I say "most of" because I turned it on when Hutter is reading the book on vampires at the inn. Still, this is the first time in at least twenty years that I've seen more of the film than a few clips. The Turner Classic Movies print is apparently the restoration that Brownlow did for the BFI back in 1997, with the James Bernard score, something which I didn't even know existed until I read the final credits tonight.

So, obviously, I've not kept up with any arguments or controversies regarding the various versions available on DVD (even though I read VIDEO WATCHDOG religiously, I don't recall anything on the subject). I liked Bernard's score, and didn't recognize any of the bits allegedly recycled from his Hammer work (yeah, I've done some cursory googling in the last hour). The tinting was cool, and the intertitles were more abundant and coherent than I remembered them being when I saw the film back in the 80s.

I do have a few questions, the first of which might have been answered if I'd seen the beginning of the film. Who is the "I" who seems, in this version, to be narrating the story? Some of the title cards are obviously quoting the book on vampires that Hutter picked up at the inn, and there are the excepted quotations from the log of the Demeter (or whatever the ship is called here), but those aren't the titles I'm talking about. The ones I mean comment directly on the story, and identify the somewhat unnecessary Van Helsing surrogate ("unnecessary" because he doesn't have nearly as much of an effect on the outcome as he does in Stoker) as a student of Paracelsus.
Is this auctorial "voice" ever identified?

The titles also seem to explicitly refer to Orlock as "Nosferatu" on several occasions, almost as if that's his name (he may well have been called "Count Orlock" at the beginning of the film, when Hutter is presumably dispatched on his mission by Knox, but I missed that). I may be misremembering, but I don't recall the word "Nosferatu" ever appearing anywhere but the title in the versions I saw in the 70s and 80s (interestingly, nobody seems to be able to verify the 19th century claim by Emily Gerard, whose THE LAND BEYOND THE FOREST was one of Stoker's primary sources, that the word means "vampire," as it doesn't seem to appear in Romanian or Hungarian).

Did I blink and miss it, or is the famous ". . . the phantoms came to meet him" entirely missing here?

And finally, why does Ellen cry out for "Hutter"? Isn't that his surname? Mina would have cried out "Jonathan," not "Harker."

I thought he was originally called Dracula but then this got changed following the lawsuits from mrs Stoker.

They showed the version with the James Bernard score? Aaaah! I've always wanted to see that one, as opposed to just hearing it.

Correct.

This, I believe, is the one version where they DON'T use that famous line about the phantoms. I have it on R2, put out by the BFI, I believe.

A few issues ago in Harry Long's Van Helsing's Journal there was a wonderfully complete comparison of the various Nosferati.

Yes, it was the BFI version (also known as the Brownlow version) that the TCM ran last night.

According to the following (fascinating and very thorough) link, the character didn't become "Dracula" until the 40s.

http://www.celtoslavica.de/chiaroscuro/vergleiche/nos.html

"It was a print from this version that reached the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1947. There, as was the norm in Iris Barry's time, the foreign-language intertitles were translated into English. In the process, the names of the characters (which in the French version had roughly approximated to the German names) were changed to the names of the characters in Bram Stoker's Dracula, which the film is of course based on."

It also answers (sort of) my question about the "narrator."

"In Nosferatu the action was linked to three books: to the 'diary', a kind of chronicle of the plague, whence the action initially emerges and into which it finally returns; to, secondly, the vampire book that Hutter finds in the Carpathian inn - just as one might find a Bible in a hotel room today - which shows him and his wife their future; and, finally, to the ghost-ship's log book. In these books the action never simply moves on - rather the books edge what is seen and shown into a shadowy half-light - from both the characters' and the viewer's point of view. There are, in addition, letters, a page from a newspaper and various official documents.

The well-known French version and those based on it ascribed the 'diary' to Johann Carvallius or Cavallius, "ancien magistrat et habile historien de sa ville natale". In Murnau's title-list, on the other hand, the keeper of the diary is anonymous, without fame or title. His signature is three crosses - "three properly painted graveyard crosses" are specified in the title-list - a voice from beyond the grave. This was obviously too irrational for whoever put together the French version.

The greatest works of the German cinema of the early '20s almost without exception make reference to 'author-less' literary genres, traditional or modern - to anonymous testimonies and traditions, to folk tale, legend, books of magic, chronicles as well as crime novels and science fiction, but almost never to the work of well-known writers. Fritz Lang made no distinction between filming a story from a newspaper serial such as Dr. Mabuse or a saga like Die Nibelungen, and when Murnau was shooting his Faust he followed not Goethe but the medieval folk epic. The anonymity of the storyteller, his voice from beyond the grave, is not the only pointer in Nosferatu signalling the disintegration of the bourgeois author and the bourgeois hero. The story-teller who signs his work with three graveyard crosses matches the vampirical Count, who finally disappears in a puff of smoke, a creature somewhere between human and animal, between life and death, a hermaphrodite like the flesh-eating plant with which he is compared in the film."

I never thought of the "three book" device before. This, of course, is analogous to the original novel being told through diaries, letters and transcriptions.

That great line now belongs to the ages. The improved subtitles are drawn from a correct translation of Henrik Galeen's script - while the new line is far more prosaic and forgettable, it's more accurate. For what it's worth.

Accuracy misses the point!

So what is the actual line in the original German?

I dunno, I was going for cheap yucks. Cheap, delicious yucks...

The more-correct line quotes Hutter as he happily sings "The schmuck went over the mountain, the schmuck went over the mountain..."

"Ain't no terrible tragedies gonna happen today"!
-WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY

In the version I reviewed in 2001 for Video Watchog 75, the line was:

"As soon as Hutter had crossed the bridge, the eerie faces he had so often told me about, took hold of him."

I guess superfluous commas are a German thing.

Yes, they, are.

L,OL!