![]() As the waxwork owner proudly shows off his exhibits to the poet, a fourth effigy can clearly be seen and is indeed introduced (though a caption is not included). Intriguingly, Leni had originally planned a fourth story in his portmanteau, evidence of which remains in the final print. In the final story, the poet finds that both he and Eva are now the prey of the final effigy, Spring Heeled Jack/Jack the Ripper, who stalks them relentlessly through the dark and twisted halls of the museum. Forging a link between each episode is the poet’s decision to cast himself and Eva in key romantic roles, thus they become a baker and his wife who, tired of their penury, hatch a scheme to rob the Caliph of his precious magical ring and later, a bride and groom whose wedding is interrupted and dominated by the sadistic Tsar who takes the bride as his own and banishes the groom to his notorious torture chamber. The waxworks owner asks the poet to start work creating backstories to fit each figure and thus the narrative frame of Waxworks is established the poet begins to scribble away at the parchment and audiences are taken into each vignette, a cinematic world that traverses the scorching Arabian deserts, the frozen Russian steppes and the thick peasouper fogs of London. It’s the final – and sadly all too brief – chapter that shows Leni has saved the expressionist best til last a phantasmagorical spectacle of shifting realities and, in Krauss’ unflinching Jack, a foe so unstoppable as to make Halloween‘s Michael Myers or any of the modern era slasher figures feel envious. Indeed, Jannings, Veidt and Krauss remain the key actors to have graced the screen in German Expressionist Cinema. These three bloodthirsty and iconic terrors from the annals of history are portrayed by Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss and so, rather pleasingly, the displays of the waxworks museum itself afford audiences the treat of a unique display from a stellar trio who were unquestionably the most popular stars of German cinema at that time. The proprietor is justly proud of his work and introduces the poet to his trio of prize exhibits an effigy of Harun al-Rashid, the fifth Abbasid Caliph who is said to have ruled over his kingdom in the Middle East during the peak of the Islamic Golden Age of 786 to 809 and was later immortalised in the Arabian Nights a figure of Ivan the Terrible, the Grand Prince of Moscow and the first Tsar of Russia whose despotic reign lasted from the mid to late 1500s and lastly an amalgam of Spring-Heeled Jack, the folkloric bogeyman of Victorian England and Jack the Ripper, the elusive serial killer who terrorised the Whitechapel district of London. Once there, the young poet meets the proprietor of the titular waxworks museum, played by John Gottowt, and his daughter Eva (Olga Belajeff). A triptych, the film tells the story of an out of work young poet (William Dieterle) who, upon seeing an advert for a writer in the situations vacant pages of a newspaper, heads out to the local carnival fair in the hope of securing suitable employment. Released in 1924, Waxworks is a seminal silent movie that effectively helped to originate a popular standard in the horror genre – the anthology or portmanteau movie. It was written by Henrik Galeen, the screenwriter behind such Expressionist classics as 1914’s The Golem (which he also directed and starred in) and, most famously of all, Nosferatu in 1922. Released to Blu-ray by the Eureka Masters of Cinema label last month, Waxworks aka Das Wachsfigurenkabinett was the final film that director Paul Leni made in his native Germany, before forging an illustrious career in Hollywood with films such as The Cat and the Canary, The Man Who Laughs and The Last Warning in the years between 1927 and his death in 1929.
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