Besides his well-known pieces, film noir master, F.W. Murnau, is also represented on DVD by a minor but nonetheless interesting work, "The Haunted Castle" (1921), made just a year before the director's seminal "Nosferatu". Now available on a truly excellent release, this DVD is not only complete with all the iris ins and iris outs (deleted from the truly execrable print on a rival label), but presented in all the splendor of its original tints.True, the movie itself is rather stagily directed with little use even of pans, let alone tracking shots. Nonetheless, the story is reasonably intriguing. What makes "The Haunted Castle" worth seeing, however, is neither the social fabric of its upper-class setting, the mystery mechanics of the plot, the two briefly surreal dream sequences or even the successfully more naturalistic performances (judged by the general standards prevailing in German cinema in 1921) delivered by most of the players, but the overwhelmingly charismatic presence of Olga Chekhova. That name will mean nothing to 99% of my readers, but from 1930 to around 1950, she was easily in private life the most important movie star in the world. As I say, "The Haunted Castle" is must viewing simply to get a glimpse of the quality that made Olga Chekhova sought after by the most famous (and infamous) men of her time. Mind you, this is only the third of her 139 films as an actress (she also directed one and produced five).As a postscript, in order to prove my theory that many of the information sites on the net are staffed by fools, allow me to point out that the name, Victor Bluetner (listed as an actor in the movie's credits) is an obvious pseudonym. You won't find too many Bluetners in a phone directory. I'd say that the name was derived from "blut" (the German word for blood), plus the common suffix "ner" (as in Wagner). I laughed when I consulted a well-known Spanish site and read in all seriousness, "date of birth: unknown; place of birth: not specified"!

Haunted Castle, The (1921) ** 1/2 (out of 4) An "old dark house" film from director F.W. Murnau about a group of people staying in an (what else?) old dark house. One night the house's owner turns up missing and later in the night his son, who was accused of killing his own brother, shows up. I read somewhere that this is the earliest surviving work from director Murnau but this here doesn't show any of his wonderful visual style that would kick into high gear the following year with Nosferatu. The film, running just under an hour, takes way too time introducing us to the characters and the actual mystery doesn't start until the very end of the movie. There really isn't any visual style either. There's one character that looks like the Karloff character in Whale's The Old Dark House, which makes you think Whale saw this film (especially since the character here leads to a good twist in the story). Another interesting aspect is a scene that uses the hands of Nosferatu to a similar effect that would be seen in the next year's Nosferatu. I had to view an overly dark, 16mm print without a music score.

I knew going in this was not a horror film, in spite of the English title: while not uninteresting in itself, it emerges as a very minor Murnau. Little of the director's trademark stylistics are present here; the film does constitute an early use of flashback, as it slowly divulges the events behind a past crime for which the wrong man was accused – but the characters don't exactly set the screen on fire.The Sinister Cinema edition I watched was a mere 56 minutes in length, as opposed to the restored 74-minute version of the film; not surprisingly, the choppy editing (full of phony-looking transitions and an equally pointless establishing shot of the castle used ad nauseam throughout) made the plot somewhat hard to follow – and the lack of detail in the print itself, not to mention the absence of an accompanying music score, didn't help matters either! Even so, the film is worth watching for the unethical way the elderly hero goes about discovering the real identity of his brother's killer and for a couple of brief – if irrelevant – dream sequences, one expressionistic (and which can now be seen as a dry run for NOSFERATU [1922]) and the other surreal. Some years back, Image Entertainment had announced a DVD release of THE HAUNTED CASTLE but, for reasons known only to them, it was summarily cancelled and has yet to appear officially on any digital format.

This very personal movie from Murnau sets the precedent for the author´s most notorious movie: Nosferatu the vampire.Murnau demonstrates his superb command of the camera and the illumination while setting the bases of the expressionism.The suspense distilled in Haunted Castle is well worth a Hitchcock´s movie and the plot is surprisingly complex for a silent.Do make sure that you see it in a winter stormy night