My Universities Moi Universiteti (1940)—In this third film of the Mark Donskoi Trilogy, based on the memoirs of Maxim Gorky, the young hero, Alexei (now played, less successfully, by Y. Valberg), goes to work in a bakery, where the men go out on strike; he mingles with revolutionaries and intellectuals, and becomes, at last, the writer we know as Maxim Gorky. This lyric, epic group of films is the only work in movie history that is roughly comparable to Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy; however, Donskoi falls into pompousness in the third film and the joyous revolutionary spirit seems programmed, while Ray soars. With Stepan Kaynkov as the bakery boss Semyonov. In Russian. b & w

 

Le Mystère Koumiko, see The Koumiko Mystery

 

Le Mystère Picasso The Mystery of Picasso (1956)—Picasso and Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) collaborate. The result is one of the most joyful of all records of an artist at work. (It was a disastrous failure, though, when it opened in a few American theatres.) Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker. For most of the film the screen is his paper or canvas, and in 75 minutes he draws or paints 15 pictures. When he complains to Clouzot that the canvas is too small, the screen expands to CinemaScope size. Some sequences use time-lapse photography to compress the working time on a canvas to a few minutes: the changes and developments (when, for example, a goat’s head becomes a skull and then a head again) suggest what animation might be but isn’t. In one sequence he does a really bum picture and you watch to see what he can possibly do to salvage it; he reworks it, making it more and more complicated, and it gets worse and worse. Finally he gives up in disgust and scribbles over it, and you feel relieved that he didn’t like it any better than you did. Cinematography by Claude Renoir; score by Georges Auric. (Don’t be put off by the fatuous narrator who tells us that we will see what is in the mind of a genius at work, and exclaims, “We would give much to know what was in Joyce’s mind while he was writing Ulysses!”) color

 

The Mysterious Island (1929)—Imaginative undersea fantasy based on an 1874 Jules Verne novel and starring sinister monsters, weird fish, Lionel Barrymore as a 19th-century inventor, and Montagu Love as a wicked nobleman. This ill-fated production was begun in 1927 by the greatly gifted Maurice Tourneur, who was fired by M-G-M and replaced by Benjamin Christiansen, and it was finally credited to Lucien Hubbard—by which time sound had come in, so the film is part silent, part sound. The plot twists are silly, but the film presents the invention, launching, and kidnapping of the first submarine, and then the real capper: a mammoth octopus with tentacles long enough to embrace that submarine in its entirety. And surely no one who saw the film as a child has completely forgotten a horror scene on the ocean floor: the wreck of a Roman galley with the skeletons of slaves still chained to the oars. With Lloyd Hughes, Harry Gribbon, Gibson Gowland, and Snitz Edwards. Art direction by Cedric Gibbons. (There were several subsequent versions of the novel: a Russian film in 1941, a serial made by Columbia in 1951, a British film in 1961 starring Michael Craig, and in 1974, a version called The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo, starring Omar Sharif.) color, with b & w sequences

 

The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser Jeder für Sich und Gott Gegen Alle Also known as Every Man for Himself and God Against All. (1975)—The story of Kaspar Hauser, who appeared in a German town in the 1820S, is a factually based variant of the lost-or-abandoned-child, Mowgli-Tarzan myth; Kaspar wasn’t raised among wolves, bears, or apes but, rather, in isolation. In this nightmare version, written and directed by Werner Herzog, Kaspar (Bruno S.) is a grunting lump of a man, chained in a dungeonlike cellar from infancy. Covered with sores and welts, unable to stand, he is fed by a black-caped man who beats him with a truncheon. One day, the man carries him to a town square and leaves him there. The townspeople train him in human habits and try to educate him, but as he begins to learn, he balks at what he is taught, and becomes obstinate, trying to retain his new, mesmerized pleasure in nature. Before the issues are resolved, he is struck down by the caped figure, who returns, first to maim him, then to murder him. The film is a double fable, intermingling the stultifying effects of bourgeois society and the cruelty of a demonic universe. Herzog achieves a visionary, overcast style; his images look off-balance, crooked, as if the cameraman were wincing. Herzog is a film poet, all right, but he’s a didactic film poet, given to heavy, folk-art ironies; he says that society puts you through pain in order to deform you, and he makes it impossible for you to identify with anyone but Kaspar, who hasn’t lost his innocent responses. The other people are alone, immobilized, unanimated; life is dormant in them. Though one could not fault this in a painter’s vision, in a filmmaker’s it is numbing. In Herzog’s conception Kaspar is the only one who has still got his soul. This conception has a flower-child fashionableness, but Bruno S. (who was once believed to be a mental defective himself) is amazing. His Kaspar has sly, piggy eyes, yet he’s so totally absorbed in experiencing nature, his head thrust out ecstatically, straining to grasp everything he was denied in his cave existence, that he becomes Promethean; the light dawning in that face makes him look like a peasant Beethoven. In German. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Mystery of Picasso, see Le Mystère Picasso

 

The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)—Marvellously grisly chiller, directed by Michael Curtiz and shot in an early Technicolor process, with the color contributing to the general creepiness. Lionel Atwill is the murderous curator who pours hot wax over his manacled, still-living victims and then exhibits them as sculpture. With Glenda Farrell, Fay Wray, Gavin Gordon, Frank McHugh, Edwin Maxwell, and Arthur Edmund Carewe. From a play by Charles S. Belden. (Remade in 1953 in 3-D as House of Wax, and probably the source of the 1959 A Bucket of Blood.) Warners.