When we think of great directors from the German Silent Era who died far too young, I think of three gentlemen: one is quite obvious, two are far less well known.  The first would of course be F.W Murnau, who famously died in March 1931 via a Pacific Coast Highway auto crash just before his film

Reinhard Heydrich--the man whose name sounds suitably like a Germanic adjective for Hydra-like, inasmuch as the man's specialty in his creation of the German Sicherheitsdeinst, or Security Service, the dreaded SD within the SS that made Canaris' Abwehr look positively warm and kissy--might be one

How talented was the person of Fritz Lang, what an artist! Every bit the cinematic compatriot of F.W. Muranu, subject of yesterday's rhapsody, the two men yet could not be more different in terms of sensibility and personality. Far more concerned with the concrete aspects of the darker side of

A rare peek at the lighter side of the man. (IMG: Fox films) Cinema to me will always be embodied by the DNA of the output of two men: James Whale in the sound era, and F.W. Murnau in the silent era. This isn't necessarily because I claim historical supremacy of these two particular men above all

Speaking of Cinema-As-Puzzle (see: yesterday's post about Don't Look Now), probably the grand-daddy of them all, whether by accident or by design, is a film that is as we speak nuzzling up towards its centenniary: David Wark Griffith's Intolerance. Made in 1916, this behemoth film was ostensibly