Goron Film

The film follows tells the story of a struggle over a plot of petroleum-rich land.

Georg Jacoby’s Jokeren is a light-hearted entertainment picture set during the carnival in Nice, a romantic comedy with a touch of melodrama. A young artist, fatally injured in a car accident, foolishly entrusts a batch of compromising love letters to Borwick, a crooked and unscrupulous lawyer, instructing him to destroy them. Instead, Borwick proceeds to blackmail the woman who sent the letters, Lady Cecilie Powder, married to the straight-arrow Sir Herbert Powder. Lady Cecilie gets help from her spunky younger sister Gill. In turn, she draws in Peter Carstairs, a debonair adventurer known to all as “the Joker” – the card that trumps all others. When the Joker repeatedly foils Borwick’s schemes, the crooked lawyer ups the ante, trying to incriminate his adversary Carstairs and expanding his demands to include marriage to Gill. But as the characters converge at yet another lavish carnival celebration party, it becomes clear that one card does indeed trump all the others: the Joker!

Dr. Egil Börne, an eminent physician, comes under the spell of an unscrupulous cabaret dancer and deserts his fiancée. The plot finds echoes throughout the Weimar period, including Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Conrad Veidt appears in a supporting role as a sinister blind painter, whose entrance eerily presages Murnau’s Nosferatu. Der Gang in die Nacht, the earliest surviving film by F. W. Murnau, is also, paradoxically, the only Murnau film for which the original camera negative exists.