Listo Film

JEWELS is an early example of the visual fascination of dark Vienna. The film was released in 1930 as one of the last silent films under the powerful title SENSATION IM DIAMANTENCLUB. The screenplay was based on motifs from Hoffmann's story 'Das Fräulein von Scuderi' (1819), which is considered the first crime story in German. Director Hans Brückner mixes some elements of the genre in his crime film, the palette ranges from classic 'Whodunit' to detective to elements of horror film, focuses on shadows, lighting effects, cross-fading according to German and drastic wrestling matches based on the American pattern. As a 'modern' script idea, the dissociative movement disorder, i.e. the psychological paralysis of a victim in shock, impresses a motif that will later prove to be indispensable for the horror repertoire.

Morris Brown, a New York gambler acquainted more with his checkbook than his prayer book, returns to Galicia with his very American daughter, Mollie (Molly Picon) for a family wedding. But Mollie, whose exuberant antics fill the film, unexpectedly meets her match--an engaging young yeshiva scholar who forsake tradition and joins the secular world to win her heart.

The farce by French comedian Dandy, filmed in Vienna, refers to the media hype surrounding the Egyptian pharaonic tombs in the early 1920s. However, the elaborate sets and costumes also clearly satirize scenes from Lubitsch's monumental film "Das Weib des Pharao", which ran for weeks in Viennese cinemas in 1922. With the wave of Egyptomania that exploded after December 1922, when the news broke that the unviolated tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen had been discovered, Dandy did not miss the opportunity for parody. The film, directed by Dandy himself, also featured Karl Leiter. The latter, known as "Länglich," was one of the most active Austrian comics in the silent period, and Dandy found in him the ideal support for his only Austrian two-reeler.