Summary
On a frost-laced Christmas Eve of 1818, snow muffles the Black Forest hamlet where Mathias, tavern-keeper and gambler with a soul already mortgaged to chance, tends a meager hearth. A jangle of sleigh bells heralds the arrival of a lone Polish Jew whose coat is crusted with rime and whose purse is fat with gold; one furtive glimpse of the traveler’s money-belt detonates the dormant greed in Mathias’s breast. After wine and false hospitality, the visitor departs; Mathias, cloaked in night, skulks across moon-bleached fields, intercepts the cutter on a lonely track, throttles the man with a muffled crunch of larynx, rifles the gore-spattered belt, and drags the cadaver to a disused lime kiln whose white dust will digest flesh faster than any grave. The bells, now silent, sink beneath the snow with the corpse. Fifteen yuletides later the murderer has metastasized into Burgomaster: plump, bemedaled, adored, his daughter pledged to the very captain of gendarmes who once hunted the vanished Jew. Yet as carols rise and mulled wine steams, phantom tintinnabulations begin to pulse inside his skull—an arterial drumbeat of guilt. In the cavernous dark of his four-poster he dreams a phantasmagoric tribunal: the mesmeric investigator forces his hand to scrawl confession; the court pronounces death; he awakens shrieking, clapper of the heart slamming against the ribs of a bell that will not cease. At dawn he is found rigid, eyes wide, mouth frozen around an unheard peal, the gold—now cold—still clenched in his fist.
Synopsis
The story opens on Christmas Eve, 1818, in Mathias' Tavern. Mathias, the proprietor, is in desperate straits for need of money, and as he is sitting at his fireplace there enters, with tinkling of sleigh bells, a lone traveler, the Polish Jew, seeking food and temporary rest. In paying Mathias, the Jew discloses a money belt loaded with gold. The Jew leaves in his sleigh, and Mathias, by taking a short cut, overtakes the Jew and murders him in a dense forest, takes the gold and throws the body into a lime kiln. Part two of the film shows Mathias, fifteen years later, again on Christmas Eve. He is now a wealthy man and Burgomaster of the village. Surrounded by family and friends, he is celebrating the betrothal of his daughter to the young captain of police. The talk leads to the mysterious disappearance of the Polish Jew fifteen years before, and the guilty conscience of Mathias makes him think he hears the sound of the accusing bells. A dramatic part of the story is Mathias' dream, in which he sees a court convened to try him for the murder of the Jew. A mesmerist is called in, and Mathias confesses the crime and the court sentences him to death, all in the dream. The sudden awakening, the final haunting fear of "The Bells" and the tragic death of Mathias make a feature film remarkable in thrilling intensity and for the beautiful scenic background.
Review Excerpt
"
Tintinnabulations of damnation
There is a moment, roughly midway through The Bells, when the camera refuses to cut away from the murderer’s face even as the lime dust rises like diabolic snow. The iris-in does not comfort us with cinematic discretion; instead it traps us inside complicity. We are pinned, moth-like, to Mathias’s pupils—two black wells in which conscience curdles. This 1914 one-reel miracle, long misfiled under mere Victorian melodrama, is in truth an ur-text of psychological ho..."
