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On my own, I was able to make one marginally important contribution to our hasty research. Chased off to the library by Clare, I brought home several scraps of information on Castle and one item of substance: an article from a 1925 issue of
McClure's.
The magazine had run a brief essay-interview on Castle that dated from soon after his arrival in the United States. At the time, he was being trumpeted by MGM as the boy-genius of filmdom. The
McClure's
piece dealt mainly with his much-publicized movie
The Martyr,
which was then in the planning stage. The magazine wanted to treat the film as a major artistic undertaking. But what came through plainly in the article was Castle's minimal enthusiasm for the project. There had been so many of these biblical epics, he complained; it would be a welcome relief when he could get on to better things.

He was asked what sort of movie he would prefer to make. A movie about the movies, was Castle's answer. He already had the film scripted; he'd brought it with him from Germany. Would it be some-thing like
Merton of the Movies
or
Ella Cinders?
No, no. Nothing so trivial. Castle had something far more ambitious in mind. “How the movies shape our soul,” was the way he put it. His interviewer found this “darkly Germanic.” What did it mean? Castle answered with a question. “Have you never wondered why they have such magic for us—the movie actors? The stars? Because of their riches, their glamour, do you think? No, there is something else. They are children of light.” That was the name Castle intended to use for his film.
Children of Light.
“Think how we go to meet them—in a dark place, a theater, an underworld.” Castle wanted to capture the power of that moment “when these strange creatures enter our lives, when they become the light that shineth in the darkness.”

Snidely, Clare commented, “Good thing he never had a shot at making it. Sounds like a dud for sure.”

And, of course, the movie never did get made. What lay ahead for Castle was the debacle of
The Martyr
and fifteen years riding a down-ward spiral. The last trace we could find of him were a couple of low-budget programmers released in 1941. They carried the not very encouraging titles
Kiss of the Vampire
and
Axis Agent.
After that, the only reference we could find was a brief obituary in the November 15, 1941 edition of
Variety.
It read:

Max Castle, German film director who immigrated to Hollywood in 1925, was reported to be among those lost at sea when the free French freighter
Le Colombe
was torpedoed by a Nazi U-boat off the coast of Spain last Thursday. Castle is best remembered for the horror films
Count Lazarus, House of Blood,
and
Feast of the Undead.
One of the youngest directors in film history, he began his career at the age of nineteen with the UFA studios in Berlin. In the United States he directed at Universal, Paramount, Republic, Prestige International, and Allied Eagle. His most recent film was
Axis Agent
for Monogram. Castle was on his way to Switzerland to discuss a new production when he met his untimely end at the age of forty-two.

The film ran for just under ninety minutes. When it was finished, Sharkey was the first to speak, cracking a brittle silence.

“I give up. Was that a
movie?”

Neither Clare nor I answered. We had no name for what we'd seen. We couldn't be certain that we'd viewed the whole film or that we'd seen it in anything like its correct sequence. What we'd watched was obviously a rough cut with all the ragged edges still showing. Yet, we knew that none of this mattered, for, after several minutes of talk, it was clear that the film, just as we had seen it, had
worked.
It had left us all with exactly the same experience of absolute, numbing horror. Not the horror of fear, but of revulsion. We'd been touched by an obscenity deliberately pressed to the limits of tolerance—and then held there in a risky balance for almost too long to bear, but not quite. Less artfully handled, the raw morbidity of the film might have driven us to stop the projector or leave the theater. But the experience had been so cleverly shaped and controlled that we stayed, we watched. We were held in spite of ourselves.

But by what? Curiosity? Or by some deeper aesthetic pleasure we would shudder to admit?

Our fascination had been so ingeniously captured that, for a long while afterward, everything Clare and Sharkey and I said about the film was shot through with an undertone of resentment. None of us wanted to admit that our sensibilities could be manipulated with such calculated skill. It's never easy to surrender to artistic genius, to admire a power that can reach in and violate the privacy of our most guarded feelings. Clare and Sharkey were sparring with the film, talking around and about its central effect. Oddly enough, it was Shannon who put an end to that. Young, vague, and impenetrably spacey, she was the first to lower her defenses and give the sense of moral anguish that enveloped all of us the appreciation it deserved. Her eyes still fixed glassily on the now darkened screen, she spoke over something Clare was saying, half-whispering the remark more to herself than to us.

“I guess that's how it would feel to be Judas… .”

Clare went silent. We waited for more, but that was all Shannon had to say. She sat playfully tugging at her long amber hair. Clare asked sharply, and a bit grudgingly, “How would you know?”

Shannon shrugged. “It's just I remember from school.” She was talking about the Catholic school she hadn't yet graduated from. “We talked about that once—Judas and Jesus, you know… .”

The comment was so lamely made, it was difficult to take what she said seriously. Shannon's manner was all but completely mindless: the unfocused stare, the slack jaw, the sleepy voice. Nevertheless, her remark was the breakthrough, the handle we needed to get our first tentative grip on Castle's art. After some fashion we couldn't yet understand, this film had captured the essence
of being
Judas. Hence the title,
Judas Everyman,
the Judas in all of us. Perhaps it took someone still naively close enough to her religious background, like Shannon, to seize upon that experience fully. Sharkey, Clare, and I were all fashionably skeptical types. I doubt that any of us had ever pondered the crime of Judas before this. For us, it was part of a defunct religious mythology. Yet the film we'd just watched had brought that ancient act of treachery, the betrayal of a living god, to life within us. It had passed into our consciousness like swallowed filth. It was only after we'd admitted the film's disturbing impact that we could go on to the question we all wanted to ask. Clare raised it. “All right, how was it done?”

There was a belligerent edge to her question. I understood why. Castle's film contradicted everything she was teaching me. Nothing provoked her critical ire more than a production that was dominated by visual gimmicks, technical tricks. Clare regarded this as the be-setting vice of film—to be swamped by its own rich technology. Precisely because this was so powerful a medium, she insisted that it must be disciplined by artistic discrimination. That was nothing less than an ethical principle for Clare; at the time, she was feeling the need to defend it with special tenacity. That summer the movie that was making the most waves in the art houses was a quirky little novelty called
Last Year at Marienbad,
an example of what some called “pure cinema.” Clare, for all her love of French film, hated it. Where others saw a bold, new liberating use of the medium, Clare saw an arbitrary hash of mesmerizing images. A movie, she argued, isn't a Rorschach inkblot.

What, then, could she say of Max Castle's
Judas?
Here was a film that had no recognizable narrative structure. We couldn't even agree among ourselves on the sequence of reels. There was no obvious beginning, middle, end—no clear location in time or place, no clear distinction between reality, hallucination, dream. The movie was all visual contradiction and paradox. Its gritty
cinéma vérité
texture (remarkably ahead of its time, right down to its use of hand-held-camera technique) suggested a hyperrealistic story, almost a pseudodocumentary reconstruction of the life of Judas. But the film was anything but realistic. Contradicting its own camera style, it was a deeply psychological study, a carefully architectured nightmare that placed us inside the mind of the guilt-maddened Judas at some point after his great act of betrayal.

This wasn't, however, the historical Judas. It was indeed Judas-Everyman presented in modern dress, moving through a modern Everytown—“modern,” meaning the wide-open, sin-ridden Berlin of the early 1920s, the cabarets, the brothels, the rathskellers. As far as we could tell, this Judas was a political fanatic, part of some underground revolutionary clique, who had ratted on a comrade; but the ideological coloration of the crime was deliberately obscure. One could read any number of interpretations into the movie, from radical to reactionary. All that mattered was the emotional convulsion through which the traitor was passing, and this unfolded, not as a story, but as a prolonged horror exquisitely studied from many sides. Although the film moved on the screen with a jagged, surging energy—the
editing at points included more cuts than the eye could register, achieving a dizzy pace—all its power was focused on that single experience. As Clare put it, paying the film as much of a compliment as she could squeeze out, we were watching a piece of “cinematic sculpture”—a monumental symbol of guilt fashioned out of moving images.

The more we talked, the less certain we became that the film was actually as much of a rough cut as we'd initially assumed. Everything we'd seen needed to be there; every detail made its indispensable contribution, even the material which on first viewing had looked like outtakes. Take, for example, the now famous and much-studied sequence in which Judas (in fact or in fantasy) cuts off the hand that received the thirty pieces of silver. In the film this appears in three consecutive versions with a rough splice between each. One assumes the director hasn't yet chosen which to use, which to cut. But the effect this run of images produces, the agonizing sense of remorse, requires all three versions, each filmed at a different speed, each from a different angle, building up to the final slow-motion repetition that becomes so terrifying in the viewer's anticipation that one wants to hide one's eyes. Even the jumpy splices between the sequences add to the shock of the event, almost as if one felt the ax striking, cutting.

Clare was obviously reluctant to admit that techniques like this could have the effect they did. She insisted through two more viewings of the film that day—each time with a different sequence of reels—that there had to be some underlying narrative element, some line of psychological development that gave the film's images their compelling power. Now, so many years later, when the qualities of Castle's “lost films” (the
Judas
was the first to be found) have become so celebrated and widely imitated, it's difficult to imagine anyone holding out against them the way Clare did. She was resisting the push-button precision with which the
Judas
produced its effects. Grudgingly, she appreciated the achievement, but she wanted it to have something to do with aesthetic taste, with recognizable literary values. Even before we saw
Judas Everyman,
I can recall her telling me that if film or any artistic medium had the power to trigger our deep involuntary psychic machinery, it would be wrong to do so. It should be regarded as impermissible and no critic should accede to it. Art, she contended, must enter our lives through the discriminating mind. Otherwise, it might as well be a narcotic.

For several days, through repeated viewing of
Judas Everyman,
Clare kept searching for the aesthetic method of the film—some subtle way in which a story line or character structure had been smuggled into Castle's images. Eventually, she made a quiet surrender.
Judas
wasn't film as she knew and loved film; but its emotional power was undeniable. Sharkey, on the other hand, received the film with unstinting enthusiasm. Its secret, he was convinced, lay in its purely formal properties: the editing, the lighting, the pacing, the camera angles. For the first time, I realized that, flabby as he was becoming in body and mind, Sharkey—if he managed to stay sober long enough—could still toss off an impressive job of film analysis. He was the one who called our attention to the way Castle used staircases throughout the film, always at crazy, vertiginous angles, the camera following a racing figure from behind—and always down-ward. The entire movie was tied together by the visual motif of reckless winding descent into engulfing shadows. Shame, panic, damnation … it was the perfect image.

Our last screening of the
Judas
that day became a grueling session of sequence-by-sequence dissection in which Sharkey tried to persuade Clare of his position. Only gradually did I come to realize that through some gap between Clare's reluctance and Sharkey's enthusiasm, an understanding of Max Castle that was all my own was being born. I listened to both; I leaned this way and that in agreement. But deep inside I knew that neither was right, because neither had yet absorbed the full thrust of the film. They were analyzing too soon, before they had opened themselves fully, as I felt I'd opened myself and wanted to open still further with each successive viewing, accepting the fearful penetration of Castle's art like a surgeon's blade that cuts to the quick in order to heal.

The film had meaning, as Clare insisted every movie must. But that meaning lay deeper than the literary qualities she looked for, deeper, too, than the technical tricks that preoccupied Sharkey. Even Shannon, who had exposed herself so unguardedly to Castle's power, hadn't followed her naive intuition far enough. Yes, we'd been made to feel the guilt of Judas. But why? For what purpose? Instinctively, I knew there was an answer to this question somewhere in the film. If I'd dared put it into words at that point, I would have said (not fully knowing what I meant when I said it) that the answer lay buried in the medium itself. I'd never until that day seen anything that needed so much to be a movie in order to say what it had to say. It needed this dark dungeon called the theater, this square of dancing
light called the screen that was so much like the doorway into another realm, this hypnotic witness of the eye feeding upon the rush of pulsing images it watched.