Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Image Entertainment)
Four historical vignettes in which Satan takes human form to tempt mankind and win favor with God. In the first, he urges Judas to turn against Jesus in his final days. In the second, he plays a Grand Inquisitor in the Spanish Inquisition to tempt a monk into imprisoning and torturing the girl he loves. In the third, he plays a cripple who reveals the whereabouts of two French aristocrats who are trying to avoid the guillotine. In the final act, he is a Russian Red who captures a Finnish revolutionary girl and threatens to kill her husband if she does not give in to his demands. Only in this final act does he fail in his endeavor and thus gain some relief from his eternal damnation. Helge Nissen plays Satan in each episode, with appropriate menace and a sense of remorse when his temptations are successful. He actually wants to fail, since that would take some years off his sentence, but mankind is portrayed mostly as too weak to resist. The film is an homage to, and somewhat derivative of, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance of a few years earlier.
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