The Haunted Castle (1921)

Pretty Good

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

"Schloß Vogelöd" or "The Haunted Castle" is a German silent film from 1921, so this one will soon have its 100th anniversary. Of course, it is still black-and-white too. It runs for slightly over 80 minutes, at least in the version I saw, and I cannot say I am familiar really with any of the actors and crew here. That is, of course, with the exception of director F.W. Murnau, who is considered one of the great silent filmmakers, not only from Germany, but in general. And looking at his other works, the genres listed here (Crime, Drama, Horror) should not be a surprise to anybody as comedy was never his field of choice.Sadly, I cannot say I was too scared or well-entertained watching this one. It is not among Murnau's most famous, but also far from his lesser known works, something in the middle. The story was just never too interesting or edge-of-the-seat stuff in my opinion. The good thing about it was probably the very frequent use of subtitles, something that should have been a lot more common in silent films as they simply did not have the audible measures yet so we could easily understand what is going on. And I am not only talking about the dialogs here, but also about soundtracks for example. Anyway, "Schloß Vogelöd" was not a good watch to me and I only recommend it to the most hardcore silent film fans. Thumbs down.

F.W. Murnau directs a film that seems strangely static. The plot has something about an uninvited count showing up at the home of a Baroness. He is professing his innocence to the killing of the Baroness's first husband and he then sets out to prove he didn't do it. Maybe it was the poor video source I saw which had inter-titles in both German and English (and which seemed incomplete) but this seemed to be little more than a bunch of people either sitting around talking or dealing with religious figure. I got bored and I got distracted and while the film played out to the end I really didn't care what happened. Not the sort of film that I would have expected from Murnau. Unless you're trying to see everything by the director I'd take a pass.

Besides his well-known pieces, film noir master, F.W. Murnau, is also represented on DVD by a minor but nonetheless interesting work, "The Haunted Castle" (1921), made just a year before the director's seminal "Nosferatu". Now available on a truly excellent release, this DVD is not only complete with all the iris ins and iris outs (deleted from the truly execrable print on a rival label), but presented in all the splendor of its original tints.True, the movie itself is rather stagily directed with little use even of pans, let alone tracking shots. Nonetheless, the story is reasonably intriguing. What makes "The Haunted Castle" worth seeing, however, is neither the social fabric of its upper-class setting, the mystery mechanics of the plot, the two briefly surreal dream sequences or even the successfully more naturalistic performances (judged by the general standards prevailing in German cinema in 1921) delivered by most of the players, but the overwhelmingly charismatic presence of Olga Chekhova. That name will mean nothing to 99% of my readers, but from 1930 to around 1950, she was easily in private life the most important movie star in the world. As I say, "The Haunted Castle" is must viewing simply to get a glimpse of the quality that made Olga Chekhova sought after by the most famous (and infamous) men of her time. Mind you, this is only the third of her 139 films as an actress (she also directed one and produced five).As a postscript, in order to prove my theory that many of the information sites on the net are staffed by fools, allow me to point out that the name, Victor Bluetner (listed as an actor in the movie's credits) is an obvious pseudonym. You won't find too many Bluetners in a phone directory. I'd say that the name was derived from "blut" (the German word for blood), plus the common suffix "ner" (as in Wagner). I laughed when I consulted a well-known Spanish site and read in all seriousness, "date of birth: unknown; place of birth: not specified"!

Haunted Castle, The (1921) ** 1/2 (out of 4) An "old dark house" film from director F.W. Murnau about a group of people staying in an (what else?) old dark house. One night the house's owner turns up missing and later in the night his son, who was accused of killing his own brother, shows up. I read somewhere that this is the earliest surviving work from director Murnau but this here doesn't show any of his wonderful visual style that would kick into high gear the following year with Nosferatu. The film, running just under an hour, takes way too time introducing us to the characters and the actual mystery doesn't start until the very end of the movie. There really isn't any visual style either. There's one character that looks like the Karloff character in Whale's The Old Dark House, which makes you think Whale saw this film (especially since the character here leads to a good twist in the story). Another interesting aspect is a scene that uses the hands of Nosferatu to a similar effect that would be seen in the next year's Nosferatu. I had to view an overly dark, 16mm print without a music score.