Director – Otto Rippert, Screenplay – Robert Reinert, Producer – Hanns Lippmann, Photography (b&w) – Carl Hoffman, Production Design – Robert A. Dietrich. Production Company – Deutsche Bioscop.
Olaf Fønss (Homunculus), Ernst Ludwig (Professor Ortmann), Albert Paul (Dr Hansen), Friedrich Kühne (Edgar Rodin), Theodor Loos (Sven Friedland), Mechthildis Thein (Margot), Ilse Larsen [Aud Egede-Nissen] (Luise), Max Ruhbeck (Steffens)
Professor Ortmann creates artificial life, a homunculus, in his laboratory. His colleague Dr Hansen’s child dies not long after being born. Ortmann substitutes the homunculus. The Homunculus grows up with no feelings. After discovering the secret of its birth, it swears vengeance against its creator. It wanders the world where by great force of will it can create miracles, including healing the ruler of a kingdom. The Homunculus becomes a great industrialist. Still it remains haunted by its condition and inability to understand notions like love.
Homunculus is a classic Serial of German cinema, originally released in six one-hour parts. It was in fact made at the height of World War I and proved an enormous success in theatres. However, much of the film is lost today. The original six chapters were cut down to three in a German re-release in 1920. In 2014, a restored version of 196 minutes (about half the film’s original length) premiered, taken from material found in a Moscow archive, although I have been unable to find a copy of this. The only subtitled version I was able to view was a condensed Italian print that cuts the entire six-hour saga down to 76 minutes (a quarter of the running time of the original). A couple of the Italian chapters are available on YouTube but without subtitles. Until a better restored print becomes available, this will have to do. Even in such a severely condensed form, Homunculus proves fascinating.
The film comes with the undeniable influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). It is important to note at the time that Homunculus was made, the Frankenstein Film as we know it today did not exist. All that there was at the time would have been the silent Thomas Edison version Frankenstein (1910) and the lost US-made Life Without Soul (1915) and there is the question of whether these would have been seen by director Otto Rippert. Nevertheless, the whole plot wherein an obsessive scientist brings a creature to life and how the creature swears retribution against its creator for its damned state is the absolute essence of the Frankenstein story.
A couple of years earlier, Germany had made the also lost The Golem (1914), which is often cited as a Frankenstein film progenitor. Its artificial creation was a large hulking monster in the Boris Karloff vein – albeit made of clay and brought to life by magical means – and this may well have had some influence on Homunculus. However, the Homunculus here in Olaf Fønss’s portrayal is not an inchoate monster as The Golem and Boris Karloff’s iconic Frankenstein monster were, but is a regular human figure who is articulate about his condition, which actually takes the story back closer to Mary Shelley’s original conception of the monster than most Frankenstein films do.
It is also fascinating watching echoes of Homunculus in subsequent works. Ernest Ludwig as the Dr Frankenstein equivalent is characterised with a mad mop of white hair and unnervingly googly eyes – clearly what would become the entrenched cliché of the Mad Scientist is well and truly alive here. That said, the film seems very vague about the processes of the Homunculus’s creation – it is just produced out of some glass cabinet as an infant (although a more detailed account may exist in the complete film) but there is nothing of the grand bringing of the monster to life with lightning bolts that we had in Frankenstein (1931). A lightning bolt does feature at the very end but this is something that kills the Homunculus, presumably for its defying of natural order, as opposed to that being used to give life to the creature as in the 1931 film.
The other work that Homunculus echoes is Hans Heinz Ewers’ novel Alraune (1911), which caused quite a sensation when it came out, before being multiply filmed after this with Alraune (1918), Alraune (1918), Alraune (1928) starring Brigitte Helm, Alraune/Daughter of Evil (1930) and Unnatural (1952). What became the cause celebre of Ewers’ novel was the idea of artificial insemination, which he saw as leading to the birth of a woman who had no soul and caused a wake of devastation as she callously used and seduced men. Homunculus steals the idea and has the artificial creation go on a power-crazed rampage dominating with its will due to its soulless state.
One of the key things that makes Homunculus work is Danish actor Olaf Fønss in the title role. Fønss comes with tall, six foot plus build and is outfitted in black Inverness cape and matching knee-high leather boots. His hair is slicked back to reveal a broad, flat forehead. Fønss gives a performance that seems to dominate the film, just like the Homunculus is said to do with his willpower alone.
It is hard to get a full grasp of the events of the middle of the film, which seem to have the Homunculus variously wandering the wilderness, taken in at a kingdom and then becoming a powerful industrialist – some descriptions of the film state that he becomes the dictator of a country, although that is not clear here in this version. There also seems a revolving roster of women he becomes involved with who seem to have little that set them apart in the edited version at least.
One final influence that the film seems to have had is on Fritz Lang and Metropolis (1927) – indeed, Lang had previously worked as an assistant to Otto Rippert and wrote the script for Ripert’s Plague of Florence (1919). Homunculus and Metropolis share the theme of the artificial person who wreaks havoc. Like Maria in Metropolis, there are scenes where the Homunculus goes out in disguise and becomes a demagogue stirring the working classes to revolt. An even more direct influence comes in the way that Otto Rippert directs crowds – something that Lang did to perfection – with magnificent images like the Homunculus standing on a staircase driving back a revolutionary horde with his sheer willpower alone.
Otto Rippert (1869-1940) was a prominent German director of the silent era. In genre material, he later directed the lost The Dance of Death (1919) and Plague of Florence (1919), an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842).
Edited Version of the film here