Giftgas

Hans Stuwe invents a process for creating a new fertilizer. He's excited about it. So is the manager of the company, Alfred Abel. That's because one of the intermediary stages is a poisonous gas just peachy for warfare. Abel sets up a plant for production. When Stuwe discovers it's for the gas, not for the fertilizer, he resigns, and Abel tells him to get off the company's property. Profits soar, and the workers are pleased by the pay raise they get. But then one of the workers dies. He company insists it was a heart attack, but the man's widow knows he was concerned about the gas. She goes to see Stuwe with murder in her heart.

It's a fictionalized version of what happened to Fritz Haber, who was one of the two inventors of the Haber Process, which is still used to produced fertilizer. He also developed poison gas for the Germans, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and soon everyone was making their own. It was soon outlawed again, nominally out of a sense of humanity, but mostly because it was unreliable; a shift in wind could send a deadly gust of phosgene back over the users' troops.

The techniques used in most of this late silent film are unremarkable: good sets, fine performers, including Lissy Arna and Fritz Kortner. It's at the end when it turns all symbolic and spooky.

Free of all the "Expressionist" cinema trappings this one brings an A feature cast to a regrettably predictable plot - evil Capitalists turn idealistic Chemist Stüwe's formula into a weapon of mass destruction. Handling, by a director who would serve out his time in Russia, fields Kortner and Abel, two of the greats of the German entertainment scene, opposite Baranovskaya star of Pudovkin's MAT/MOTHER. Her scenes are the best in the film.

There's a distinct change from the near realistic handling of the body of the production to a crazy montage finale which seems to have picked up a lot of the Gance J'ACUSE.

Surviving copy is dire - soft, goes out of rack, dupey.

Still an intriguing record of major talents trying for significance.