"Director: Josef Von Baky"

• Munchhausen | DVD | (18/08/2003) from £8.98   |  Saving you £13.00 (185.98%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Enjoying the dubious billing of being the Third Reich's "finest fictional moment", Münchhausen lives up to the hype. Commissioned by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to mark the 25th anniversary of the UFA film studio in 1943, director Josef von Baky was given every incentive artistic, technical and financial to create a state-of-the-art film outflanking Hollywood--and, in most respects, he succeeded. Hans Albers is understatedly right as the buccaneer aristocrat, his adventures over the centuries made possible by preternatural longevity. Hermann Speelmans gives sterling support as loyal manservant Kuchenreutter, while Brigitte Horney has appealing decadence as Catherine the Great. The spectacular Venice canal sequence and whimsical moon episode are balanced by strong scriptwriting from "Berthold Bürger" (Erich Kästner of Emil and the Detectives fame), with Georg Haentzschel's lushly eclectic score scarcely inferior to those by his more famous Hollywood counterparts. A tendency to send-up non-German nationalities hints at Nazi ideology, but otherwise this is pure--though never soulless--escapism, produced to the highest artistic standards. On the DVD: Münchhausen on disc is presented in a restored print which recaptures the original's breathtaking interplay of colour, and the soundtrack has been very adequately cleaned up. Just eight access points and subtitles in English only, but a photo gallery of over 100 stills and memorabilia to chart the course of the film in detail. R Dixon Smith's insightful documentary feature gives the lowdown on why the film was made. All the more remarkable, then, that it's survived the vicissitudes of its era so handsomely. --Richard Whitehouse

• Classics of German Cinema | DVD | (21/05/2007) from £73.71   |  Saving you £-28.72 (N/A%)   |  RRP £44.99

  Perhaps no period of any national cinema extends its influence so powerfully into the present day of movies as that of the German cinema of the Weimar era. From the fraught angles that accompanied magisterial set-design to the dreamlike interplay of light and shadow German films of the pre-WWII era defined the famed ""expressionistic"" visual style even as they tested the boundaries of social and sexual taboos. This collection contains five films. Four are classic films emblematic of the legendary Weimar period and one is an historical curiosity commissioned under the Nazi regime. Paul Wegener's and Carl Boese's 1920 film Der Golem represents the second (and the only fully surviving) film treatment by Wegener of the Yiddish folktale based around a towering clay monster created by magic corrupted by evil and redeemed ultimately by the force of the human soul. From the same year comes Robert Wiene's nightmarish classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - a story of mesmerism sleepwalking and murder - a demented dreamscape that perhaps single-handedly galvanized the Expressionist movement of silent cinema. Nine years on Joe May's Asphalt opens a door to the sordid carnality lurking inside the Weimar heart of darkness - and gives audiences the gift of Betty Amann the greatest ""siren unsung"" of the early silver-screen. No lack of recognition would beset the besotted lead of Josef von Sternberg's 1930 masterpiece The Blue Angel - presented here in both its German- and English-language versions. Simply put this tale of a mild-mannered professor (Emil Jannings) sucked into the world of a licentious cabaret artiste introduced the public to an immortal: her name written among the stars would read ""Marlene Dietrich"". By 1943 a new era had dawned one in which Joseph Goebbels called the shots and it was Josef von Bky's Mnchhausen that epitomized the ""new German epic"" - a state-sanctioned Agfacolor melange of the picaresque and Aryan myth that nevertheless served to inspire Terry Gilliam's more benign modern fantasia The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Myth sex magick and the ""tall-tale"": Classics of German Cinema: 1920-1943 presents the viewer with a selection of masterpieces that tower not only over the awesome first phase of German movies but over the origins of world cinema as a whole. 1. Der Golem 2. Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari 3. Asphalt 4. The Blue Angel 5. Munchhausen