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Filmed in German by a Swiss production firm, The Eternal Mask (Die Ewige Maske) was adapted by Leo Lapaire from his own novel. Mathias Weimann plays an idealistic doctor who believes he has discovered a cure for meningitis. Ordered not to experiment with this serum, Weimann does so anyway, utilizing the supposed wonder drug on a terminal patient.
When the man dies, Weimann is reprimanded by his superiors, and wanders out of the hospital, believing himself a failure. His depression deepens into delirium, and soon the doctor is wandering through a Caligariesque world of distorted shapes and distended shadows, where he finds it
Filmed in German by a Swiss production firm, The Eternal Mask (Die Ewige Maske) was adapted by Leo Lapaire from his own novel. Mathias Weimann plays an idealistic doctor who believes he has discovered a cure for meningitis. Ordered not to experiment with this serum, Weimann does so anyway, utilizing the supposed wonder drug on a terminal patient.
When the man dies, Weimann is reprimanded by his superiors, and wanders out of the hospital, believing himself a failure. His depression deepens into delirium, and soon the doctor is wandering through a Caligariesque world of distorted shapes and distended shadows, where he finds it impossible to separate illusion from reality.
Meanwhile, Weimann's superiors determine that the meningitis serum is indeed effective; now they must snap the doctor out of his nightmare in order for him to reveal the formula.
Source: Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
British film scholar Paul Rotha called Die ewige Maske (The Eternal Mask) "the most astonishing pre-war Swiss film." Awarded a prize at the third Mostra in Venice (1935) and acclaimed by the U.S. National Board of Review as one of the best foreign films of 1937, this "major curiosity" of Swiss film history boasts a story that was off-beat for the period: in a Basel clinic, Dumartin, an idealistic young doctor, has developed a serum for meningitis. Following the death of a patient on whom he has tried out the serum, Dumartin attempts suicide. Saved at the brink of death, he begins to suffer a split personality. His colleagues try to treat his schizophrenia with various methods...
Die ewige Maske was the first production of Progress-Film, founded in 1934 to provide "proof that Switzerland can produce films of international standing and to counter the notion that we are only good for filming the Alps or accepting anything we are offered from abroad." For its inaugural production, Progress-Film opted for an adaptation of a first novel by Leo Lapaire, a Jura-based painter and writer. German filmmaker Werner Hochbaum was assigned to direct. Shot entirely in the studios of Vienna in 35 days and enjoying considerable means, Die ewige Maske, with its ideas akin to the theories of the Jew Freud, did little to improve the reputation of Hochbaum, a political exile distrusted by the Third Reich.
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