American Cinematographer - October 1984 - 42

the basement, and six

girls wearing blonde wigs were
stand motionless in glass booths.)
This is Hjalmar Poelzig's poisoned
universe. Morally bankrupt, he vents his sexual repres¬
sion by adopting an alternative religion - the sick inver¬
sion of every Judeo-Christian ethic - in which he
conquers women sexually, embalms them, and tends to
them as a gardener would water his plants. This is not
necrophilia per se; it would be blasphemous for him to
violate the "chastity" of these dead women. He con¬
quers them, then collects them. As Ulmer wrote, "The
idea, to be conveyed as abstractly as possible, is that
Poelzig, as the earthly incarnation of Satan, takes, at the
climax of the ritual, the sacrificial virgin as his bride."
Meaning, morbidly, that he rapes and murders them at

paid $12 each

to

the altar,

while others look on.
Architecturally adroit, Poelzig has
converted parts of the gun barbettes into outre coffin
pedestals, and the coffins themselves beg for inspection.
Remarkably minimalistic, the framework is triangular.
(So are Poelzig's "embalming racks.") Implicit in their
design is Ulmer's "hymenal" idea, that by suspending
them in womblike vacuums, Poelzig (as Satan) has recap¬
tured their virginity. Unwilling and unable to detach
himself from past sexual conquests, he allows them to
"cohabitate" with his living bride, who at present hap¬
pens to be Karen, Werdegast's daughter. This bizarre

relationship embodies the life-death dichotomy of
Poelzig's world - both mother and daughter are his sex¬
ual objects, one being dead and untouchable, the other a
fixture in his bed. Dominating and unaffected, he has the
best of both worlds.

(There is

Egon Brecher as the
majordomo and
Jacqueline Wells as

eye.

Joan.

tistical coquette

was

more to

this than

meets

the

woman in the blonde wig
the incarnation of Ulmer's mother, a passionate ego¬

The regal image of the
who

was

widowed by the

war

and led

a

rather

promiscuous life. An incident in his adoles¬
that of his mother dancing with him all night at
a masquerade ball,
concealing her identity until his dis¬
covery of the "coverup" later on - fueled his erotic
awakening. In Ulmer's mind, she had become sexually
fixated. He wanted that woman's beauty, always. His
sister Elly knew it. "I do believe that Edgar was terribly
cence

-

in love with his

own

mother. But it

was a

love-hate type

of

thing, because she neglected us so. A lot of those
feelings came out in The Black Cat in a very diabolical
way.")
The film's finest

moments

occur

when

Poelzig leads Werdegast into the basement, a
grand tour of what both men once knew as Fort Marmarmos. A bleak piece of
dialogue that Ulmer wrote on
the

set

("I

can

still

sense

death in the air") defines the

atmosphere, and John Mescall's buoyant camera glides
through the gun turrets like a phantom eye.
Even in this mordant

design is

milieu, Ulmer's

powerful and surreal as a Magritte can¬
vas. An illuminated
panel of frosted glass (used for war¬
time trajectory equations) looms over Lugosi like a large
sheet of graph paper, while Karloff, at screen right, flicks
on a light switch
revealing the body of Karen Werdegast.
The staging here is shrewd and deliberate - Werdegast is
manipulated against the graph, as though his movements
had been calculated by Poelzig along its coordinates.
set

as

"You see,

Vitus? I have cared for her

tenderly and well. You will find her almost as beautiful
as when you last saw her."
Werdegast gapes in horror at
the mounted corpse. Poelzig says that she died after the
war, "of pneumonia", but a feline blink signals his de¬
ception. "And the child?" asks Werdegast. "Dead!"
Then, looking at his masterwork, Poelzig's eyes mist. "Is
she

beautiful?

not

beauty

I

wanted

to

have

her

always." Grief turns to fury and the doctor
draws a Luger. As originally written, he cries out: "Lies.
You killed her to save her youth and beauty for your own
-

monstrous

end! You killed her

The black
the glass.

cat

as I'm about to kill you!"
jumps in and Werdegast collapses against

(The script reveals something more
When Lugosi asks about the child, Karloff's
original line was "She died - at birth", meaning that
Poelzig abducted Werdegast's wife while she was preg¬
nant! Ulmer, reconsidering the kinkiness of this idea,
changed the line just prior to the shoot, and was forced
to expand an earlier line in which
Lugosi demands:
"Where is my wife Karen? And my daughter?" The
changes so confused Ruric, the script contains this di¬
alogue glitch: "And the child my daughter?" "Died - at
birth." Making it impossible for Werdegast to have
known the gender of his offspring!)

perverse.

Their retreat from the basement is a
masterwork of camera movement and shadow. With the
creak of a door, Lugosi's underlit face slowly pans to the
hand of the dead woman, which dissolves to the
tive

camera

as

the

two

ascend

a

subjec¬
spiral staircase. In a

poignant monologue tying these shots together, Karloff
speaks of them as being living ghosts of the war, then

40

American

Cinematographer

October 1984
American Cinematographer - October 1984

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