Alraune (1952)

Expected more

Absolutely the worst movie.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

I saw this on Amazon Prime under the title UNNATURAL: FRUIT OF EVIL. It's a slow-moving little potboiler in which a scientist manages to create an artificial woman with no sense of morality. Inevitably the woman gets loose in the world and causes calamity due to various men falling in love with her. While there are shades of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN in the premise and the film explores some intriguingly muddy moral ground, generally it's cheap and listless, never really sparking when it should. The best thing about it is the cast, including Karl Boehm (later of PEEPING TOM infamy), Hildegard Knef, and the barnstorming Erich von Stroheim.

This version of Alraune is largely unremarkable but for another excellent performance by the always-radiant Hildegard Knef. Unambitious cinematography and a slow pace undermine any attempt to build real atmosphere. Most interesting is the film's theme of eugenics and the dangers of science just a few years after the fall of the Third Reich.In some ways, though, the Alraune fable is an inverse of Frankenstein: whereas, in Shelley's tale, science is shown to supersede alchemy, here it is the reverse. Alraune's creator has more in common with Rotwang in the sense that there is a blurring of alchemy and science. It is noteworthy that Brigitte Helm starred as the titular character in the early version of Alraune as well as her more famous role as Maria in Metropolis.This film is recommended to Knef fans and people interested in the Alraune myth. However, as a piece of cinema, it is workmanlike and nothing more.

Brooding scientist Professor ten Brinken (a stern Erich von Stroheim), thrown out of Uni for his blasphemous beliefs, creates a "daughter" (Hildegarde Knef) from the sperm of a double murderer and the egg of a prostitute in his castle laboratory and raises her under the gallows, where the mandrake root grows. It's an experiment in genetic theory but true to the plant's legend, Alraune will bring good fortune just before death and destruction as the movie opens with the girl escaping from a convent and making her father rich when she divines a mineral spring on land he bought. Falling for her cousin (Karlheinz "Peeping Tom" Boehm), Alraune feels something for the first time but luck won't last long and although her "evil" isn't premeditated (much), she's responsible for an attempted suicide, a framing for theft, a fatal accident, a duel, death from exposure, bankruptcy, and public disgrace. The story ends with the inevitable: Alraune, crying tears she never could before, gives up the man she loves lest he be cursed, too, and her "father", who gave her life, takes it away and goes to the gallows in a fitting twist of fate. The film equates artificial insemination with the crimes of Viktor Frankenstein but blames the creator since love is what gives us our souls and Alraune had become human.The German production's a handsomely mounted, atmospheric period piece with an Expressionism the original 1928 silent lacked, especially in the gloomy castle, and some thunder, wind, and rain are there to underscore a point or two. Obviously THE BAD SEED, a hit Broadway play and Hollywod movie about hereditary evil that came out a few years later, wasn't exactly innovative. The dubbed U.S. version, UNNATURAL: THE FRUIT OF EVIL, is missing ten minutes and eliminates any reference to artificial insemination.

This fascinating German fantasy film stars the legendary Erich von Stroheim as Professor Jacob ten Brinken, a brilliant scientist who has played God and created the world's first test tube baby. Now fully grown, Alraune (Hildegard Knef) is a beautiful but affectless creature whose way with the opposite sex threatens to ensnare the Professor's nephew (a very young looking Carlheinz Bohm). Alraune's amorality--presumably the result of being bred from the egg of a prostitute and the sperm of a murderer--has not been tempered by a spell in convent and now threatens to destroy the family legacy. Though clearly set before World War II, the film reflects concerns about the misuses of science by the Nazi regime, though perhaps the conclusions it reaches are not that far afield from those of Dr. Mengele. Alraune is a missing link between German expressionism and the Italian Gothic cinema of the early 1960s, with a dash of Jean Cocteau thrown in for good measure. Interesting sidenote: it sure sounds like von Stroheim dubbed his own English language track.