Der Student von Prag
Movie Lover:
Jeremy Weinstein from
Walnut Creek, CA US -- January, 24, 2009
Looks on screen like watching a poor VHS copy, but this may be your only choice if you want to see it at all, and it is worth seeing. Some better-quality snippets can be seen in Bret Wood's Kingdom of Shadows. Suffers from a strong whiff of anti-Semitism, perhaps not as strongly so as "The Golem"'s picture of Jews as a stinking foreign body consorting with astrology and demons; here it's just a Jewish-looking master-manipulator dealing in souls. The scene of the removal of the doppelganger by taking the reflection from the mirror is cut from the print, which is a huge disappointment. However, this scene, likely more primitively, is in the 1913 version also sold by Alpha. Original music by Paul David Bergel added by Alpha, but it is generally a dull and depressing chord progression, with rare moments of inspiration, such as that accompanying the scene of the hunt.