Faust
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