- director:
- E.A. Dupont
- cast:
- Emil Jannings, Lya de Putti, Maly Delschaft
This seldom-seen Weimar classic is a circus-set tale of love and lust, starring Emil Jannings as a no-name trapeze artist who hits the big time at Berlin’s famed Wintergarten thanks to a new partner—his mistress Berta-Marie. Unbeknownst to him, however, she’s having an affair with the third member of the act! Once Jannings finds out, well, acrobatics is a dangerous profession, after all…
Cinematographer Karl Freund matches the kinetic energy of the script with a vertiginous, “unleashed” camera style, executing its own daring feats of flying acrobatics that simply must be seen on a big screen. The digital restoration was undertaken by the foundation Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung, working with the Filmarchiv Austria, using nitrate prints from both the US Library of Congress and the Filmarchiv Austria.