Chased by the Devil

Featuring one of the era's most beloved male idols, Hans Albers, as the doctor losing control of his dark side, is Viktor Turzanskij's rarely-screened Jekyll-and-Hyde version Vom Teufel gejagt. For added depth and relevance, a colleague who, years before, had assumed the doctor's guilt when an experiment went badly returns to continue their earlier research-besides, his name is tarnished anyway, where else could he go? It's difficult to not see this very elegantly dispassionate piece (a curious predecessor to the soon rising Arztfilm-wave) as an attempt to discuss its star's and auteur's involvement with the Nazi-era film industry: Albers starred in Herbert Selpin's world-weary anti-British epopee Carl Peters (1941), and Turzanskij directed (and co-wrote) the edgy anti-Polish, anti-labor drama Feinde (1940).