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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)

Rating: 4 Stars (out of 4)

Dutch Angles

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on DVD

Robert Wiene's essential The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) is an unquestionable landmark in cinema. Krauss stars again as the doctor, who enters a carnival with his main attraction, a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) who predicts people's deaths (and may well be the cause of same). When his best friend is found murdered, Francis (Friedrich Feher) immediately suspects Caligari and sets out to prove his hunch. Rather than attempting to capture "realism," which was the general method of the time, Wiene went the opposite route, slathering the screen with forced perspectives and all kinds of bizarre diagonals and slants; there is hardly a right angle to be found in this film. It results in vivid, dreamlike logic and a terrifying lack of control. A prologue and epilogue were apparently added over Wiene's objections to lessen the overall impact of the film's sheer, unrelenting madness. Interestingly, though this film influenced everyone from Murnau and Lang to Hollywood filmmakers of the 1940s -- and still influences certain filmmakers today -- Wiene himself never had much of a career.

Starring: Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Rudolf Lettinger
Written by: Hans Janowitz, Carl Mayer
Directed by: Robert Wiene
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Running Time: 75 minutes
Date: February 13, 2008