to an ordinary person, wham out of nowhere on an ordinary street. I like the shadowy anxiety-scapes of noir, but there has to be some anchor to the world as we know it. Specifically, it reminded me of Tension (1949), not necessarily in plot but in the way it happens in a sunlit world, which doesn't help. The weird thing is that I haven't been able to find a lot of criticism that agrees with me. Glenn Erickson is about it, and he isn't impressed with Alfred Abel.
--you are a poet no matter what you happen to be writing
no subject
It's not mechanized. There's no buffer of metal and futurism. It's hooves and wheels and human hands on reins. It does feel more raw.
What you say about Melitta makes her oddly sympathetic. Like, it's not her he's after, but she'll take being the replacement object of a passion that big.
Yes! I found her really interesting. It would have been easy to make her a seductive cheat, greedily exploiting Lorenz's romantic obsession, like Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945)—the false double of Veronika, the loose shadow of steadfast Marie—but her amorality, if that's what it is, is innocent. She doesn't tempt or corrupt him; that role is reserved for Wigottschinsky, constantly reminding Lorenz that he'll get nowhere in life without money, and perhaps also Melitta's mother, coolly equating her daughter's love affairs and her own business dealings. Melitta herself took a stranger home without even knowing his name, only the hungry, awestruck, vulnerable way he stared at her across the room. They met in the swankiest restaurant in town; he's wearing an expensive suit and he has Alfred Abel's sensitive, worn face; she bursts into delighted laughter at his claim to be something as common as a laid-off town clerk (she warns him not to try that joke on her mother, who might believe it) and believes him at once on his second, double-speaking try: "I . . . am a poet . . . a man with no luck . . . who chases after a shadow . . . a phantom!" Of course she likes him to buy her presents and take her out on the town, but he's a romantic figure to her, too. She disappears from the story after their last, blowout day together and I would love to have known her feelings when the truth about Lorenz came out. You can tell her mother would be disgusted and denounce him as a fraud, but I think Melitta might have been, however briefly, sorry.
The film doesn't demonize his aunt the pawnbroker, either. Lorenz's mother has nothing kind to say about her estranged sister and Wigottschinsky boasts about "old Schwabe"'s legendary hard heart, but she herself—a solid, handsome middle-aged woman—is sincerely, obviously fond of her nephew, the only person of her acquaintance she claims isn't a heel. She's delighted to hear that a famous publisher is looking at his poems. She hugs him, pours him a drink, wants to know all the details, agrees that he needs to look his best; she fusses as proudly over him as if he were her own child. The ultimatum she delivers in the third act is as much hurt and disappointment as it is the cold equations of cash. She doesn't trust easily. She trusted Lorenz. And when she went to check up on him, as it belatedly occurred to her that a person with a new book deal shouldn't have needed a loan of 60,000, she was shocked to find her sister alone in an unkept house, in illness and poverty, and the supposedly breadwinning son nowhere to be seen. Nearly the first words out of her mouth are "I thought Lorenz took better care of you." After that, she cuts him no slack. He's the cheat, the chiseler, the one who takes advantage of love. Abel as an actor is so good at conveying Lorenz's own horror (and increasingly unmanageable guilt) at the person he's becoming that he never lost my sympathy, but however tormented and obsessed he may be, he's still done wrong and the film knows it.
I think all of these choices are further reasons Phantom reminds me of film noir, because it's a nighmare taking place in a real world with real people in it—the story might be more symbolically charged if Melitta were an evil twin and the aunt a gatekeeper of the underworld, but it would also be much more morally stacked, much less like something that could happen to an ordinary person, wham out of nowhere on an ordinary street. I like the shadowy anxiety-scapes of noir, but there has to be some anchor to the world as we know it. Specifically, it reminded me of Tension (1949), not necessarily in plot but in the way it happens in a sunlit world, which doesn't help. The weird thing is that I haven't been able to find a lot of criticism that agrees with me. Glenn Erickson is about it, and he isn't impressed with Alfred Abel.
--you are a poet no matter what you happen to be writing
Thank you.