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Contrary to the impression that one often receives, cinema does not belong, and has never belonged, to the United States of America. Even Hollywood cinema itself has not always belonged in any real sense to the United States of America. The presence particularly of German and Austrian emigrants (Murnau, Von Stroheim, Lang, Lubitsch, Von Sternberg, Zinneman, Wilder, Wyler, Preminger) revolutionised the American cinema and effectively dominated its heyday. The United States (in the first half of the twentieth century) was of course still a country built on immigration and it is unsurprising that Hollywood directors should have diverse European origins (Frank Capra was born in Sicily, Lewis Milestone in Russia) but the Germans and Austrians are to some extent a case apart in that they all emigrated as adults and many had already had substantial careers as film-makers in Austria or Germany before their arrival in the United States. What is more they remained to a remarkable extent a distinctive and interlinked group and all retained strong affinities with European cinema.

Lang and Murnau had been the two great rival talents of German cinema in the twenties; Von Stroheim, who had not worked in cinema before coming to America, was given his big break by fellow-Austrian Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios; Lubitsch was already a celebrated actor and film-director in Berlin before coming to the States; Zinneman, Wilder and Robert Siodmak had all worked together in Vienna in 1929 along with Edgar Ulmer (future "King of the B's") who had previously been assistant to Murnau; Zinneman first worked in America as assistant to Austrian writer and director Berthold Viertel; Preminger had been a major theatre-director in pre-war Vienna as had Wilhelm Thiele before going on to make films in Germany. In America, it was Preminger who completed Lubitsch's last film afterthe great man's death in 1948 while Thiele worked for a time as assistant to Joseph Von Sternberg; Von Sternberg first came to America from Austria when only seven but deliberately added the "von" to his name (he was born plain Jonas Sternberg) and returned to Germany in 1930 to make Der Blaue Engel with German actor Emil Jannings (and, in the process, of course to discover Marlene Dietrich). Jannings, whose first talkie this was, had already been directed by Von Sternberg in America during the silent era and had previously starred in German films directed by Murnau and Lubitsch. Austrian-born cameraman Karl Freund had worked both with Lang and Murnau in Germany before becoming a key-member of Laemmle's team at Universal Studios in America.


William Wyler, born of Swiss parents in Alsace (then part of Germany), came to America very young but he too was a protégé of Laemmle, a disciple of Lubitsch and close lifelong friend of Billy Wilder; Wilder himself, an established script-writer in Berlin before the war, worked in America in that capacity for both Lubitsch and Thiele before getting his chance to direct. To the list one might also add the Hungarian Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) who had been making films for fifteen years in Hungary, then Austria and Germany before coming to America in 1926. His compatriot, the actor Bela Lugosi had also had a distinguished acting career in Hungary and Germany before emigrating in 1920 and another Hungarian actor Peter Lorre had first made his name in Germany in Fritz Lang's M (1931). Twenty years later Lorre would return to Germany to make his sole film as director (and star), Der Verlorene (1951). Robert Wiene, director of one of the great classics of German cinema, Der Kabinett des Doktors Caligari (1919) also left Germany but chose to settle in Paris where he died in 1938 but it was Hollywood director Robert Siodmak who completed his last film Ultimatum.

The early history of American cinema (as recounted in the countless newsreels) is essentially one of vaudeville (with smatterings of epic and melodrama). The vaudeville, drawing as it did on both American and British traditions, was inspired - Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy or the acrobatics of Douglas Fairbanks - but vaudeville (with certain exceptions in the case of Chaplin and Keaton) it remains. The epics are grandiose and the melodramas overpowering but epic and melodrama - again with the occasional exception - they remain. Despite memorable work by D. W. Griffiths and others, Hollywood cinema in the twenties and thirties would have been in artistic terms a rather primitive affair without the input from European film-makers. Early American cinema offers nothing comparable to the films being made in Germany by the likes of Robert Wiene (Caligari), Georg Pabst (Die Büchse der Pandora, Atlantis, Dreigroschenoper), Friedrich Murnau (Nosferatu, Der Letzte Mann) and Fritz Lang (Metropolis, Doctor Mabuse, M). These cinematic classic of the first decades of the century also provide a continual source of inspiration that has never ceased to reinvigorate cinema. It is common to talk somewhat glibly of 'expressionism' with regard to this period of German cinema even though Lang always explicitly rejected the label and Murnau was never keen to revindicate it. The cap fits well enough with respect to Robert Wiene's Das Kabinett des Doktors Caligari (1919), whose remarkable painted sets an distorted perspectives are strongly reminiscent of contemporary expressionist painting and the work of all the directors cited is, to some extent or other, influenced by expressionism and the whole variety of post-Romantic movements in art and literature that flourished during the pre-war period, but the real significance of their cinema is much broader and more far-reaching.

Pre-War Cinema in Germany and Austria

The great advantage that German cinema had over Hollywood (and which European cinema was to continue to have for most of the century) lay not merely in the quality of its writers and directors but in the degree of artistic independence that they enjoyed. The problem with Hollywood is (and has always been) the power of the producers and accountants and, in the early years at least, the dominance of the studio system. A nightmare for American artists (it all but destroyed Buster Keaton), the loss of independence was often well-nigh unendurable for the immigrants. Those from Germany and Austria were in effect between a rock and a hard place. Most could not return to Europe if they wanted. Those who did, like Pabst and the actor Jannings, simply ruined their careers in another way by collaboration with the wartime German régime, whose influence was doubly deadly (although in a rather different manner) to the independence of the film-makers. The rise of Hitler is, apart from everything else, one of the most appalling tragedies in the history of cinema. The notion that it was, in some sense, 'good for Hollywood', is fundamentally untrue. The well-being of Hollywood (along with the well-being of cinema in general) depends fundamentally on independent input from Europe or elsewhere. To weaken or destroy one area of cinema is, ultimately, to weaken cinema everywhere. This remains of course just as true today as it was in the 1930s and 1940s.


There are dangers in talking of 'serious' cinema (or, in the awful phrase, 'art' cinema). To do so immediately creates a false (and damaging) dichotomy. There is no such thing as 'art' cinema. There are quite simply good films and bad films. Nor are the producers and accountants always wrong in their insistence on the importance of bums on seats in the cinema. Nonetheless if cinema globally is to be of a high quality, it needs, like any other art, an input that, for want of a better expression, is intellectual. 'Serious' films in this sense, quite apart from their intrinsic value, are also vital to the existence of a vibrant 'popular' cinema. 'High' and 'low' culture (again for want of better expressions) are never in practice in competition or in any way mutually exclusive; they are complementary and mutually dependent. What is therefore important about pre-war German cinema is that it is a serious cinema in this sense - a cinema of ideas and, for that matter, of ideology, for it is also, in the widest sense of the term, a socially and politically engaged cinema, something that the Hollywood system has (generally speaking) always prevented American cinema from being.


Take, for instance, Fritz Lang's M (1931). This is the first really important celluloid treatment of a theme that has become (rather sadly) predominant in modern American cinema - the 'serial killer'. The unforgettable performance of Peter Lorre (far and away his best) and the film's dazzling technicl virtuosity as a suspense-thriller have tended to overshadow the fact that a good third of the film is devoted to a realistic portrayal of the German underworld (featuring actual underworld figures amongst the actors) and concludes with a complex debate about the nature of crime and punishment, the guilt (or otherwise) of the 'compulsive' killer, the right (or otherwise) to inflict capital punishment. Its portrayal of Berlin beggars is clearly influenced by Brecht's Threepenny Opera (1928), itself the subject, the following year of a film adaptation by Pabst. There is a similarly complex social and psychological setting for Pabst's Die Büchse der Pandora (Lulu), starring Louis Brookes and based on Frank Wedekind's disturbing 1908 drama. Here again the appearance of a serial killer (Jack the Ripper) is of more than merely prurient interest. Lang's M also touches on the subject of the psychosis, not of killers but of the 'general public' in its response to crime. This had also featured in Murnau's screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula made in 1922, Nosferatu. In a scene cut from some versions, a frenzied crowd attacks a scarecrow in the belief that it is the escaped lunatic Renfield (renamed in Murnau's version) whom they are chasing. The same theme is explored in another silent film on the subject of a serial killer made by a young English director (working however for a subsidiary of Paramount), The Lodger (1926), in which a mysterious man is (wrongly) believed to be the killer and is pursued by a frenzied crowd. The young Englishman who made the film was of course Alfred Hitchcock.


It hardly needs emphasising that there is a very measurable distance between the treatment of the subject of the serial killer in Lang's 1931 (and for that matter in young Hitchcock's The Lodger) from that one encounters thirty years later in Hollywood-Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), which, for all its virtues, has abandoned sensibility for sensation and replaced intellectual curiosity with a sort of glib pop psychology. There is a distance of light years between Lang's film and the unhealthy prurience and totally blunted sensibilities of such 'popular' modern examples of the 'genre' as The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Seven (1995). The fact that all three modern films mentioned are extremely well-directed, well-scripted and well-acted merely emphasises that the qualities of a film are not limited to any of these things. A film is also the product of the ideas that go into it. And, as the informaticians say, 'Garbage in, garbage out'. To find a 'modern' treatment of the serial killer that has the intelligence of Lang's M, one would have to look again to European cinema, to Luis Buñuel's witty Essayo du Crimen (1955) or to Claude Chabrol's very different but equally remarkable Le Boucher (1969).


This example illustrates too the ways both in which 'serious' cinema influences 'popular' cinema and in which it establishes a continuity of tradition itself. In a 'serious' film made, like Hitchcock's The Lodger only under the broad auspices of Hollywood, The Third Man (1949), the English director Carol Reed includes continual visual references to what it is still to convenient to call German expressionist cinema (and particularly to Lang's M). The film is also notable for the unusual perspective created by sharply-angled camera-shots. The cameraman won the Oscar but the idea was suggested by Reed himself. The Viennese setting of the film and the use of well-known Austrian actors in supporting roles enhances this sense of a homage to the European tradition. In France, earlier in the same decade, the same influences are everywhere apparent in the films of Henri-Georges Clouzot (particularly perhaps Le Corbeau and L'Assassin Habite au 21 or in the sets devised by Jean-Pierre Melville for his 1958 adaptation of Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles. Cocteau, who himself speaks the narrative and who had worked with Robert Wiene during the latter's Paris exile in the thirties, is himself a symbol of the intellectual continuity.


If Clouzot was a sort of spiritual forefather of the French 'nouvelle vague', Melville was in a sense its herald. Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and the other French directors associated with them draw of course heavily on 'popular' Hollywood tradition but the 'nouvelle vague' also has roots in the same intellectual and artistic bedrock of European cinema. Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, the French director most influenced by expressionism and by the closely linked theatre and cinema traditions of pre-war Germany, recreates by the use of a collage of posters, advertisements and other paraphernalia of the modern landscape an effect remarkably similar to that achieved by Robert Wiene with the painted sets of Caligari. The ironically titled Made in USA (1966) is a particularly striking example. Godard appreciates more than most the power of the best films from the silent era. His parody-war film Les Carabiniers (1963) is effectively a silent movie with words, complete with interpolated text on cartons (masquerading as postcards from the front) and visual gags that are themselves a homage to the silent film. One of the monstres sacrés of the period, Fritz Lang actually appears (as himself) in another Godard film, Le Mépris (1963).

With Der Kabinett des Doktors Caligari (1919), Nosferatu (1922), Doktor Mabuse (1922), Die Büchse der Pandora (1929) and M (1931), the German cinema had shown itself masterly in its exploitation of the genre known in Europe as the fantastique or in English more quaintly as 'gothic'. The genre grew, as a literary form, out of Romanticism, first in England (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein being today the best known early exemplar) and then in France and Germany. It became one of the most predominant features of German Romanticism, inspiring works by Hoffmann, Von Chamisso and Büchner and pervading almost every aspect of German art. America was not of course any laggard and Edgar Allen Poe remains one of the great masters of the genre. It was the Austrian-born Carl Laemmle and his company Universal that would exploit the genre on film in the United States. Early silent versions, starring Lon Chaney Sr., of two French classics of the genre were amongst the most elaborate and expensive, as well as the most successful, film to come from the studio. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the first film adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel directed by Wallace Worsley, appeared in 1923 and The Phantom of the Opera, an adaptation of a (then) modern work in the same genre by Gaston Leroux by director New Zealand Rupert Julian, appeared two years later.


The real spate of Universal 'horror films' came in the thirties with English director James Whale's celebrated version of Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff and Tod Browning's Dracula starring Bela Lugosi both appearing in 1931 and Browning's Freaks and French-born director Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue (based on the Poe novella) both appearing in 1932. The presiding genius was cameraman Karl Freund, who himself also directed The Mummy in 1932, and interestingly the most evident inspiration came not from the great classics of German cinema but from a less distinguished German film, Boesne and Langener's Der Golem (1920), for which Freund had also been the cameraman. Freund had arrived in the United States in 1929. Apart from Der Golem, he had worked in Germany on Walter Ruttmann's pioneering documentary Berlin Symphonie einer Großstadt (1927), on Lang's Metropolis and on Murnau's Der Letzte Mann (1924). His first film for Universal was Lewis Milestone's Oscar-winning war film All Quiet on the Western front (Universal's first Oscar). Although the early Universal films are undoubtedly in the tradition of the fantastique, the choice of Der Golem (a particularly lurid example) as model is perhaps significant. For with the growth in demand for 'horror' (soon further stimulated by a similar craze in American comic-books), there comes not so much a change in the genre as a change of the genre itself. 'Horror' has acquired such a cult-following that it is difficult to breathe a word of disapproval without invoking howls of protest, but, as with the treatment of the serial killer, there is an evident debasing of the form, sensation once again taking precedence over sensibility, what is originally the means becoming instead (as the very word 'horror' itself suggests) the whole purpose of the exercise. Lang in M uses the serial killer as metaphor and a starting-point for an exploration of the society in which the serial killer lives. The original title The Murderers are Amongst Us emphasised this social purpose and may also, as is often claimed, have been intended, even at this early date, as an allusion to the rise of Nazism. Caligari, Nosferatu, Doktor Mabuse and Die Büchse der Pandora all have a similar social dimension. Frankenstein is a moral and political fable as for that matter is Tod Browning's Freaks (1932). In the 'horror' genre as it later developed there is increasingly little left beyond the mere 'horror' itself.

It is hard not to have a soft spot for the stream of 'horror' films produced by Universal during the thirties, forties and fifties or for the tongue-in-cheek 'horror' classics produced by the British firm Hammer in the sixties or seventies or for the rather camp classics of Mario Bava or George Romero, but they have nevertheless all contributed to a change in, and change of, genre that is in the end rather lamentable. Occasionally the notion of the fantastique has reasserted itself, as for instance with Roger Corman's adaptations of Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), both starring the inestimable Vincent Price or with such British films as Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) or Robin Hardy's justly 'cult' The Wicker Man of the same year, both hugely influenced by the work of Corman. These exceptions, however, tend only to emphasise the nature of the general trend towards a much more banal exploitation of 'horror' for its own sake. Since the problem is with the genre itself rather than with the individual productions, even extremely well crafted films, superbly acted and based on deftly written scenarios - Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1969), William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), Richard Donner's The Omen (1976) or Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) - all betray the same rather depressing tendency. It is significant in itself that the writer Stephen King, master of the slick formulaic horror thriller, is such a predominant influence and the author behind, not only The Shining but also De Palma's Carrie, Reiner's Misery, Romero's Creepshow and countless lesser films in the genre. If the best films are open to criticism, the vast quantity of also-rans, of which John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is a fairly typical if above-average example, have provided cinema producers with a facile output that is rewarding in no sense but the financial.

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