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Following that apparently successful film, Castle fell in with a group of UFA directors who specialized in Gothic fantasies. They picked up the name
Die Grabräuber
—the Grave Robbers. At the time, their work was generally regarded as, at best, morbid, commercial trash. At worst, it was called decadent and psychotic. Yet, at one time or another during its brief existence, the group included such stellar talents as Joseph von Päppen, Franz Olbricht, Abel Volker—directors who were destined to change the course of moviemaking in Germany
and America. Collectively, the young Grave Robbers won their spurs by inventing the entire repertoire of movie horrors: vampires, ghouls, homicidal sleepwalkers, werewolves. Their films were immensely popular with a war-weary German audience looking for supernatural escape.

Were Castle's movies of that period anything better than hackwork? It was impossible to say, since most, if not all, of these films had long since dropped out of sight. Producers and exhibitors of the time treated such work as dispensable merchandise. One authority on German films of the period touched briefly and disapprovingly en Castle, singling him out as the most sensationally lewd of the Grave Robbers. But the same study included a tantalizing quotation from Abel Volker. “Even in those early days,” the great director remarked, “we could see that young Max was the best among us. He thought about the medium of film more deeply—always innovating, innovating. Of course, the pictures we made at UFA then—they were rubbish. Even so Max always saw possibilities. Look, in these spook movies he made, the lighting technique—'split-lighting' he called it. Nobody yet has reproduced that. A great cinematic talent. Of course, later, it was very sad. Hollywood—it ate him alive.”

About 1923, Castle got his chance to venture beyond the Gothic ghetto. UFA assigned him a film called
Simon the Magician.
He was given big-name talent to work with: Emil Jannings, Hanna Ralph, the young Peter Lorre. Once again, Thea von Pölzig's name appeared buried among the lesser credits as one of the set designers. There was little more we could find about the movie beyond a few passing references in a study of the German director Georg Pabst. The remarks had to do with Louise Brooks. Pabst was the man who turned Brooks into a star, featuring her as the classic vamp in his
Pandora's Box.
But before Pabst discovered her sexual allure, Castle had already used her as a slave girl in
Simon the Magician.
It was only a brief appearance for the young actress, but it nevertheless attracted considerable and scandalized attention. Hypnotized by Simon the black magician, she is induced to perform a dance that, as one critic reported it, began as offensively indecent and finished as intolerably obscene. Reputedly, the film contained lots of sadism and perversion, all thinly disguised as an edifying saga of early Christianity. Upon its release, it was met by a wave of public protest. Universally condemned as no better than smut, the movie was withdrawn, never again to find its
way to the screen. Along with other Castle movies, it may have eventually been destroyed by the Nazis as part of the “garbage culture” they meant to liquidate.

Where did
Judas Jedermann,
or
Judas Everyman
in its English translation, fit into Castle's early filmography? There was no record to be found of the picture anywhere. Possibly it was his last German production, destined to receive even less public exposure than
Simon the Magician,
perhaps none at all. We had to settle for whatever we could deduce from Thea von Pölzig's terse memo. Attacked by the censors before the final cut was completed, it was never released but simply boxed and shelved at UFA. Clare, still arguing with Jürgen von Schachter at the back of her mind, made a smug observation. Castle and the Grave Robbers sounded like exactly what Professor Kracauer set out to study in his book: filmmakers who had driven the German public crazy with paranoid terrors and ghastly fantasies. If the professor was correct, then, ironically, the Nazis were trying to destroy the very disease of which they were the major symptom.

In the mid-twenties, along with a boatload of German movie talent, Castle came to Hollywood. There he received the usual publicity buildup the studios reserved for foreign directors and stars. His name was now officially changed from Kastell to Castle, and in 1926 he was contracted by the fledgling MGM Studios to handle a big-budget historical production:
The Martyr.
It was, like
Simon the Magician,
a Christians-and-lions extravaganza, possibly meant to capitalize on the air of scandal surrounding Castle's censored German film. Rod La Rocque was signed for the title role, fresh from success with DeMille, and Louise Brooks was selected to play the role of Mary Magdalen in a reportedly sensational interpretation. Castle at once spirited his cast and crew away to Rome and Jerusalem to begin filming. The movie was one of the earliest to involve extensive (and expensive) location work, something the studio used for all it was worth in its publicity. Supposedly,
The Martyr
enjoyed one of the fattest production budgets in film history. Even so, it soared over cost within the first month of shooting. For the next year, the trade papers carried occasional items on the film's progress, its difficulties, its triumphs, its unprecedented scope and expense. There were rumors that Brooks had experienced an epiphany while filming at Golgotha.

When it was completed, the movie simultaneously launched Castle in America and sank him. He came in with a film thirty-one reels
long. Eleven hours. Metro refused to release it at even half that length and demanded major surgery. Castle refused. After months of haggling, the film was cut by the studio to a still weighty four hours. Castle threatened legal action to reclaim the edited footage. He argued that the film belonged to its maker, not to the studio, but the cause was hopeless. The case became moot when Metro announced that it had preemptively destroyed the unused material. Decrying the act as vandalism, Castle disowned
The Martyr
in its studio-revised form. As released by MGM, the movie proved to be both an artistic and financial disaster. It was withdrawn one week after its premiere, never again to be seen: another in the long list of Castle's lost films.

Following this debacle, no studio in America would hire Castle without placing him on a tight rein. There were a few more abortive contracts, but within two years of his arrival in the States, Castle had become one of the industry's least employable directors. In one of the trade journals for 1927 there was a brief note that mentioned he was assisting in some unspecified capacity at Universal on the silent original of
The Cat and the Canary.
The director on that archetypal piece of Hollywood Gothic was his recently arrived colleague Paul Leni. Possibly this was an odd job meant to keep him solvent while he and MGM wrangled over the cut on
The Martyr.
After that Castle dropped out of sight for three or four years, except for the occasional report on how his ill-fated litigation with MGM was going.

Then, in the thirties, he began a second, less celebrated, career, migrating along the low-rent fringes of the American studios as a freelance director. Nobody would trust him with anything better than B-movies. Of these he did several—hack thrillers and horror films. A return to his Grave Robber period. From his childhood Sharkey thought he could just dimly recall a few of Castle's latter-day cheapsters. “Classic awful” was the way he described them, not altogether disapprovingly. Clare, on the other hand, was quick to state that she'd never seen a Castle movie—other than
Feast of the Undead,
which she had only recently screened at The Classic. Her parents, she explained, wouldn't allow her to go to movies like that. Not because they were scary, she hastened to add, but because they were
bad.
Still, these pictures had been financially successful enough to keep Castle steadily employed. A few of them still got shown on late-night television or as midnight movies on Halloween.

We were able to find extremely little critical commentary on Castle's work. What there was dated back to the early thirties, all of it
dealing with
The Martyr.
For the most part these were attempts to guess what the film might have looked like before MGM applied the knife. Was it perhaps a lost masterpiece? Clare managed to dig up one article along these lines that lent Castle a bit more stature in her eyes. It was a piece written by Alexander Woollcott for
The Dial
in which the noted critic used the fate of
The Martyr
as an opportunity to castigate the barbarism of Hollywood. While the essay pushed some praise Castle's way, it gave no details about the movie. As far as we could discover, that was the last time Castle or his work had enjoyed a glimmer of artistic visibility in America.

That brought us to the
CinéArt
interview. On this, Clare and I spent an entire evening and most of a night, picking our way through the rough French and German of the unpolished draft. There were passages that defied comprehension, even legibility. But we could recognize that the piece dealt mainly with some filming Castle was doing in France during the late thirties. This was the cloudiest part of his career, but also the part that most teased the curiosity. Seeking the opportunity for more ambitious work than Hollywood would permit, Castle had returned to Europe several times. There he traveled, did some shooting, and tried to raise money for his own work—apparently without much success. Certainly nothing he started during these junkets ever got completed. Even Geneviève Joubert—if she was indeed the author of the manuscript—hadn't seen more than a few rough-cut scenes. But these she wrote about in glowing terms as daring experimental efforts. At one point, she referred to them as the
fusée à temps,
the time bomb of modern cinema, unrecognized now, but destined to have the greatest impact in the future.

It was pretty obvious that Castle was cueing the author along these lines, shamelessly celebrating himself in vague but pretentious terms. At one point, he characterized himself as “the most unknown of filmmakers.” But he bravely accepted this role without self-pity, or so he claimed. As the author recorded it, “… he muses on the theme of the unknown creator … the creator
behind
the creator, the god without a face, without a name. He explains that in the film industry one's name does not always appear on one's work.” Then, quoting Castle: “What is the director in America? The shop foreman. Under orders. You do part of a film, half of a film. In America, they have an art form called the patchwork. A dozen ladies come together, each sews on a patch, finally a pattern emerges. We have this in Hollywood too. A patch job, we call it. Two, three, four directors overlapping
on one film. But it is not art, simply cheap production. Quite mad.”

Here it was noted that Castle laughed sardonically and then went on. “Still, as we have mentioned, even on this crass assembly line, it is sometimes possible to do work of significance, provided one knows how to conceal the result. It is like magic tricks. Now you see it, now you don't.” His interviewer, who apparently knew what this remark meant, agreed and then led the discussion off into a turgid digression which outran Clare's German, no doubt because so much of it was abbreviated or highly elliptical. Toward the end of this baffling passage, she came upon what seemed to be some notes the author had jotted down to elucidate the discussion. “… as if Rembrandt had treated his paintings with a glaze that covered more than it revealed. One had to wait for this glaze to fade, to fall away—perhaps for centuries. What then would we know of Rembrandt? Suppose his finest work lay hidden under a trivial doodle.”

The interviewer asked only briefly and timidly about Castle's Hollywood potboilers. He responded to the question with good humor, claiming that he had come to enjoy making “these little toys.” When his interviewer expressed surprise, he explained, “But these are the
true
movies, are they not? Movies for the millions. With these I reach the world of the streets. But I tell you this: this shit I am busily depositing in the movie houses across America is more fertile than the world knows. The eyes that can appreciate this work … ” Here Clare paused to pick through the German word by word, “Let's see. He says 'the eyes … have not yet seen the light.' I suppose that means 'have not yet been born.' ” Castle was coming across as bombastic. I could tell that Clare disapproved.

At several points in the interview, the author seemed to be quoting from a piece of writing that Castle was asked to elucidate. It took several readings before Clare got it clear that the quotes were from something Castle himself had written—an essay on film theory. But where had it been published? There was no indication. Clare was exasperated, for the quoted fragments managed to be intriguing without being illuminating. But then, that was very much the character of the entire piece. It left the reader wholly uncertain where Castle's words had been edited, paraphrased, reworked. There were large sections that had been inked out, others where the French and the German, both given, seemed to mean very different things. Yet there was just enough to get a hook into the mind—Clare's mind, at least—and to give the blurred impression of Castle as a serious (if often
pompous) thinker. Finally, Clare gave up, pretending to dismiss the tattered little manuscript as hopelessly obscure and probably not to be trusted. She didn't like the way Castle came across, didn't like the gullibility of his interlocutor. But in the months that followed, more than once I found her perusing the interview, trying to construe it more clearly. Mangled as it was, the item proved to be an effective piece of bait for both of us.

On the back of the last page, there was a personal memo scrawled by the author and a date—August 29, 1939. Two days before the outbreak of war. Whatever film Castle had come to France to make, it, too, remained unfinished.