"Varieté" or "Variety" is a German black-and-white film from 1925 and as this one is already over 90 years old, nobody should be surprised that this is a silent film of course. The writer, who adapted the novel by Felix Hollaender, is Ewald André Dupont and he is also the one who directed this movie. There are contradictory statements about the runtime, but the version I saw was slightly under 100 minutes long. The big name here is of course the one who is also credited first in the cast list: Emil Jannings. The female main character was played by the ill-fated Lya De Putti. All in all, there was a decent scene here and there, but overall it was not working well enough for me as a whole to recommend it. Then again I am not the greatest silent film fan in general. One major problem here is the one that was really common back then: namely the lack of subtitles or I could also say they were not frequent enough. this is a real deal breaker in many movies and this one here is no exception, because if you are not familiar with the novel, it is occasionally impossible to understand what is going on and if you lose the connection to the story, you also lose interest quickly. This is what happened to me here. I give "Varieté" a thumbs-down. Watch something else instead.
Review of Variety
