Movies & TV / Reviews
Blast From The Past: The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari Review
Image Credit: Public Domain
Loading...When I started doing these Blast From The Past reviews, I did not intend for the series to be reviews from the DISTANT past! And while they haven’t all been, I’ve done several reviews now of movies that are in the area of one hundred years old! The Gold Rush and Nosferatu aren’t exactly the kind of movies that a lot of folks are checking out here in 2024.
But that’s all part of filling in cinematic blindspots, I guess; you have to do them from every era. And there’s nothing wrong with building a repertoire of 1920’s films. Maybe I should find the time to watch Metropolis, among others.
And here it is, we are traveling back to 1920 this edition to take a look at The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, a movie I’ve admittedly been very curious about ever since I watched The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, and we all heard Nicholas Cage talk up his love for this picture. It was not the first I’d heard of the classic German Expressionist film, but it was the first time I’d really considered adding it to my Playlist on Plex.
I do believe as of this watching, this is now the oldest film I have ever seen, supplanting the title from Nosferatu, which held it for two days. Sorry, Nossy. Forget Metropolis; maybe I should move into the 1910’s next. Hell, maybe I’ll go all the way back to A Trip To The Moon. It would be hard to go further back than that!
Anyway, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari is the story of a young man named Francis and his fiancé Jane. When Francis finds another man sitting on a bench and talking about having seen spirits, he decides to tell the man the story of how his beloved Jane came to enter a semi-catatonic state.
This takes us back in time to the town of Holstenwall where Francis and his friend Alan talk about both being in love with Jane. Meanwhile, the traveling Dr. Caligari enters the town and decides he wants to be a part of the fair they are having. He has a somnambulist, you see, and he wants to put him on display and earn a few bucks.
Francis and Alan take in Dr. Caligari’s show, and Alan asks Cesare–the somnambulist–when he will die. Cesare responds that Alan will die at dawn.
The next day, Alan is found dead in his home! Francis immediately suspects Dr. Caligari and Cesare, and he sets about proving his theory is correct…
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ The sets and makeup of the German Expressionist style are designed to keep you on your toes and disoriented. Everything is warped and dark and disproportioned. It all wiggles its way into your head and creates a sense of discomfort.
Everything here just looks great. It’s all so stylized and creepy, and I loved it. It would be effective and creative if I saw it today, but witnessing it from a film from 1920 is even more amazing. Great stuff.
+ It’s nothing I can get too much into in a Spoiler-Free review, but The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari has a truly unexpected twist ending that I did not see coming. Now, I’m no film historian, but it’s not like I anticipate that there were loads of movies with big turns at the end by 1920. So this has to have been a mind-blowing occurrence when audiences first saw it.
It’s a great ending here that perfectly works in the context of the story.
– Right in the middle of the movie, there have been two murders committed in Holstenwall. As a third is about to occur, the killer is caught and arrested by the police. This seems to interfere with Francis’ investigation into Dr. Caligari, but it turns out that the would-be killer confesses he wanted to murder an old woman, but he was not the culprit behind the first two deaths. So it turns out that that killer is still at large!
This is such a weird plot point thrown into the film that really does not go anywhere or add anything to the film. And it’s not like The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari is a long picture or anything. Was this short element thrown in just to add five minutes to the runtime? I did not understand the point of it at all.
– The Jane character is so underused as to basically be negligible to the story. You could essentially write her out of the plot and barely anything changes. She has a brief moment where she visits Caligari and Cesare and ends up getting stalked by Cesare, but that’s about it. You could replace her with any other townsperson for that purpose.
With the way the movie starts, you expect Jane to take on a larger role than she does, so it feels weird that once you are into the meat of the story, she more-or-less vanishes from the tale.
