Mysteries of a Barbershop
Mysteries of a Barbershop German Mysterien eines Frisiersalons is a comic, slapstick German film ofminutes, created by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Erich Engel, and starring the Munich cabaret clown Karl Valentin and leading stage actor Erwin Faber. Brecht reportedly did not write a complete shooting script, but rather produced notes and parts of a manuscript according to Faber for this short, silent film and intended the actors to improvise the action. Although the film was not considered a success by any of its creative team, and consequently never released as a profit making film to the public, it has been recognized and acknowledgedsince its rediscovery in a Moscow archive in the 1970sas one of the 100 most important German films of all time.
Mysteries of a Barbershop was created during a monthlong pause before the beginning of rehearsals for Bertolt Brechts early drama, In the Jungle of Cities at the Munich National Theatre, in February 1923. Brecht and Erich Engel the director of In the Jungle, assembled a cast that included Karl Valentin, Liesl Karlstadt Valentins cabaret partner, Erwin Faber the leading actor in Munich at the time and star of Brechts three staged plays in Munich Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, and the forthcoming Edward II, Max Schreck soon to be a leading film actor in such films as Nosferatu, comic actor Josef Eichheim, character actor Kurt Horwitz, Carola Neher later to play the lead in Brechts Happy End and the role of Polly in the film of Threepenny Opera and the cabaretist and wife of song writer, Friedrich Hollaender, Blandine Ebinger. The group improvised a series of comic and mockromantic scenes, which, according to one critic, contains enough cruelty jokes to have made WC Fields envious.The plot revolves around Dr. Moras Faber who visits a barber Valentin, who accidentally shaves Moras to look like a Chinese person above, left, and then mistakenly cuts off Moras rivals head photo, above, right, which is sewn back on by the barbers assistant Ebinger, and ends with a sword fight The Duel and in which Faber is triumphant actually, saved by the girl and Ebinger and Faber embrace in a happy ending in a mysterious Senegalese Salon photo right. ........
Source: Wikipedia
