Product Details

• Actors: Werner Kraus, Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover
• Directors: Robert Wiene
• Format: Black & White, Original recording reissued, NTSC
• Rated: Unrated
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Timeless Multimedia
• VHS Release Date: December 1, 1994
• Run Time: 69 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (104 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6304014457
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #266,478 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

This haunting classic of the silent screen is familiar to every graduate of Film 101. Like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, Godard's Breathless, and Welles's Citizen Kane, Caligari helped define a cinematic school... and forever changed the way the world made movies. It's also great fun, even for modern audiences.

The film begins with two men trading horror stories. One promises the other a terrifying true tale--the harrowing story of his fiancée's narrow escape from death. Here's the story: an amoral asylum director wants to see if he can order somnambulist patient Cesare to commit murder. To this end, the nefarious doctor masquerades as a traveling showman and picks victims from the gawking carnival crowds. He sends his sleepwalker out to execute bloody deeds by night--crimes of which Cesare is barely aware. Soon, Cesare abducts the narrator's girl and is caught ... which is only the beginning of the surprises.

Caligari's world became the textbook example of 1920s German Expressionist cinema--a cockeyed dreamscape, where black-clad actors feverishly chase each other across moody, barely-realistic sets. Think of films such as Dark City or the Nightmare Before Christmas or Saturday Night Live's "Sprockets" sketches. Here's where it all began. --Grant Balfour

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

161 of 166 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a note to confused amazon users..., January 23, 2005

By 

Dirk De Bruyne "Dirk" (Schoten, Belgique Belgique) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Restored Authorized Edition) (DVD)

Amazon does NOT differentiate its reviews of titles (be it book/DVD's/vhs etc) by this or that edition by any of the many companies that release them....so your review of the cheapy public domain Alpha dvd(to name just one of the several CRAP distributors of old movies)and the words you write about the restored fine print Kino International(to name one of the very excellent distributors of old movies)will be all on the same page, WHATEVER version you have selected!!

Having said that , my review is of the KINO dvd release , a very fine one as this company does not distribute anything less(you pay more, but if you know anything about silent and classic movies it will be no secret to you that if you pay peanuts that is exactly what you will get....)...it is however disconserting to see that even the best available dvd release still hasn't been cleaned up to the degree that other classic silent masterpieces have..surely with todays technology a digital "hoovering" of this film is not too much to ask.

Wonderful film of course, but you know that otherwise you wouldn't even be reading these reviews, and the KINO version is , so far, the best you can get for your money.

133 of 139 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Edition selection tips, January 12, 2006

By 

J. Porter "Julian Porter" (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Special Collector's Edition) (DVD)

I'm not going to spend time raving about the movie, because I'm going to assume that if you've got this far you already know how wonderful it is. What I think could be far more useful (as this is an area where I have been burned) is some comparison between the two DVD editions I know of.

I have copies of both the Kino Video edition and the Image Entertainment edition. My preference is for Image Entertainment for the following reasons:

(1) The print seems slightly cleaner (and most helpfully, the DVD packaging warns you about the horizontal line across the top of some scenes which is a defect on the original film)

(2) The intertitles on Image use the correct expressionistic style as per the 1920 release. from what I recall, Kino's are the 'normalised' printed intertitles from 1923.

(3) The Kino version has possibly the most insensitive layer transition location I have ever come across. For reasons of their own Kino put an intertitle before the final sequence in the asylum, and it would have been a natural place for a layer transition. Instead they put it a few seconds into the final sequence (and only a couple of minutes before the end of the film!). Image has no layer transition.

(4) Both scores on the Kino version are dreadful. One consists of strange electronic noises, while the 'orchestral' one is pretty inappropriate. Instead Image chose a very nice specially composed score by Timothy Brock which is a remarkably effective pastiche in the style of Alban Berg (very appropriate for an expressionist film).

(5) Image has a commentary track; it's not clear that Kino does (I can't remember, but certainly it isn't mentioned in the blurb on the back).

Just about the only plus of Kino is that there is considerably more bonus material (43 minutes from 'Genuine: the tale of a vampire' as compared to about 3 on Image). However, if the price for that is the awful layer transition, then I know which I prefer.


So that's why I prefer the Image version and wish I hadn't bought the Kino version.

89 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prime example of German Expressionism, August 11, 2000

By 

keviny01 - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Special Collector's Edition) (DVD)

I had watched many poorly-made VHS tapes of this film and was very happy a restored version came out on video. There's probably no better way to see this film. This visual stunning silent German film tells the story of a mad doctor who trains a sleepwalker to kill people in order to study the effects of somnambulism. Filled with images resembling one's nightmare (or the mind state of a mentally-ill) -- distorted views, deformed spaces, bizarre lights and shadows -- this film in 1919 helped usher in a new era of German Expressionism, a period that produced such classics as The Last Laugh, Nosferatu, and Metropolis.

This DVD is identical in content to the laserdisc from Image a few years ago, with the exception that the LD included a detailed letter explaining why there is a faint horizontal line near the top of the screen in certain scenes (it's a misplaced "frame line" that is supposed to mark the edge of a frame). The DVD merely mentions on the jacket case that this is a "defect" on the film negative. Like the LD, this DVD also presents the film in a "windowbox", ensuring every frame can be seen in full.

The audio commentary on the alternate sound track is thoughtful and insightful, but the commentator reiterates much of what appears on the jacket essay. Other extras include a few comtemporary photographs related to the film, and a short silent film from the Expressionist era.