This is definitely one one the best pre-WWI movies! Still, if you are looking for the typical German expressionism, you will not see a lot of this. The movie is great in its use of the Prague locations (remember- those were still the days of Austria-Hungary). You see some of the city sights and also the famous Jewish cemetery but not in a tourist fashion, it all serves the romantic atmosphere of the movie: romantic in the fashion of Hoffmann and the German doppelgänger idea.
Paul Wegener is far away from a modern day movie star, but he was one of the top German theater actors of the days. He fully embraced the concept of movies and even directed some. The author Hanns Heinz Ewers produced some dangerous Nazi books later on, but this one is a major achievement.
Review of The Student of Prague
