Faust (1926, F.W. Murnau) (Patreon)

57/100

Guess I should've seen the splash of cold water coming, since it's not as if I'm unfamiliar with this legend's trajectory. Still, Faust's first act, up to and including a contract written in fire (ten seconds that apparently took an entire day to shoot), rivals Sunrise for uncanny formal magnificence and Nosferatu for legendary horror iconography. Towering over beautifully detailed village sets in his original unearthly form, Jannings' Mephisto is a genuinely fearsome presence; even before he unleashes the plague, depicted as a cloud of smoke descending upon the populace, his own shadow enveloping everything serves as a simple but remarkably potent visual metaphor. (Madeleine L'Engle uses more or less the same idea throughout A Wrinkle in Time, though it's less effective as prose. Didn't see the by-all-accounts-terrible recent film.) Spookier still—it actually raised some gooseflesh—is Mephisto's first and second and third and fourth appearance after being summoned at the crossroads, showing up repeatedly in the form of a dark, shabby figure with glowing eyes who politely tips his cap at an increasingly panicky Faust. Furthermore, Ekman's old-age makeup is perhaps the best I've ever seen, to the point where his actual youthful (-ish, he was 36) visage looks oddly fake to my eyes. There's even some surprisingly au courant social commentary in these early scenes, as proto-YOLO yahoos decide that folks dropping dead left and right means it's time to party!!! After half an hour or so of being dazzled, I couldn't imagine why Faust doesn't enjoy the same high reputation as Murnau's other classics. (Checking the possibly out-of-date They Shoot Pictures list that I cloned some years ago, Sunrise is #8, Nosferatu is #134, The Last Laugh is #181, and Faust is significantly further down at #562.) What's not to revere?

Most of what follows, turns out. I've never been enamored of the Faust legend in any form—it's effective as parable, less so as a long-form narrative that has to somehow depict "transcendence" in the form of de-aged Faust getting hot and bothered over Gretchen or freakin' Helen of Troy (though note that I've never actually seen either Marlowe or Goethe's play performed). This version adds a potentially interesting wrinkle by having Faust's initial motivation for the pact stem from altruism rather than a combination of greed and ennui; if we were gonna get the happy ending, I figured, that's a better justification than Goethe managed. This aspect speedily gets dropped, though, with the villagers turning on Faust once they discover who's enabling his miracles. We then get the standard quasi-erotic roundelay, complete with a disappointingly defanged Mephisto being pursued by Marthe the not-so-comely neighbor. This is all faithful to at least some of the source material, but Faust's thirst for esoteric knowledge and experience (admittedly hard to dramatize, but that's the challenge) gets barely any attention. Meanwhile, the shift into what very nearly qualifies as bedroom farce—at one point, Murnau cuts back and forth between Faust chasing Gretchen around a tree and Marthe chasing Mephisto around her house—can't help but seem bizarrely lightweight, given the masterful doominess that preceded these shenanigans. And no version of the tale that concludes with Faust being rescued by an angel for his ostensible deep-down goodness ever satisfies me, but this Faust skirts perilously close to inventing "the real X...was love." Rallies a bit with memorably stark images of Gretchen and her doomed infant wandering through the snow and being turned away by misogynistic assholes, but most of what I'll remember in years to come happens while Faust is still decrepit.