Der Tunnel (1915) AKA The Tunnel

Golly, what a movie. There was some serious money and effort poured into this film, from some incredible multilayered sets (prefiguring the sort of thing Hitchcock would do for the courtyard set of Rear Window)–some of which sets even undergo destruction during the film–to the stunningly huge amount of extras in a great many scenes, to the wonderful and convincing special effects. Somehow this film manages to predict technological advances ranging from the Chunnel to the bullet train to broadcast television and flat-screen TVs, although no matter how much time passes in the film, all the characters are still, amusingly, wearing clothes from the 1910s. The blocking and choreography are dynamic and skillful, the acting is filled with chemistry between the leads, the makeup and wardrobes and editing and processing are inspired (purple tinting!), and the story shuttles forward at the unpredictable pace of an Osamu Tezuka serial.

It’s a far more class-conscious film than I had expected, reminding me to a certain extent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, though I’d be hard-pressed to say whether the film is actually pro-worker and anti-capitalist or perhaps the reverse. It certainly depicts the miners as having a horrendous and dangerous job, but they’re far from the innocent victims of exploitation that they are in Sinclair’s vision of factory work. If anything, the film feels more like it’s attempting to depict the way that humans of any income level get caught up in forces far bigger than themselves, even when ostensibly they have the money to control things. There are also a surprising number of Black actors in the picture, including one lovely sequence of a Black miner trying to escape the tunnel fire (Jesus, the tunnel fire! what a sequence!) and a white miner trying to help him, which rings true to what I understand of miners’ race relations in the early twentieth-century U.S., but which I couldn’t imagine existing in an American picture from this same vintage. Strangely, despite this apparent racial progressiveness, there also appears to my eyes to be a bizarre moment of blackface–the servant at 5:10 and later at 5:39 certainly seems to be wearing a darkening makeup over his face, though for the life of me I can’t figure out why that would be. If the character were intended to be Black, the producers certainly seemed to have no shortage of Black actors they could have cast: maybe they were doing re-shoots and didn’t have anyone on hand at the time? But there’s no reason the servant *had* to be Black, either, if that was indeed the intention, so anyone’s guess as to what’s going on there is as good as mine.

This restoration by the Filmmuseum München, too, is just incredible, and the damage to the original print is pleasantly minimal, only really distracting in the rare moments the degradation covers the full frame. Richard Siedhoff’s score deserves special praise for being riveting and incredibly well-matched to the mood and action throughout, even incorporating through the piano an imitation of a gunshot. At an hour and a half, this film is quite long for a silent feature, and the score and restoration do a great deal to combine with the original acting, editing, and direction in making this a consistently delightful and thrilling picture throughout. Sometimes a film just fires on all cylinders; this one certainly does, and it’s going straight onto my list of all-time favorites.

Thank you, Jon, for posting it and bringing it to my attention.