Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Phantom (1922)

Meek and book-bound Lorenz Lubota (Alfred Abel), a city clerk, is struck down one morning by a horse-drawn carriage driven by Veronika (Lya de Putti). The accident, inconsequential as it was at the time, sets forth a series of circumstance that eventually costs Lorenz his sanity.

Quite poor but smitten by the vision of Veronika and carried on the enthusiasm of a bookbinder for his promise as an emerging poet, Lorenz approaches his pawnbroker aunt for cash to purchase a new suit in which he hopes to approach Veronika. But, Lorenz is alarmed to learn that her father intends to wed Veronika to a rich man.

Now despondent, and fired from his job, Lorenz nonetheless approaches Veronika’s parents and announces his hopeless bid for her hand. Emboldened what he perceives as encouragement from her father, Lorenz proceeds to a fine restaurant where he encounters Melitta (Lya de Putti) and her mother, a pair of society vultures. Lorenz is astounded at Melitta’s likeness to Veronika, and lies about his true situation to enter into a torrid, sick affair.

Now desperate for money to maintain his façade, Lorenz is convinced by forces and people around him to deceive his aunt to put up money against future royalties from his puffed-up, sham career as a poet. The money is given to Lorenz, but in no time the 60,000 marks are siphoned off by the grifter Wigottschinski and by Melitta. When the suspicious aunt visits Lorenz’s home, she discovers not only that his mother is destitute but that he is jobless and has been frequenting questionable places and people.

Confronted by the aunt, Lorenz is given three days to rectify the swindle or face prison — leading to the film’s famous sequence of special visual effects that convey Lorenz’s guilt and engulfing fear.

Without the strength of will to recover the grifter’s money or to stem Melitta’s mad spending, Lorenz sinks further into desperation and is convinced by Wigottschinski to participate in the theft of his aunt’s remaining money.

After this desperate chapter in his life, however, Lorenz is redeemed by the love of the ever-devoted Marie (Lil Dagover), the daughter of a humble bookbinder.

F.W. Murnau’s adaptation of the serialized novel by Gerhart Hauptmann is brilliant, with restrained moments of flashiness and sustained sequences of psychological tension. Abel’s performance is in turns mousy and frenetic, de Putti appropriately smarmy, and Dagove’s placidly beautiful.

While the film has not been readily available for viewing, its recent restoration and availability on home video will help Phantom take its place, in the minds of silent film enthusiasts, among the major films in Murnau’s canon. Viewers will be struck by Phantom’s seminal themes of romantic obsession and doppelgänger love interests which lay the cinematic groundwork for later films like Vertigo (1958) and Obsession (1976).

— Carl Bennett