From Amazon.com
F.W. Murnau's last German production before leaving for Hollywood is a visually dazzling take on the Faust myth. Pushing the resources of the grand old German studio UFA to the limits, Murnau creates an epic vision of good versus evil as devil Emil Jannings tempts an idealistic aging scholar with youth, power, and romance. The handsome but wan Swedish actor Gosta Ekman plays the made-over Faust as a perfectly shallow scoundrel drunk with youth, and the lovely Camilla Horn (in a part written for Lillian Gish) is the young virgin courted, then cast aside, by Faust. The drama falters in the middle with a tedious courtship and bizarre comic interludes, but the delirious images of the opening (Jannings enveloping a mountain town in his dark cloak of evil) and the high melodrama of the climax (Horn desperately clutching her baby while crawling, abandoned and lost, through a snowstorm) triumphs over such shortcomings. The sheer scale of Murnau's epic and the magnificent play of light, shadow, and mist on his exquisitely designed sets makes this one of the most cinematically ambitious, visually breathtaking, and beautiful classics of the silent era.
--Sean Axmaker
Review
While not as well known today as Nosferatu or The Last Laugh, Faust is perhaps director F.W. Murnau's masterpiece; few films by any director can match it for the sweeping impact and beauty of its visuals or the power of its storytelling. Murnau approaches Goethe's tragedy of a man who learns all too well the price of his soul with appropriately broad dramatic strokes, and if the effect seems a bit over the top in the early reels, it hits with full melodramatic force at the end; the full, horrible impact of Faust's comeuppance is as disturbing today as it was in 1926. Gosta Ekman is fine as the luckless Faust and Emil Jannings is brilliant as Mephisto, the embodiment of cunning and evil. And the camerawork by Carl Hoffman and production design by Robert Herlith and Walter Rohrig are nothing short of astounding, creating a brilliantly controlled and beautifully painterly visual sense that's the ideal backdrop for this fable. Anyone who thinks of silent films as sluggish and amateurish has obviously never seen Faust; the home video release on Kino compliments the film's striking visuals with a superb original score by the American composer Timothy Brock that's worthy of attention on its own merits. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
DVD ~ F.W. Murnau
DVD ~ Andrzej Wajda
DVD ~ Nagisa Oshima
DVD ~ Akira Kurosawa
