Tartuffe (1925) Dynamic, daring and full of beautiful compositions, it’s definitely more than lesser Murnau (Review)

In Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film The Silence of the Sea, Howard Vernon’s tragically naive Nazi lieutenant tries to curry favour with the French family he’s staying with by praising their culture.  He says his Fatherland has but one emblematic literary genius, Goethe, but France is spoiled for choice with Zola, Racine and Molière.  It’s not stressed in Melville’s film, but the latter was not always so beloved.  The first performance of Molière’s 1664 comic play Tartuffe was followed by an immediate ban, with Archbishop’s threatening excommunication for anyone who watched it.  The scale of the efforts to ban it compares to the worst days of the campaign against The Satanic Verses – or, indeed, to Nazi book-burnings.

Both of those were in the future when German director F.W. Murnau made his 1925 silent adaptation of Molière’s play, now reissued as part of the F.W. Murnau box set by Eureka Masters of Cinema.  Molière’s tale of a pious man swindled out of his fortune by a monstrously greedy priest – the Tartuffe of the title – would surely still have offended some, but time and a place in the European literary canon had domesticated this once-feral beast.  And yet Murnau’s film doesn’t feel safe.  For all his work was never as explicitly political as his great contemporary Fritz Lang, he can’t have been ignorant of the anti-democratic, censorious currents in Weimar-era German politics.  In adapting Tartuffe, he was reaching for a weapon that had grievously wounded its target before, and hoping to repeat the trick.

The first thing to note is that Murnau’s Tartuffe is not Molière’s.  Compared to the mostly respectful ‘heritage cinema’ adaptations of Shakespeare and Dickens that were being made elsewhere, Murnau’s film is a complete reinvention of its source, stripping away side characters, cutting out much of the last two acts and adding a modern frame story in which a young man shows his grandfather an adaptation of Tartuffe in order to awaken him to the danger of his scheming housekeeper.  The frame story, perhaps inspired by Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, has long been considered ballast by critics.  In their book The German Cinema, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel call it “quite unnecessary”, and in general dismiss the film as lesser Murnau.

Murnau is not infallible, of course, but it would be fair to assume he made these changes for a reason.  How does Murnau’s framing story affect Molière’s play?  You could say it makes it less incendiary – the villain of the new material is a servant rather than a cleric, an instance of “punching down”.  But the film doesn’t end on her defeat.  It ends with captions warning that a man like Tartuffe – a hypocrite, a swindler, a lecher, a tyrant, a man glorying in his own unchecked authority and ability to dish out cruelty – might be sitting next to them right now.  And in Germany in the mid-1920s, that might well be true.

Murnau knows that time and familiarity has made staging Tartuffe in 1925 a lot safer than it was in 1665.  In the framing story, he purposely removes that safety net.  The rest of the film lives up to that daring, an accelerated retelling of Molière’s story that moves like a rocket.  The children of Tartuffe’s mark Orgon are cut out, turning the narrative into a duel between Tartuffe and Orgon’s smart, resourceful wife Elmire.  Emil Jannings and Lil Dagover are tremendous in these roles, and Murnau’s soft-edged, tight, static framing relishes in their close-ups.  Occasionally he adopts Tartuffe’s point of view, mercilessly undercutting his sanctimony with hungry iris-ins on Orgon’s jewellery and Elmire’s cleavage.

Without Molière’s dialogue and some of his plot twists, Murnau’s film is less funny than his source, though he and his regular co-writer Carl Mayer create some fine visual gags to compensate.  At one point Tartuffe persuades Orgon that part of his holy duty involves placing him in a hammock and rocking him to sleep, a tremendously funny idea made even funnier by the bearish Jannings’s physicality.  At times Jannings resembles Gérard Depardieu, who directed and starred in a 1984 adaptation of Molière’s play.  The only other notable attempt at a film adaptation went unmade; Terrence Malick briefly considered ending his post-Days of Heaven hiatus with a version.  Given that Malick’s existing work contains absolutely no anti-clericalism – or, indeed, jokes – he must have been planning a reworking as radical as Murnau’s; if so, it would have forced a long-overdue reassessment of the earlier film.  Dynamic, daring and full of beautiful compositions, it’s definitely more than lesser Murnau.

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