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Alraune More at IMDbPro »

23 out of 24 people found the following review useful:
Worth a look, even if only for its unusual premise., 31 October 2001
Author: jim riecken (youroldpaljim)

ALRAUNE (aka UNNATURAL), is based on the popular Hanns Heinz Ewers novel. This version made in 1952, is the fifth and last version filmed. Many sources state that this film is lost in its English language version, but since the version I saw everyone spoke English, I can assure you they are wrong.

This film is unusual, if only for its premise. Erich Von Stroheim plays Ten Brinken, a scientist who has created a women by means of artificial insemination. Ten Brinken used the sperm from a hanged murderer and the egg from a prostitute. Ten Brinken raises the girl (whom he has named Alraune, German for "mandrake") as his daughter, but is convinced because she was created artificially, she will inherit all the unsavory characteristics of her "parents". Only evil will befall all those who may fall in love with her. And tragic circumstances do follow all the men she tries to fall in love with. There is an odd element thrown in which suggests Alraune has supernatural powers. She convinces Ten Brinken to by a worthless parcel of land. She then commands some workers to start digging where they discover a spring whose waters contain healing properties. Ten Brinken and a wealthy woman invest in it but the spring runs dry and Ten Brinken ends up almost financially ruined.

Despite the films very adult premise, I could not help thinking that this film has the feel of a film belonging in era much older than the 1950's. The few American critics who reviewed the film when it was released in America in 1957 also noted an old fashioned air fatalism throughout the film. Karl Boehm (later of PEEPING TOM) is convincing as the young man who falls in love with Alraune, despite being aware of her ghastly origin and is the only man Alraune finds true love. Critics said he was to naive and boyish for the part, but I think that was what was right for the role.

8 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Cross pollination, 23 March 2008

Author: John Seal from Oakland CA

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

This fascinating German fantasy film stars the legendary Erich von Stroheim as Professor Jacob ten Brinken, a brilliant scientist who has played God and created the world's first test tube baby. Now fully grown, Alraune (Hildegard Knef) is a beautiful but affectless creature whose way with the opposite sex threatens to ensnare the Professor's nephew (a very young looking Carlheinz Bohm). Alraune's amorality--presumably the result of being bred from the egg of a prostitute and the sperm of a murderer--has not been tempered by a spell in convent and now threatens to destroy the family legacy. Though clearly set before World War II, the film reflects concerns about the misuses of science by the Nazi regime, though perhaps the conclusions it reaches are not that far afield from those of Dr. Mengele. Alraune is a missing link between German expressionism and the Italian Gothic cinema of the early 1960s, with a dash of Jean Cocteau thrown in for good measure. Interesting sidenote: it sure sounds like von Stroheim dubbed his own English language track.

3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Slow moving, yet fascinating Gothic piece., 7 March 2010
Author: flapdoodle64 from Portland, OR, United States

This film is a quiet, Gothic kind of psychological film, and is interesting and well enough made so as to be watchable in a poorly dubbed US version. I found the actress in the title role to strangely compelling, and convincingly portrayed sexual attraction with slightly disturbing aspects.

Eric Von Stroheim plays a perverted scientist, which is interesting because Von Stroheim is said to have induced an actual orgy among actors in order to film an orgy scene in one of the silent movies he directed. Stroheim, in his famous roles in Grand Illusion and Sunset Boulevard, was adept at playing formerly great and tragically flawed characters: this role is an interesting variation on this theme.

This film was made in 1952, in Germany, and is concerned with scientist who collects semen from an executed criminal and uses it to impregnate a prostitute; the offspring of this union is the title character. This movie would have had a strong resonance upon its original audience, just 7 years after the end of the Nazi period.

The Nazis, besides having many kinky sexual fetishes, instigated some strange 'breeding' programs designed to induce blonde-haired and blue-eyed people to reproduce. There were hostels, where these blonde and blue-eyed women could stay during their pregnancy, and where they and their offspring could live afterwords, free of charge and enjoying a comfortable lifestyle.

Alraune is the German word for the mandrake root. In folk legend, the mandrake grew beneath the hanged man, and it was the legendary discharge of semen from a hanged man which supposedly caused this plant to grow. In addition, there was another legend in which the mandrake, applied to a woman's nether regions, could instigate a pregnancy, with or without sexual contact from a living man.

This is a slow moving but strangely compelling film, and owes a lot to the beautiful actress in the title role. The subtext is also fascinating.

1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
The evils of artificial insemination, 23 October 2011

Author: melvelvit-1 from NYC suburbs

Brooding scientist Professor ten Brinken (a stern Erich von Stroheim), thrown out of Uni for his blasphemous beliefs, creates a "daughter" (Hildegarde Knef) from the sperm of a double murderer and the egg of a prostitute in his castle laboratory and raises her under the gallows, where the mandrake root grows. It's an experiment in genetic theory but true to the plant's legend, Alraune will bring good fortune just before death and destruction as the movie opens with the girl escaping from a convent and making her father rich when she divines a mineral spring on land he bought. Falling for her cousin (Karlheinz "Peeping Tom" Boehm), Alraune feels something for the first time but luck won't last long and although her "evil" isn't premeditated (much), she's responsible for an attempted suicide, a framing for theft, a fatal accident, a duel, death from exposure, bankruptcy, and public disgrace. The story ends with the inevitable: Alraune, crying tears she never could before, gives up the man she loves lest he be cursed, too, and her "father", who gave her life, takes it away and goes to the gallows in a fitting twist of fate. The film equates artificial insemination with the crimes of Viktor Frankenstein but blames the creator since love is what gives us our souls and Alraune had become human.

The German production's a handsomely mounted, atmospheric period piece with an Expressionism the original 1928 silent lacked, especially in the gloomy castle, and some thunder, wind, and rain are there to underscore a point or two. Obviously THE BAD SEED, a hit Broadway play and Hollywod movie about hereditary evil that came out a few years later, wasn't exactly innovative. The dubbed U.S. version, UNNATURAL: THE FRUIT OF EVIL, is missing ten minutes and eliminates any reference to artificial insemination.

Sedate Remake of Alraune, 8 March 2012
Author: David Le Sage from Australia

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

This version of Alraune is largely unremarkable but for another excellent performance by the always-radiant Hildegard Knef. Unambitious cinematography and a slow pace undermine any attempt to build real atmosphere.

Most interesting is the film's theme of eugenics and the dangers of science just a few years after the fall of the Third Reich.

In some ways, though, the Alraune fable is an inverse of Frankenstein: whereas, in Shelley's tale, science is shown to supersede alchemy, here it is the reverse. Alraune's creator has more in common with Rotwang in the sense that there is a blurring of alchemy and science. It is noteworthy that Brigitte Helm starred as the titular character in the early version of Alraune as well as her more famous role as Maria in Metropolis.

This film is recommended to Knef fans and people interested in the Alraune myth. However, as a piece of cinema, it is workmanlike and nothing more.

Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, 20 January 2011

Author: keith-moyes-656-481491 from United Kingdom

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I have finally managed to catch up with this hard-to-find movie on a budget DVD.

Even in 1952, when the movie was first made, it was already an anachronism, full of the misogyny that seemed to characterise German movies from the early Twentieth Century (e.g. The Blue Angel). Typically they featured a beautiful woman who exerts a fatal attraction on all the men around her and then humiliates and destroys them.

The femme fatale in this movie is Alraune. She is the result of the artificial insemination of a prostitute by a murderer. This 'unnatural union of tainted blood' is posited as the reason for her selfishness, emotional frigidity and destructiveness. However, at the very end, the movie suddenly flips and holds out the possibility that her soulless predation on men is due to nurture rather than nature. I doubt if this is thematic sophistication on behalf of the film-makers. More likely, it is simply indecisiveness.

I find this film hard to evaluate, because the print is very poor and there are some baffling artifacts in the DVD transfer that I have never encountered before. More to the point, the movie is only 79 minutes long, as against the 92 minutes quoted on IMDb. I do not know whether this trimming was undertaken when the English language version was prepared, or whether it is a consequence of damage to the print itself. Possibly it is both.

This might explain the strange editing. There are some very abrupt plot transitions that suggest significant cuts were made for US distribution but, in addition, the transitions between the scenes that remain are sometimes so sharp that the dubbed dialogue seems to spill over from one scene to the next. This gives the film a disconcerting rhythm. The pacing within scenes is often quite ponderous (I am tempted to say 'Germanic'), but the cutting between them is very sharp. The result is that the movie seems both leaden and breathless at the same time. I would be interested to see the original German language version to see if it has this same paradoxical feel.

It is difficult for me to recommend this movie in the form in which I have seen it. It really needs to be viewed in a reasonably good, and reasonably complete, print.

Nonetheless, despite all its deficiencies, Alraune does exert a weird sort of fascination but it will probably only appeal to those people who are particularly curious about the oddities that can occasionally be disinterred from the remoter hinterlands of the movie landscape.

To the more general movie-goer I would say: "there are better things to do with your time."

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