movie three

 Somehow a German wheat beer feels appropriate for a classic German movie.  You find Weihenstephaner around, in bars and stores, but it's not one I pick up habitually.  Now that it's all summery and gross at night, it's a good time for a tangy wheat.  Vitus is glowy yellow-gold, cloudy like wheat beers tend to be.  It's a bit sour in smell, but with a little sweet hiding under it.  The taste is classic wheat beer, sweet at first and developing a little tang as the swallow happens.

Supplier: Cervecissimus
Price: €2.80

spoilers ahead!

I don't know if it matters to warm people about spoilers for a movie that's over 90 years old.  Varieté from 1925 is one of those show people movies that seem to have been pretty popular in the early 20th century.  Maybe because live spectacle was so much more important for entertainment then.  It starts in a prison with the warden calling up a prisoner and guilting him into discussing his crime with a letter from his wife.  It seems he was a carnival worker with a piano playing wife and a young baby he adores, but one night a friend of his brings a young woman to him to dance in the carnival.  She and her mother were picked up in an unnamed country and the mother died off of South Africa, so the young woman has nobody and nothing.  The wife doesn't want to hire her but the carnival man says she stays.  She dances for the audience and an attraction develops between her and the man, and he starts to feel like he should return to performing himself.  He had been a trapeze artist until he broke his leg, and when he mentions this to his wife she says if he goes back into performing it will be without her.  He takes her at her word, apparently, because soon he decides to run away with the dancer and start a new trapeze act.  Later, in Berlin, they are seen in a carnival by the agent of the Wintergarten, who has just lost his trapeze artists because one was injured in their last performance.  He convinces the remaining Artinelli to hire the pair for a new act and they begin a successful career with him at the Wintergarten.  Artinelli is interested in the woman, the man's "wife", from the start, but she shows no interest in him until he corners her in his room and probably rapes her.  Bizarrely, but a trope for old movies and stories, she falls in love with him after that episode, but doesn't want to leave her "husband", so as not to break up the act, possibly.  Eventually, the man finds out and lays a trap for the lovers.  He tells Artinelli that he'll be out late and then he waits in Artinelli's room for him to come back from his date with the woman.  He confronts Artinelli, pulls out two knives and demands he defend himself, and finally stabs him.  It was a foregone conclusion, since Artinelli was practically falling down drunk.  The man goes to his room, where his "wife" is pretending to sleep and she greets him happily when he comes in.  He looks at her strangely and she gets nervous, then when he goes to wash his hands, blood flows into the water and she screams.  He leaves the room and she follows him, begging him to stay and possibly explain what happened, but then they pass Artinelli's room and she sees the body.  She runs after her "husband" shouting for help, but then she falls down the stairs and breaks her neck or something.  At the end she's lying immobile on the stairs anyway.  The man turns himself in to the police, and we return to the beginning, to the scene with the warden.  The prisoner feels that God is punishing him for his bad decisions, but the warden assures him that God's mercy is greater than his justice, and the last scene is the prison gates opening.

The carnival man is Emil Jannings, a staple of these old German films.  When he goes in for the kill, he looks like an incredibly dangerous man.  His eyes seem to glow with the fires of Mephistopheles.  He's a jerk for abandoning his wife and the baby he seems to love dearly, but he's also a good partner to the young woman while they're together.  She seems to be following the policy of ingratiating herself to the most important man around.  Probably, this is just a survival strategy learned in a life of hardship.  Still, she doesn't seem to be disgusted by either of the men we see her with in the film.  Artinelli is the villain for sure, deliberately trying to destroy a relationship for his personal enjoyment, even if it might hurt him professionally.  In the end, of course, it hurts him both professionally and personally, since he's dead.  There are a couple of scenes where signs are in English, a reminder that the images for this restored version were taken from a copy in Library of Congress.  Like most 1920s films that are still available, the cinematography is excellent and the framing of the scenes is fantastic.  The story barely needs the intertitles, since the images practically speak for themselves.  The people next to me even commented that it was truly impressive how well they filmed different angles and movement with the technology of the time.  I'm only minorly irritated by the piousness at the end, but again, it's a common theme in those early films.

I think Stephan looks a little disapproving...