A youth falls in love with a rich maiden whom he saves from an accident caused by a frightened horse. He decides to marry her but she refuses because she is in love with a certain René, who has parted for a long journey in foreign lands. He tries to kidnap her but then kills her (with a bunch of poisoned white roses!) and replaces her with a lookalike who accepts his proposal of marriage. But when everything seems to be coming right, the young delinquent is arrested. The lookalike stays with her new parents but does not betray the secret. A film divided into two parts, Marionetten des Teufels and Eine suchende Seele, of which the second is lost, is a police film with the narrative pace of a dream which mixes figures and places as in a nineteenth century feuilleton: the seer, the backstreets, love, longed-for wealth, the dead and the miracles of Lazarus. A mysterious work which despite the poverty of means is rich in appeal.

“Friedrich Fehér (Vienna, 1889 – Stuttgart, 1950) was an evasive, hard to define personality – actor, director, set designer and musician: at thirteen he presented a musical composition and at little more than twenty he was director of the Renaissance Theater of Vienna. In 1911 he made his début as actor in the cinema with leading roles in biographical films such as Theodor Körner and Wilhelm Tell, but already in 1913 he tried his hand at directing with Das Blutgeld. Between Berlin and Vienna, throughout the teens, sometimes in front of the camera, sometimes behind, he worked without rest, but wasn’t very incisive. […] In 1919, Fehér was chosen for the role of the madman in whose imagination the nightmare of the Caligari affair takes form. His experience in this film – for which Fehér later on several occasions took much of the credit for having suggested and even constructed the sets, statements denied by other collaborators and rejected by cinema historians – echoed in a film that Fehér shot in Austria the next year, Das Haus ohne Tür und Fenster or Das Haus der Dr. Gaudeamus, in which however, as Jeanne and Ford report: ‘le scénario signé Thea von Harbou, était abracadabrant et les décors d’un cubisme exaspéré: les résultants furent déplorables’. Completely overlooked however was his Marionetten des Teufels, where the presence of a female ‘doppelganger’ adds disturbing dreamlike tones to an affair of love and death. This film, recently rediscovered and restored, reveals Fehér as one of the authors participating in the cultural upheaval of the day, fact which has been wrongly ignored by cinema history. Fehér fell in love with and later married the actress Magda Sonja, with whom as leading lady all his next films were shot. […] Forced to leave Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, Fehér settled in Great Britain, where in 1935 he made The Robber Symphony, for which he wrote the script and the suggestive music as well. This was a unique work that stirred up much discussion, interesting in its image-sound combination and tone. This latter was markedly caricatural and a conscious reminder of Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) by Brecht and Weill, relived with formalistic and late expressionist accents.

(Vittorio Martinelli, Cinegrafie, VI, n. 9, 1996)