DER HERR DER WELT (1934)
aka Master of the World
Article 2289 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-1-2007
Posting Date: 11-18-2007
Directed by Harry Piel
Featuring Walter Janssen, Sybille Schmitz, Walter Franck

A mad scientist creates an army of robots.

This movie was rescued from my list of unfindable movies when a copy managed to manifest itself. It’s one of several science fiction movies made in Germany during the early thirties, and given that the entire film is in unsubtitled German, I don’t have a strong grasp of what actually is going on in detail, and had to rely on some short plot descriptions for help. I will say this much; some of the scenes are incredibly striking; the two scenes in the mine (one in which workers flee in terror from some unseen force spitting fire, another in which a worker maintains a set of robot miners) are very impressive, and all the scenes involving the mad scientist in his lab are moody and exciting. It would be great to see a subtitled version of this one. Because of the language problem, I have trouble attaching actors to characters, but I definitely recognized Otto Wernicke (Lohmann in M and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE ) in a small role.