As influential as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is, the first thing one notices about the movie is its surreal backdrop, making it a prime example of German Expressionism. With its jagged edges and sharp building tops, the set looks more like a fantasy village than a real German town. To this weird-looking town arrive the mysterious Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) and his traveling show.
Everything in the movie has a distinct cartoonish feel, right down to Dr. Caligari’s Mickey Mouse gloves. Dr. Caligari would inspire the Universal horror films that followed in the next decade, but, in appearance especially, his most obvious influence was on Lon Chaney in the now lost film London after Midnight, with his stovepipe hat, wire-rimmed glasses, and evil grin.
There was a reason for the film’s bizarre look. In the end, the whole story had to be all a dream. German censors (despite the notably relaxed attitude toward film expression in the Weimar Republic after the fall of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918) didn’t want to believe that the German public could be duped by someone as evil as Dr. Caligari. How ironic their stance would prove in about a decade.
Robert Wiene, however, was the Terry Gilliam of his day in more ways than one. He resembled the director not only in the weirdness of his film, but also because he fought to keep his vision at all cost. Ultimately, the ending was changed and the story was revealed to be the delusion of a mental patient (sadly detracting from the anti-authoritarian theme initially conceived by Wiene), but the rest of the film was largely left unaltered.
Still, it is a creepy experience to watch this movie in hindsight. Watching Dr. Caligari attracting a gawking audience to his sinister carnival is a reminder of how easily masses can be influenced by evil. Indeed, Dr. Caligari’s sideshow hides a dark secret: a somnambulist named Cesar (Conrad Veidt), who can kill on command.
There is also a light subplot to the film involving a woman (Lil Dagover) loved by two men, Francis (Friedrich Feher) and his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski). Even this subplot reflects a modern handling of an old sentiment (love for the same girl) and has left its own influence, most notably in romantic comedies and Judd Apatow films. More importantly, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari represents the start of the non-straightforward thriller. It opens with a flashback as Francis recounts the strange tale of Dr. Caligari to an old man. Then, after we are introduced to the romantic triangle, Alan is murdered after a visit to Caligari’s carnival where Cesar prophesized his death. When the prophecy is realized, all we see is the shadow of the killer. Could it be Cesar? Is it Francis, jealous of his love for the same girl as Alan? Here it is important to consider that at the time The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was made, Germany had just got out of WWI. The country had gotten hit very bad and was now facing a devastating financial debit among other losses. Anxiety over death was something very real for young men all over the country.
Cesar, however, is the single most influential aspect of the film. The legacy that this one character has left behind (everyone from Robert Smith of The Cure to Edward Scissorhands, thanks to his pale make-up and dark-rimmed eyes) is amazing. Conrad Veidt himself would go on to star in Casablanca as Major Strasser, which further utilized his talent for portraying unsettling characters.
In Robert Wiene’s original vision, Dr. Caligari was a real threat. In the film’s ending (one of the first twist endings), however, he is revealed to be simply the head of the psychiatric ward where Francis is a patient. The whole story is revealed to be a fabrication by Francis, in which he cast Dr. Caligari as an evil circus man and other patients of the asylum in different parts (e.g. a delusional girl believing herself to be a princess was his inspiration for Jane, his love).
Fortunately, although this compromises Wiene’s vision, the ending is partially salvaged by no clarity of what exactly is real and what’s not. Not only is the line between nightmare and reality blurred, but we are left with the suspicion that the murder of Alan may have indeed occurred and is as yet unsolved. After all, while researching an ancient library earlier in the film, authorities did discover a manuscript supporting the existence of a Dr. Caligari hundreds of years ago who traveled around Italy with a sinister Cesar. While it is unfortunate that Wiene’s vision did not entirely go through, the end result is an amazing film. It is creepy, disturbing, and did as much to invent cinema as Birth of a Nation before it.
