The End of the Homunculus (1918)
A group of scientists, led by a Professor Ortmann, produce a living human child using scientific processes - a "homunculus." This creature is human in every way, except that he cannot experience love.
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it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.
Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%
The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
This was originally a super-serial, composed of feature-length episodes, and like Feuillade's LES VAMPIRES, was meant to play not only as a serial, but as a series. However, the only remaining copy of this is a cut-down of all six episodes, about an hour and a quarter in length, held by the George Eastman House and available at the moment for viewing on their website. My thanks to them for making this and several dozen other movies of the Teens and early Twenties more generally available.While the are some great technical strengths to the movie, including some wonderful photography (notice the strong use of framing not by irising, as was still very common at this time, but by using structure and set decoration to change the effective frame size) and toning (a process in which the black silver nitrate is replaced by other compounds with colors, resulting in white whites, black blacks but colors instead of grays) and a good story which asks the question: is the soul born with the body, or the gift of god? Unfortunately, I find the style of acting to be rather over the top, involving a lot of rolling eyes. The net effect is very watchable, but not great.