Summary
Copenhagen’s winter fog coils like a noose around Michael von Straeten’s granite tower, a mausoleum of ledgers where every digit is a throat he’s slit without touching steel. Aage Hertel’s prow-like profile cuts through the screen—cheekbones sharp enough to sign contracts in blood—while Karen Poulsen’s mute, moon-white face drifts beneath him, a living reminder that every fortune is fertilized by someone else’s famine. In flickering gaslight we watch The Tiger parcel hearts as if they were junk bonds: a widowed clerk’s last mortgage, a sailor’s forfeited pension, a chorus girl’s future sold for a single night of champagne that tastes of copper. The film’s reels throb with proto-expressionist chiaroscuro: faces half-eclipsed, pupils lit like furnace doors, streetlamps bruising the cobblestones a jaundiced yellow. When von Straeten’s own past is marched before him—phantoms of the starved, the suicided, the betrayed—director Fritz Magnussen refuses easy repentance; instead the camera circles its predator in an ever-tightening dolly, a predatory planet devoured by the gravity of its victims. The final courtroom is not oak-paneled but cosmic: a blown-out soundstage of whirling dust and black crepe where the accused must weigh his billions against the weight of a child’s empty lunch tin. Salvation flickers, guttering, then is snuffed by a cut that lands like a guillotine, leaving only the echo of coins raining into a bottomless dark.
Synopsis
Michael von Straeten is an unscrupulous financier whose harshness and cynicism have earned him the nickname 'The Tiger'. He destroys his enemies with no mercy and no regrets, watching calmly when his victims come close to starving to death. Will von Straeten see the error of his ways when he is brought face to face with all the evil deeds of his life? Or is it too late for von Straeten to make amends for the lives he has ruined, escaping the ultimate punishment on Judgement Day?
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