How Did Aragorn’s People Seal the Ringwraiths in Tombs?

[Miguel]

Forget about that scene and imagine something like this with Pharazôn and Sauron instead. That ambience is tremendous.

 

[Olorgando]

Ah, the version with Klaus Kinski, one of Germany's more notorious actors. The majority of his roles could be bunched under the category of being that of a "loose cannon".
Remake of a 1922 (also German) silent film which apparently ran into legal trouble with Bram Stoker's heirs over not having been authorized. Thankfully, despite a court order (it doesn't say where) to the contrary, some prints survived. I'm pretty sure I've seen this version completely, not as sure about the Kinski one. Though it was one of his more low-key performances.

Off the top of my head, I would envision Pharazôn a lot closer to the movie Théoden before his being released from Saruman's influence by Gandalf (definitely one of PJ's overboard explicitness "sins").

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

For those who somehow haven't seen it, the original Murnau film is available in several versions on youtube. Here's one with the Erdman score reconstucted:

Another one, reconstructed from various partial prints:

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

Is that an actual part of the official TH EEs? I certainly don't remember it (my guess would be the scene in the cinematic version where Gandalf and Radagast meet in the tombs in those "high fells", perhaps a flashback to the "entombment").
Or is this something which "ended up on the cutting-room floor", as one said in the days of celluloid, and someone scooped it off the floor and posted it on YouTube? 😒

Posting this in the RIGHT forum now....

Yeah, I'm not sure which movie but it's from the Extended Edition of one of them. I own all three but never even bothered to watch Battle of 5 armies yet because it was so bad in the theater.

 

[Olorgando]

Since the topic of vampires has cropped up – and there is the odd vampire bat flitting around even in the published Silmarillion, never mind HoMe – somebody should have told the Dúnedain the bit about driving a wooden stake through the heart.
But then again, the Nazgûl didn’t belong to that category of the undead … 😕

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

To continue dragging the thread OT, I recommend "Shadow of the Vampire" from 2000, about the making of the 1922 film, with the conceit that Murnau, in order to create a film as "authentic" as possible, found a real vampire to play Count Orlock:

The situation with the Murnau film is similar to that of the Spanish version of 1931's "Dracula", in that parts were missing; much more of the latter, of course, to the extent that it was considered a "lost" film, until a print was discovered in Cuba in the 1960's. Still not generally available until released on home video, in 1992, I believe. Of course, that was a case of simple neglect, rather than deliberate destruction.

I'd been reading about it for decades, and was delighted to finally have it, as it is in many ways superior to the English version; for one thing, Dracula actually rises from his coffin, something Todd Browning wasn't able to figure out how to do. The camera work is much more fluid, too, compared to the Browning version, which, after the great first reel, becomes a bedroom farce without the comedy. The only thing missing is Lugosi.

OTOH, it replaces the bloodless female actresses, to whom one early reviewer quipped "no self-respecting vampire would give a second glance", with much sexier Latinas, especially the delicious Lupita Tovar, who was still alive to give an introduction to the home video release:

 

[Olorgando]

Murnau’s actual family name was Plumpe. He took his pseudonym from the Bavarian town (south of Munich), though whether he ever actually was there is speculative, at least at the time he changed his name (1910). The town’s mansion museum did a special exhibition on him in 2003 (115th birthday?) and produced an exhibition catalog for the event. A copy of which catalog I was able to purchase in 2006 when I was in an even smaller town, one train station south of Murnau, for some weeks.

F.W. Murnau seems to have been regarded quite highly as a director of the silent film era, first in Germany, and after his emigration in 1926 in Hollywood (he died from injuries suffered in a car accident near Santa Barbara in 1931).

In the filmographic section of the catalog, there is an impressive collection of film stills, posters, and paintings which may have served as inspirations to him, the latter by artists which included Munch, Velazquez, and Goya (to name those that ring a bell even with me, art philistine that I am – this is my wife’s area of interest). To bring my post, wheels screeching and skidding, back to topic, from those pictures I would think that F.W. Murnau could have done things with the tombs and Dol Guldur scenes that would have put PJ absolutely to shame. Though I often wonder if what we “Hildor” consider to be the special atmospherics of many of these silent-era films boils down to the limited lighting capabilities of the era. But then again one could argue that they did wonders with the limited resources available to them at the time, compared to today’s technical overkill.

 

[Miguel]

Ah, the version with Klaus Kinski, one of Germany's more notorious actors. The majority of his roles could be bunched under the category of being that of a "loose cannon".
Remake of a 1922 (also German) silent film which apparently ran into legal trouble with Bram Stoker's heirs over not having been authorized. Thankfully, despite a court order (it doesn't say where) to the contrary, some prints survived. I'm pretty sure I've seen this version completely, not as sure about the Kinski one. Though it was one of his more low-key performances.

Off the top of my head, I would envision Pharazôn a lot closer to the movie Théoden before his being released from Saruman's influence by Gandalf (definitely one of PJ's overboard explicitness "sins").

This movie is a masterpiece and definitely my favorite version of this story, there are moments where it stops feeling like a movie and becomes sort of a documentary with long scenes of absent dialogue and the visuals/landscapes taking over to talk for themselves. There are two cuts of this movie, one with the actors speaking German and in the other English. The scenes on both cuts are nearly identical, like i wouldn't have noticed if i didn't read it.