Review: The Golem (1920)

German actor Paul Wegener co-wrote, co-directed and played the title role for the third time in his career. (He played the Golem for the first time in a 1915 version, then, oddly enough, in a sex comedy titled The Golem and the Dancing Girl in 1917; Wegener co-directed both of those movies as well.

Rabbi Loew, who sees in the stars that misfortune is to befall the Jews of Prague, comes up with a pretty extreme plan to save them: He creates a monster to rescue them from oppression. Loew makes a statue of clay, obtains the proper mystic word to animate the statue from a demon named Astaroth, and brings this statue, named the Golem, to life to defend the ghetto when the Emperor declares that the Jews must leave by the end of the month. Loew takes the Golem to the Emperor's palace, where the clay behemoth quite literally brings down the house and convinces His Majesty that he might want to reconsider that whole "Get Outta Here!" position.

This is all grand and skippy...until the Rabbi's assistant, who is in love with the Rabbi's young daughter, uses the Golem to knock off his romantic rival. Disaster ensues, and the Golem goes out of control and starts tearing up the town, starting a huge fire and killing innocent townspeople until the spell that animated him in the first place is broken.

Wegener's Golem, with his enormous stature and stiff, jerky movements, provides the template for later movie monsters such as Universal's Frankenstein and the Mummy--especially the 1940s versions of these beasties, when they'd been reduced to the level of supernatural henchmen. There are also particular scenes that seem familiar now, like when a girl in the palace presents the Golem with a flower, or when the Golem hurls the lover from the top of the Rabbi's tower to his death, or when the enormous Golem confronts the little blonde girl at the end of the movie. All of these scenes can be found, in one form or another, in Universal's Frankenstein series, particularly James Whale's Frankenstein, which displayed Whale's knowledge of (and influence by) the great German Expressionist horror films.

The architecture in The Golem also strikes a familiar note: It has the oddly angled rooftops and walls first seen in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and later employed in several Universal pictures, especially Murders in the Rue Morgue (itself a thinly disguised remake of Caligari), The Old Dark House (also directed by Whale) and Son of Frankenstein (not directed by Whale, but intentionally mimicking his style and visual sensibilities).

It may be this familiarity with its elements that robs The Golem of its excitement for modern audiences, as well as an utter lack of characters to care for.

Since the Golem is little more than a tool--first for good, then for evil--he doesn't elicit sympathy. Rabbi Loew engages in black magic--one of the reasons the Emperor states for wanting the Jews out of Prague--to bring the Golem to life and willingly lets his creation kill people at the palace to make his point, so he doesn't exactly come off like a good guy either. And the Rabbi's assistant incites the Golem to kill the daughter's boyfriend, and what is his punishment for all the resulting harm the Golem causes? Nothing. It even looks an awful lot like he gets the girl in the end.

The Golem is certainly a cinematic landmark, showing the way for many of the movie monsters to come. That doesn't, however, make it a great movie on its own terms. Interesting? Certainly. Influential? Undeniably. But a classic of cinema as a whole, much less the horror genre in particular? Not exactly, though it's genre fans will find it worth a look, if only to see where the Frankenstein Monster and Kharis the Mummy learned their dance steps.