It was coincidence, largely, which led me to double-bill THE STRANGE DOOR and VIA MALA, which both turned out to feature sinister water mills.
I was pointed towards VIA MALA by David Stewart Hall’s Film in the Third Reich: A Study of German Cinema 1933-1945, a useful book with the most unnecessary subtitle ever. I was looking to know more about Josef Von Baky for my vid essay on the various MUNCHAUSENs. Von Baky’s Agfacolor superproduction being one of the three really notable feature versions of the book.
Here’s the passage in Hall’s book that caught my eye:
“One of the last films made under the Third Reich, and certainly one of the strangest, was Josef Von Baky’s Via Mala. The script by Thea Von harbou was based on John Knittel’s famous novel of violence and retribution, a worldwide best-seller of the mid-1930s. Almost entirely shot in the studio, the picture looks like a vintage Ufa horror drama of the silent period, complete with bizarre neoexpressionist decors, heavy shadows, dripping water, and a villain straight from the Nibelungen.”
And the film’s largely wordless opening scenes do live up to that description:
I don’t think the sets are as crazily stylised as the description implies, but they’re certainly stylised ENOUGH — the distortion and exaggeration are at the service of creating an impression of oppressive weight, which feeds back into the sense of reality, so it’s very far from the psychological expressionism of CALIGARI or the exotic mythology of DIE NIBELUNGEN. The exterior view is trying to be as convincing as possible but as it’s a studio cataract with forced perspective, it doesn’t get within spitting distance of reality and has to settle for a shadowy impression, like Rich Little in a cape.
As the film goes on, however, this kind of grand stuff fades from view, and in fact there is quite a lot of actual Alpine scenery and happy smiling villagers — the astonishing doom and gloom is largely dissipated. Sunlight intrudes amid the threatening ceiling beams. The sight of peasants having a dance makes us reluctant to return to the miserable main characters, and we never do spend as much time again in the dank mill and its adjoining house. The constant sound of water falling, which makes the opening so bleak, fades away. It’s as if Von Baky knew he couldn’t get away with maintaining this nightmarish tone.
The film had a complex history: Von Baky was a darling of the Reich — his ANNALIE (1941) was a comedy smash, and this got him the job of helming Ufa’s anniversary film, MUNCHHAUSEN — film exists (above) of him enjoying a fag break outside Babelsberg with a Nazi officer — nevertheless, VIA MALA was withdrawn immediately after its release in ’45. “It’s too depressing,” said either Goebbels or Roger DeBris. Two reels were destroyed by a bombing raid. After the war, the politically flexible Von Baky reshot those two reels at Defa in East Germany and the film was rereleased in ’48.
One reason given for the film’s banning was religious scruples — the Nazi party planned to exist alongside the church — render unto Caesar etc — “the Nazi party is a political organisation with the spirit of a religious one, not vice versa” — but the portrayal of a family living under the sway of a violent maniac may have been too poignant a metaphor for the national situation. After the frightening opening scenes, the drunken father vanishes, presumed dead — but what if he comes back? That must have resonated anxiously in the post-war screenings.
Von Harbou, possibly for political/censorship reasons, muffs the ending — Knittel made (nearly) EVERYONE guilty (TOO resonant?) — she plucks some rando from the supporting cast and points the finger at him in a conclusion that feels tacked-on, without a satisfying trail of Dame Agatha breadcrumbs to be followed and interpreted. Making the killing an act by the united family, as in the novel, would have felt totally logical even without clues.
The film was remade in 1961 and, as sometimes happens, the original version became officially unavailable. Long live piracy!
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