Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), directed by Robert Wiene, is usually credited as the first German expressionist film. The sets depict distorted, warped-looking buildings in a German town, while the plot centres around a mysterious, magical cabinet that has a clear association with a casket. F. W. Murnau's vampire horror film Nosferatu was released in 1922. Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) was described as "a sinister tale" that portrays "the corruption and social chaos so much in evidence in Berlin and more generally, according to Lang, in Weimar Germany". Futurism is another favourite expressionist theme, shown corrupted into a force of oppression in the dystopia of Metropolis (1927). The self-deluded lead characters in many expressionist films echo Goethe's Faust, and Murnau indeed retold the tale in his film Faust. German expressionism was not the dominant type of popular film in Weimar Germany and were outnumbered by the production of costume dramas, often about folk legends, which were enormously popular with the public. The Weimar era's most groundbreaking film studio was the UFA studio. Silent films continued to be made throughout the 1920s, in parallel with the early years of sound films during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Silent films had certain advantages for filmmakers, such as the ability to hire an international cast, since spoken accents were irrelevant. Thus, American and British actors were easily able to collaborate with German directors and cast-members on films made in Germany (for example, the collaborations of Georg Pabst and Louise Brooks). When sound films started being produced in Germany, some filmmakers experimented with versions in more than one language, filmed simultaneously. When the musical The Threepenny Opera was filmed by director Georg Pabst, he filmed the first version with a French-speaking cast (1930), then a second version with a German-speaking cast (1931). An English version was planned but never materialized. The Nazis destroyed the original negative print of the German version in 1933, and it was reconstructed after the War ended. The Blue Angel (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg with the leads played by Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings, was filmed simultaneously in English and German (a different supporting cast was used for each version). Although it was based on a 1905 story written by Heinrich Mann, the film is often seen as topical in that it depicts the doomed romance between a Berlin professor and a cabaret