I recently stumbled across this highly amusing 1920 review of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by the Chicago Tribune‘s pseudonymously named film critic “Mae Tinee” (who also owned the distinction of being the first Chicago journalist to interview Charlie Chaplin when he shot His New Job here for Essanay Studios in 1915). Aside from the faint whiff of xenophobia in the line about “their own backyard,” and in spite of the fact that this is a negative review (she doesn’t like Caligari precisely because it was effective in giving her “the willies”), this is a fun read that I think accurately captures the spirit of the film. Tinee calls it “a weird, mad, fantastic thing whose settings remind you of nothing so much as the disordered groupings of varicolored particles seen through the eye of a kaliedoscope,” before concluding that “Caligari is a Poe Charlie Chaplin!” Good God, have newspaper movie reviews gotten worse over the last hundred years?