Steppenwolf (1974)
DVD9 Custom | VIDEO_TS | PAL 16:9 | 01:43:22 | 7,24 Gb
Audio: English, German - AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps (each) | Subs: German, English (added)
Genre: Art-house, Drama
DVD9 Custom | VIDEO_TS | PAL 16:9 | 01:43:22 | 7,24 Gb
Audio: English, German - AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps (each) | Subs: German, English (added)
Genre: Art-house, Drama
Director: Fred Haines
In the bourgeois circles of Europe after the Great War, can anything save the modern man? Harry Haller, a solitary intellectual, has all his life feared his dual nature of being human and being a beast. He's decided to die on his 50th birthday, which is soon. He's rescued from his solipsism by the mysterious Hermine, who takes him dancing, introduces him to jazz and to the beautiful and whimsical Maria, and guides him into the hallucinations of the Magic Theater, which seem to take him into Hell. Can humor, sin, and derision lead to salvation?
IMDB
Wikipedia
I have long been a fan of Hermann Hess and have read Steppenwolf innumerable times and will most likely reread it many more times. With this kind of familiarity of a book it would normally be quite unlikely that a movie adaptation would be found to be satisfying. This movie is the very rare exception. Max von Sydow is the perfect Harry Haller! The Magic Theatre was done very well! I highly recommend this movie to all who Herman Hesse fans.IMDB Reviewer
I first saw this film back in 76 or 77, I think. A strange little underground art-house cinema (which is now a Burger King) in Melbourne…
It remains with me as a thing of beauty, its environments and music always evoking a wave of optimism. This is an exploration of the possibilities of the human spirit, as well as a joyous declaration of non serviam. An aesthetic revolt into surrealism, it suited the time well.
The animated sequences in particular are very impressive: as a means of dealing with the concepts of 'The Treatise on the Steppenwolf' within the film, but separate from the body of the narrative.
The film is not Hesse's novel, but a magical gesture towards the novel. As an adaptation of a complex and sophisticated novel it is a valiant effort. I will cheerfully admit that this, along with Lindsay Anderson's if… was what ultimately interested me in studying cinema.IMDB Reviewer
Way, way back in the Woodstock era, the works of the German novelist Herman Hesse and their search-for-self themes enjoyed a vogue with young intellectuals yearning for some deeper understanding of the world. It was during this time that writer/director Fred Haines took on the daunting task of taking Hesse's popular 1927 novel of an aging writer's struggles with the dual aspects of his nature and translating it for the screen. The end product, Steppenwolf (1974), employed period psychedelia, Gilliamesque cut-out animation and such-as-they-were special effects to try and open a door into a tortured soul. The numbingly literal results, finally introduced to the DVD market by HomeVision Entertainment and Image Entertainment, remain intriguing if not entirely successful.
When you consider that his only other screenwriting credit of note is director Joseph Strick's adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses (1967), Haines seemed a glutton for punishment when it came to trying to film the unfilmable. He did have the good fortune of casting Max Von Sydow in the central role of the Hesse surrogate Harry Haller. As the bourgeois intellectual so weary of trying to reconcile his genteel exterior with the "wolf of the Steppes" that he harbors within that he contemplates marking his fiftieth birthday with suicide, Von Sydow deftly and delicately projected the character's crushing angst.
However, Haines had Von Sydow do so through half an hour of hallucinatory meanderings, until Haller makes the acquaintance of the young prostitute Hermine (Dominique Sanda), whose attentions finally draw him outward. Once in her orbit, the reserved old bourgeois gets a taste of life's more decadent pleasures, courtesy of the jazz musician-drug dealer Pablo (Pierre Clemente) and Hermine's sensual colleague Maria (Carla Romanelli). It's through their attentions that Harry finds his long-sought egress into the hallucinatory "Magic Theatre" where he might finally achieve self-realization.
Those contemporary viewers willing and/or patient enough to sift through the panorama of eye candy that Haines utilized to put his story across will get the most out of Steppenwolf; others may want to take a pass. Sanda, an arthouse favorite of the era was at the height of her beauty here, if patently uncomfortable performing in English. The bulk of the supporting parts, insofar as they were played out in Haller's fevered imagination, were appropriately cast with grotesques straight out of Breughel, notably Alfred Baillou as a dwarfish Goethe. The picturesque location footage taken in Basel, Switzerland provided an appropriately Gothic feel for Haller's bleak reality.
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