Der Sonntag Zwischen-Titel

“I destroyed a genuine one!” or something…

I was recently telling someone that maybe Italian intertitles are the prettiest, which I’d stand by, but there’s no doubting that the Germans knew what they were up to with cine-typography. This is from HOMUNCULUS, or one episode of it, an influential expressionist serial which survives only in fragments. Typically, the Italians go for beauty at any price, and the Germans go for brute functionality. But both express an underlying IDEA.

Bought this in a fit of madness from a bootleg DVD salesman in Union Square. He did warn me that it was untranslated, and my brain warned me that I don’t speak German, but it was too cheap not to buy.

Olaf Fønss – he’s homuncular and avuncular!

It was all worthwhile since I also got from the same source a copy of a super-rarity illustrated in Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies — Lawrence Huntington’s THE VULTURE, with Oscar Homolka mutating into the titular scavenger. So that’s well worthwhile. Gifford has the film down as a William Castle movie, which seems to be one of his rare-ish factual errors, but I’m psyched to see anything somebody would mistake for a Castle flick. Might be better than a real Castle flick!