THE WANDERING SHADOW (1920)

Wil, who considers himself the legal heir of his cousin, the recently deceased free-love philosopher Georg, is attempting to sue Irmgard, Georg's lover, so she doesn't get what Wil thinks is his inheritance. Coincidentally, he sees her on a train, looking desperate and distraught, so he decides to hold off on the suit temporarily and follows her. On the train, she gets a telegram from John, Georg's twin brother, saying "If you think you can escape me, you are surely mistaken." Irmgard arrives at a mountain village where a large wedding is taking place. She hears a death knell ringing for a monk at a nearby monastery and is told that is a bad omen. The room Irmgard has booked has been given to someone else, but with Wil's help (though he doesn’t tell her who he is), she gets a room in an inn across the river. John is soon directly on her trail, telling people she is mentally ill and needs his help. She takes off for the mountains to hide; Wil offers to help her but she says she must bear her cross alone. When she runs across a bearded shepherd up in the hills, she melodramatically announces to him, "I am looking for a path that leads away from misery." He replies that he can't point her to somewhere that doesn't exist. Standing before a statue of a Madonna and child, she prays for help. With bad weather coming, the shepherd takes her to his isolated cabin for the night. Irmgard hears another death knell and sees an image of a skeleton hand ringing the bell. Suddenly, there is an avalanche that leaves the two trapped in the buried cabin.

We now get a long backstory flashback. Years ago, Georg, famous for his free love views, hires Irmgard as an assistant. They fall in love and she wants to marry, but he won't contradict his beliefs and says he will only take her symbolically as a "wife in free love." When she becomes pregnant, he still refuses to engage in a legal marriage so, in secret, she marries Georg's twin brother John but puts Georg's name in the marriage register so her baby will be considered legitimate. Georg learns of this and fakes an accidental death then escapes for the mountains to live alone, vowing by the Madonna statue that he will not leave the mountains until the statue walks through the snow. Back in civilization, Georg's will leaves everything to Irmgard, but John claims it as his because he is the man actually married to her. Wil feels he has a solid claim as well. Back in the present, we realize the shepherd is actually Georg. As a rescue team tries to dig out the buried cabin, the now crazed John begins throwing rocks at the rescuers, while Wil decides he wants to marry Irmgard. How will this wild melodrama end?

Some fans of director Fritz Lang consider this a strange one-off as it doesn't fit with the rest of his oeuvre (sci-fi films like Metropolis, crime films like Spies or the Dr. Mabuse movies, or his later Hollywood noir films). But Lang was no stranger to melodrama (as in the Metropolis narrative) and this is even spiced with mysticism, like The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in the element of the death knell and the Madonna. Many online reviewers find this film hard to follow. No complete version of the film is known to exist, but the print in the Kino Classics Blu-ray set contains a handful of title cards that explain missing scenes, and this version is easy to follow, considering the convoluted nature of the narrative and its structure. This has been seen as a forerunner of the German “mountain movie” genre; it is set in the mountains, and there is a natural disaster, but otherwise it's not all that similar to those films. The whole thing actually feels rather fresh and interesting for the era: the free-love aspect, the doppelganger element, the character of Wil who goes from revenge-seeker to marriage-seeker, and the potentially miraculous set-up of the Madonna statue coming to life. The acting is generally more naturalistic than the average for the time. Rudolf Klein-Rogge, much better known later as Dr. Mabuse and the villain Rotwang in Metropolis, is Wil; Mia May makes for a rather plain Irmgard; Hans Marr is fine in the dual roles of the brothers. It takes a good ten to fifteen minutes to acclimate yourself to the narrative, but I was quite glad I stuck with this. Also released as The Wandering Image, which is a more exact translation of its German title. Pictured at top are Marr, Klein-Rogge and May. [Blu-ray]