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Sauerkraut & Sausages with a Little Goulash: Germans in Hollywood, 1927

W hen Paul Leni’s first American film The Cat and the Canary opened in May 1927, it was a revelation for many of Hollywood’s filmmakers. Leni had taken a tired old warhorse, based on John Willard’s wildly successful 1922 Broadway play, and turned it into a breath-taking exercise in visual style that one-upped any of Hollywood’s technical tricks. At the same time, he introduced an expressionist set and lighting design, previously associated with German high art cinema that was nevertheless compatible with classical Hollywood narrative. Leni’s opening in The Cat and the Canary, with its double and triple exposures, metaphorically visualizes the last days of the corpse who sets in motion the old dark house story with all its stereotypical characters and creakiest of plot devices. A matched dissolve from an image of the mansion and its oddly shaped towers to the oversized bottles of medicine that the dearly departed has been forced to consume functions as a double image of a prison, dwarfing the old man who sits alive with his will in a corner of the frame. The lighting, too, creates deeper pools of light and shadow than almost any American film ever had. German chiaroscuro lighting, according to Lotte Eisner, had its roots in German Expressionism and Max Reinhardt’s theater, but it would be Americanized in Universal horror pictures in the 1930s, as well as in studio produced film noir in the 1940s. As a former art director in Germany, Paul Leni knew all about lighting design: he continually reinvents every one of his rather atmospheric but limited sets (after all, this was Universal) through lighting schemes that force the viewer to renegotiate spaces. And Leni’s fluid moving camera not only simulates movement around the relatively static figures of the characters, it also plays formally with perceptual positions, e.g. when he moves his camera slowly away from a character as the actor walks away from the camera, creating a strange sense of movement without movement. Then Leni reverses himself, moving the camera in as the same character turns in fright and runs towards the camera, doubling the speed of movement, at least perceptually. Like a number of other film directors who had made a career for themselves in Germany or Austria, Leni successfully negotiated the American studio system on his first attempt. The film received rave reviews from almost everyone in the New York press and was a box office success. The Cat and the Canary certainly justified the importation of the German director, fulfilling some of the hopes that had been kindled with the arrival of German cinema practitioners in America, even if others were less successful. In mid-1920s Hollywood, technicians had been bowled over by the atmospheric studio sets and complex camera movement in F.W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The Last Film History, Volume 17, pp. 241–260, 2005. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America