The cabinet of Dr. Larifari

From 1930 is the film "Das Kabinett des Dr.Larifari". 

Let me make it clear right from start that it has nothing to do with "Dr.Caligari", Robert Wiene's more known film, an expressionist masterpiece. The cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the subject of an intense advertising campaign during its premiere, in 1920, with slogans like "We must all be Caligari! » in newspapers and on posters.

 

Ten years later, a team formed by the comedians Max Hansen, Paul Morgan and Carl Jöken, create a little gem of absurd humor, with the director Robert Wohlmuth, and borrow the title of the great expressionist film to do something completely different. They substitute Caligari with Larifari, a word that means something like "crazy chatter".

 

The spirit of the film (available on youtube) is close to the contemporary Marx Brothers. The plot: three broke friends imagine a way to make money: to start a film company, the "Trio-Film". Yes but, which films will they produce? They go from one crazy idea to another. They end up realizing that film production is not the best way to pay their debts. But in the meantime, they offer us some funny sketches.

 

"Dr.Larifari" is a film about film. They make fun of different popular genres at the time, and they laugh at the newly-released talking film too, with a scene where the sound engineer records the slightest sound produced by the mouths of a family in the process of eating the soup.

 

We also attend a boxing match where the opponents sing opera tunes instead of beating each other. It makes one think of the sketch of the football-playing greek philosophers of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

We also see the famous Weintraub Syncopators playing, a jazz band that also made inroads into other musical genres, with a humor quite in tune with Larifari.

 

Even if Trio-Film never sees the day, 

nothing prevents the three entrepreneurs from dreaming big: they already see their company settle in monumental offices. This sequence is shot in the headquarters of the Ullstein group in Berlin, a veritable palace that housed the editorial offices of newspapers and magazines belonging to the group. We see the facade, in itself expressionist style but which, distorted by the camera’s lens, takes a look even more unreal. The Ullstein house still exists, by the way.

 

Another comic scene is where Austrian actress Gisela Werbezirk plays a woman writer: Frau Hedda Mutz-Kahla. She comes to propose a novel to be filmed. "It will surely bring you 1,000,000 marks," she says, "maybe even 1,050,000. » In addition she sings "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss ...", Marlene Dietrich's song in The Blue Angel (which had its premiere a few months before), but with significantly less sex appeal.

In the cafe where the three friends discuss their projects, we see a poster on the wall, advertising a new film: "The blond Danubian child from the Rhine", a title worthy of appearing in the filmography of Trio-Film.

 

Several of the actors were well-known cabaretists in the Berlin of the 20s. Almost all went into exile in 1933. But the most important role is that of the unforgettable Max Hansen, a great comedian of Danish origin.