DER MÄDCHENHIRT (Künstlerfilm
GmbH, Berlin, DE 1919)
Regia/dir: Karl Grune; scen: Karl Grune, Beate Schach, dal
romanzo di/from the novel by Egon Erwin Kisch; f./ph: Felix
Xaver; scg./des: August Rinaldi, Karl Grune; cast: Magnus
Stifter (commissario di polizia/Crime Commissioner Duschnitz),
Fritz Richard (Chrapot), Lotte Stein (sua molie/his wife), Henri
Peters-Arnolds (Jaroslav, “Jarda l’elegante”/“Jaunty
Jarda”), Lo Bergner (Betka Dvorak), Roma Bahn (Luise Heil), Rose
Liechtenstein [Lichtenstein] (Illonka Sereniy), Paul Rehkopf (Albert
Wessely, “Adalbert il lascivo”/ “Randy Adalbert”),
Franz Kneisel (Anton Novotny, “Toni il nero”/“Black
Tony”), Alfred Kühne; riprese/filmed: 1919, in Praha
(Prague); data v.c./censor date: 10.1919; première:
9.1919 (presentazione alla stampa/press screening), Berlin; lg.
or./orig. l.: ?? m.; 35mm, 1553 m., 75’ (18 fps), col. (imbibizione
e viraggio originali riprodotti su pellicola a colori/printed on colour
stock, reproducing original tinting and toning); fonte copia/print
source: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.
During his life, the director Karl Grune gave various
explanations about the birth of his passion for cinema. One was the
time spent among foreign soldiers in World War I, when he’d learned
to fathom their talk from faces and gestures; hence his urge to develop
in cinema a purely pictorial language. Another was the impact he felt
as a young man of the theatre by the film camera’s access to
reality. “Where the theatre served to supply an illusion,” he
recalled in 1936 in the English magazine Picturegoer, “the
kine-camera could capture in constantly moving light and shade actual
representation of facts.”
The primacy of “actual representation of facts” stayed with him throughout
his career. In Der Mädchenhirt, his first film as director, his
camera absorbed the atmosphere of Prague’s streets and byways (Grune himself,
though born in Vienna, was a Czechoslovak citizen). The tone of the film was
realistic, the mood serious: attributes never lost as his work grew subtler,
more artfully designed, more psychologically penetrating. This is not yet the
Grune who directed Die Strasse, the pivotal “street film” of
the 1920s, where naturalism and Expressionism criss-crossed; but in this tale
of the Prague underworld he is clearly on his way.
The plot is taken from the only extended piece of fiction by the Czech writer
and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, published in 1914 – a year after Kisch
enjoyed his biggest scoop uncovering the scandalous affair of Colonel Redl, the
blackmailed Austro-Hungarian officer. The story of a crime commissioner and his
long-lost illegitimate son – the Mädchenhirt (shepherd of
girls, or pimp) of the title – contains its obvious contrivances. But a
journalist’s nose for how life is lived is clear enough in the background
details of sleazy bars and shady dealings. Jaroslav the pimp is portrayed by
a fresh new face of the time, Dutch actor Henri Peters-Arnolds. The commissioner’s
face may be much more familiar: he is Magnus Stifter, busy in films since 1914,
and the director of two 1916 Asta Nielsen vehicles, Dora Brandes and Das
Liebes-ABC.
Note, too, the name of Grune’s co-scenarist, Beata Schach – the wife
of his friend, neighbour, and future producer, Max Schach, whose industry fortunes
in Germany and England, both good and bad, Grune came to share. Long before Schach’s
death in 1957, Beate had become Grune’s companion. When Schach died, they
married; when Grune died, she took her own life. It was a triangle worth its
own Kammerspiel film – taut, intimate, laced with happiness and
despair. – Geoff Brown
Karl Grune (Vienna, 1890–1962, Bournemouth, England)
Though largely forgotten today, Grune was a notable figure in 1920s German film
culture, acclaimed for films that made sparing use of intertitles and dialogue,
communicating narrative and atmosphere through the power of camerawork, lighting
and visual effects. He trained as an actor, and spent three years at provincial
theatres before being engaged at Vienna’s Volksbühne, where he was
also directed. After the war he moved to Berlin’s Deutsches Theater and
Residenz-Theater as actor and director. In 1919, on the recommendation of Max
Schach (film and theatre critic for the Berliner Tageblatt), Grune became
a scenarist at Friedrich Zelnik’s production company Berliner Film-Manufaktur,
graduating to direction with Der Mädchenhirt (1919). Three years
later he and Schach founded Stern-Film GmbH together. Working closely with cameraman
Karl Hasselmann, his collaborator on eleven pictures, Grune created his most
famous film, Die Strasse (1923) – a rumination on the nocturnal
temptations and dangers of any modern city, which inaugurated the “street
film” genre. His adventurous streak continued with Arabella (1924),
an experimental melodrama told from a horse’s viewpoint, and a doppelgänger film, Die
Brüder Schellenberg (1926). With Königin Luise (1927)
he turned to historical epics; Waterloo (1928), equally lavish, was
heavily inspired by Abel Gance’s Napoléon, even making
use of triple-screen set-ups for some scenes.
Grune continued his professional association with Schach. After Schach became
general manager of Munich’s Emelka studios, Grune became its head of production.
Emigrating to Britain after the Nazis came to power, he joined other émigrésworking
for Schach’s new companies, Capitol Film Corporation and Trafalgar Film
Productions. Grune directed three opulent costume dramas: Abdul the Damned (1935),
a thinly-veiled parable about Hitler’s dictatorship, transposed to 19th-century
Turkey, starring Fritz Kortner; Pagliacci (1936), an adaptation of the
Leoncavallo opera with Richard Tauber, partially in colour; and The Marriage
of Corbal (1936), a French Revolution swashbuckler featuring Ernst Deutsch.
Grune became Capitol’s artistic director and assumed British nationality.
However, the films proved costly flops at the British box-office, and the collapse
of Schach’s enterprises triggered wider financial turmoil in the British
industry. Grune’s career never recovered. He returned briefly as a producer
for the Scottish realist drama The Silver Darlings (1947), but a cherished
biblical project, From Beginning to Beginning, stayed in limbo. (Adapted
from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited by Hans-Michael Bock,
Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
This screening is presented as a special CineFest Event and a preview
of the 2007 CineFest International Festival of German Film Heritage (17-25 November
in Hamburg, and subsequently in Berlin, Zurich, Prague, and Vienna). Der
Mädchenhirt, shot by a German crew in Prague, is one of the earliest
examples of the close and multi-faceted relations between the Czech, Austrian,
and German film industries throughout the 20th century – a complex shared
history that is the topic of this year’s CineFest. The festival is organized
by CineGraph (Hamburg) and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Berlin) with international
partners.
EIN GLAS WASSER (Das Spiel der Königin) (Decla-Bioscop
AG, Berlin, per/for Universum-Film AG (Ufa), Berlin, DE 1923)
Regia/dir: Ludwig Berger; prod: Erich Pommer; scen: Ludwig
Berger, Adolf Lantz, dalla pièce/from the play Le Verre
d’eau di/by Eugène Scribe; f./ph: Günther
Krampf, Erich Waschneck; scg./des: Hermann Warm, Rudolf Bamberger; cost: Karl
Töpfer, Otto Schulz; cast: Mady Christians (Regina Anna/Queen
Anne), Lucie Höflich (Duchessa di Marlborough/Duchess of
Marlborough), Hans Brausewetter (John William Masham), Rudolf Rittner
(Lord Bolingbroke), Helga Thomas (Abigail), Hugo Döblin (gioielliere/jeweller Tomwood),
Hans Wassmann (Lord Richard Scott), Bruno Decarli (Marquis von Torcy),
Max Gülstorff (Thompson), Franz Jackson (Hassan), Josef Römer,
Gertrud Wolle; riprese/filmed: 1922; data v.c./censor date: 19.1.1923; première: 1.2.1923,
Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2558 m.; 35mm,
2537 m., 110’ (20 fps); fonte copia/print source:Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung,
Wiesbaden.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.
In 1923, unveiling his film adaptation of an 80-year-old Eugène
Scribe farce, Le Verre d’eau (The Glass of Water), when
inflation and political tempers raged in Germany, Ludwig Berger preached
the gospel of escapism: “In times of misery and oppression even
more than in times of security and wealth, we long for serenity and
light play.” The Romantics’ supposed flight from reality,
he declared, had served as “food and strength during decades
of external poverty” and “a bridge to a better future”.
So, he hoped, would Ein Glas Wasser – a visually exquisite
comedy of political and amorous scheming, set in the early 18th century
during the reign of England’s Queen Anne and the Spanish War
of Succession. The plot’s pivot is the handsome youth Masham,
who catches the eye of both Queen Anne and the strong-willed Duchess
of Marlborough, the power behind the throne, though Masham’s
own heart focuses on the lowly Abigail. Enter another political schemer,
Lord Bolingbroke, who sees a way of using Masham to scupper the Duchess’s
power.
To a hard, humourless observer like Siegfried Kracauer, such an escapist flight
into prettier times was clearly a footpath to Hitler. Perhaps at some level it
was. But most cinéastes today will be happy to rejoice in the
imagination, fantasy, light touch, and musicality Berger brings to the flow of
story, character, and imagery in his third feature film. Though Berger achieved
his first successes in the theatre, he uses cinema to liberate and expand his
stage text, never to nail it to the floor. Berger’s achievements were recognized
immediately. C. Hooper Trask, Berlin correspondent for Variety at the
time, labelled Ein Glas Wasser “one of the best atmosphere pictures
ever done anywhere”; to the German critic Herbert Ihering, the film brought
lyrical movement into German cinema for the first time. A chief constituent in
this magic atmosphere is the gracious Mady Christians (Queen Anne), featured
in other regal roles for Berger later in the decade (Ein Walzertaum; Die
Jugend der Königin Luise). Günther Krampf and Erich Waschneck’s
photography, and the sets of Hermann Warm and Rudolf Bamberger (Berger’s
brother), make their own contribution, soothing the eyes with opulence flavoured
with the South German baroque. Above all, there is Berger, guiding, balancing,
and blending, showing how to make an innately musical film through the music
of images alone.
Geoff Brown
Ludwig Berger (Ludwig Gottfried Heinrich Bamberger; Mainz,
1892-1969, Schlangenbad) first made his name directing in the theatre, notably
with Shakespeare productions in Berlin, featuring sets and costumes designed
by his brother Rudolf Bamberger. Following his 1920 film debut, Der Richter
von Zalamea, he made three lavish, all-star pictures for producer Erich Pommer
at Decla-Bioscop, crowned by Ein Glas Wasser and a succulent version
of the Cinderella story, Der verlorene Schuh (1923). Ein Walzertraum (1925),
an ironic, self-reflective version of Oscar Straus’s operetta, was another
notable success. Enticed to Hollywood, Berger laboured on five Paramount films,
silent and sound: but exporting the musicality and fairy-tale qualities of his
German films proved difficult. Returning to Europe, he scored a modest stylistic
triumph with Ufa’s tri-lingual modern-day musical comedy Ich bei Tag
und Du bei Nacht (1932). His émigré years, based in
the Netherlands, were difficult. A highly-strung perfectionist, he suffered much
interference from producer Alexander Korda on the British-made The Thief
of Bagdad (1940) – an ignominious experience for Berger (he ended up
sharing directorial credit with Michael Powell and Tim Whelan). During the Nazis’ occupation
of the Netherlands he managed to survive using forged papers. Returning to West
Germany in 1947, his most significant work was for television. He became a pioneer
of West German television drama, and in 1957-58 produced an outstanding series
of Shakespeare comedies; his career had come full circle. Berger’s retrospective
feelings about his cinema experiences may be judged from the title he gave the
relevant chapter in his 1953 memoirs: “The Flea Circus”. (Adapted
from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited by Hans-Michael Bock,
Oxford/NewYork: Berghahn Books, 2008)
RIVALEN (Apex Film Company Limited, Berlin, DE 1923)
Regia/dir: Harry Piel; prod: Harry Piel, Louis Zimmermann,
Heinrich Nebenzahl; scen: Alfred Zeisler, Victor Abel, [Harry
Piel]; f./ph: Georg Muschner; scg./des: Hermann
Warm, Albert Korell; acrobazie/stunts: Hermann Stetza; cast: Harry
Piel (Harry Peel), Adolf Klein (Professor Ravello), Inge Helgard (Evelyn),
Charly Berger, Karl Platen, Heinz Stieda, Albert Paulig, Maria Wefers,
Erich Sandt; riprese/filmed: 10.1922-1.1923; data v.c./censor
date: 23.2.1923; première: 23.2.1923, Berlin (Schauberg); lg.
or./orig. l.: 2476 m.; 35mm, 2437 m., 105’ (20 fps); fonte
copia/print source: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.
Films pregnant with symbols, shadows, and myths were not for Harry
Piel. From the titles downwards, they spilled their contents with the
blunt finesse of a cheap crime novel or a circus poster. The Flying
Car. The Black Envelope. Zigano, Brigand of Devil’s Mountain.
Behind these tags lay boisterous thrills and spills in films packaged
for quick consumption and popularity. Even Siegfried Kracauer succumbed
to their gusto in the 1920s, valuing the films’ absence of pretension
in a national cinema over-fond of the pompously artistic. “Bright
and cheerful trash,” he called them.
From the beginning, as actor, producer, and director, Piel used popular cultures
beyond Germany as his inspiration and goal. His name was steadily Anglicized:
Heinrich Piel became Harry Piel, and, in some situations and foreign prints,
Harry Peel. He fed off Sherlock Holmes and American serials. The stunts and athletic
abandon of his films lured contemporary commentators to call him “the German
Douglas Fairbanks”, though the parallels were never exact. Piel never leaned
towards decorative art, as Fairbanks did in The Thief of Bagdad. Nor
did Fairbanks ever tangle with science-fiction, a mad scientist, and a robot,
as Piel does in the delightful film we’re presenting here.
In Rivalen and its sequel Der letzte Kampf (released one month
later), Piel made a determined effort to heighten his cinematic polish. Look
at Hermann Warm’s modish and fanciful designs in the spectacular ballroom
scene; at the camerawork’s slickness, and the panache of Piel’s stunts
(engineered with the help of his colleague Hermann Stetza). Yet Piel hadn’t
abandoned hokum. For plot material he drew on one of his early successes, Die
grosse Wette (1916), a futuristic adventure set in America in the year 2000.
Where and when Rivalen takes place is not so immediately obvious. But
it’s a time and country happily stocked with familiar figures. There’s
the power-crazed scientist Professor Ravello and his marauding robot. There’s
Evelyn the lovely damsel in distress (unfortunate target of Ravello’s desires).
Plus sturdy Harry, the courageous hero, who undergoes various fates worse than
death, topped by underwater suffocation in a glass cage.
One of the stunts features a car, tumbling from a bridge into water (the location
used was Kalksee, east of Berlin). There the car stayed, drowned and forgotten,
until 1963, the year of Piel’s death, when divers looking for something
else uncovered it by chance. It was a surprising physical memento of what was
by then an invisible career. For negatives of the bulk of his films had been
destroyed by the bombs of World War II; now, not even Harry Piel’s ingenuity
can bring them back. – Geoff Brown
Harry Piel (Heinrich Piel; Düsseldorf-Benrath,
1892-1963, Munich) acquired the early nickname of the “Dynamite Director” from
the explosions frequently staged in his spectacular adventure films and detective
serials. Other regular ingredients included stunts, wild animals, exotic vistas,
and turbulent plots – plus Piel himself in the starring role. Over 40 years
and 100 films, through the Wilhelmine, Weimar, Nazi, and post-war periods, he
was almost a popular genre in himself.
On leaving school, Piel served as a ship cadet, took a business course, and trained
as a stunt pilot. The skills gathered proved invaluable in building his film
career. He began in 1912 with Schwarzes Blut, which he produced, directed,
and wrote. Die grosse Wette (1916) marked his debut in the science-fiction
genre; the daring wild-animal stunts first appeared the same year in Unter
heisser Zone.
After directing 8 detective films in the Joe Deebs series for Joe May, he created
his own Harry Piel adventures; he performed most of his own stunts and became
an internationally recognized star. Some films featured him in double roles,
as in Sein grösster Bluff (1927), where he was teamed with a young
Marlene Dietrich.
In 1930 Piel moved effortlessly into sound films with the mistaken-identity comedy Er
oder Ich. The animal and circus films continued into the Nazi years with
films like Der Dschungel ruft and Menschen, Tiere, Sensationen. Ein
Unsichtbarer geht durch die Stadt (1933) was one of the period’s rare
science-fiction and fantasy films. In 1943, his patriotic story about an animal-catcher, Panik,was
banned because censors believed its realistic air-raid scenes could undermine
public morale.
After World War II Piel was imprisoned for 6 months as a Nazi “fellow traveller” and
banned from working for 5 years. In 1950 he founded a new company, Ariel-Film,
but the clock was ticking. His brand of popular cinema no longer appealed to
audiences; nor could Piel himself, always a bit plump and now visibly ageing,
convince them as a daredevil. His comeback film, Der Tiger Akbar (1951),
used a tragic romance between an animal trainer and a younger colleague to reflect
on the march of time. His last major release was Gesprengte Gitter – Die
Elefanten sind los (1953), an edited version of the unreleased Panik.
During the 1950s, Piel released a few shorts, before retiring at the end of the
decade. (Adapted from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited by Hans-Michael
Bock, Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
BUDDENBROOKS (Dea-Film GmbH Albert Pommer,
Berlin, per/for Universum-Film AG (Ufa), Berlin, DE 1923)
Regia/dir: Gerhard Lamprecht; prod: Albert Pommer; scen:
Alfred Fekete, Luise Heilborn-Körbitz, Gerhard Lamprecht, dal
romanzo di/from the novel by Thomas Mann; f./ph: Erich Waschneck,
Herbert Stephan; scg./des: Otto Moldenhauer; cast: Peter
Esser (Thomas Buddenbrook), Mady Christians (Gerda Arnoldsen), Alfred Abel
(Christian Buddenbrook), Hildegard Imhoff (Tony Buddenbrook), Mathilde
Sussin (Elisabeth Buddenbrook), Franz Egénieff (armatore/shipowner Arnoldsen),
Rudolf del Zopp (Console/Consul Kröger), Auguste Prasch-Grevenberg
(Babette), Ralph Arthur Roberts (Bendix Grünlich), Charlotte Böcklin
(Aline Puvogel), Karl Platen (procuratore/clerk Marcus), Kurt
Vespermann (Renée Throta), Elsa Wagner (Sesemi Weichbrodt), Rudolf
Lettinger (postiglione / coachman Grobleben), Emil Heyse (Kesselmeyer),
Friedrich Taeger (Borgomastro/Burgomaster Oeverdieck), Philipp
Manning, Hermann Vallentin (Smith), Robert Leffler (Capitano/Captain Kloot); riprese/filmed: 1923; data
v.c./censor date: 16.8.1923; première: 31.8.1923,
Tauentzien-Palast, Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2383 m.; 35mm, 2301
m., 85’ (24 fps), col. (imbibizione originale riprodotta su pellicola
a colori/printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); fonte
copia/print source: Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin. Didascalie in tedesco
/ German intertitles.
Two stout volumes in its first printing, published
at the end of 1900. A total of 1105 pages. The dimensions of Thomas Mann’s
first novel, Buddenbrooks, let alone the book and the author’s
reputation, would give pause to a filmmaker even today. Twenty-five years
old at the time of shooting what was cinema’s first adaptation
of a Thomas Mann book, the director Gerhard Lamprecht and producer Albert
Pommer (Erich Pommer’s elder brother) deliberately trod carefully.
From Mann’s detailed chronicle of a wealthy Lübeck mercantile
family suffering economic, spiritual, and physical decline over four
generations, the script plucked out the story of Thomas Buddenbrook,
the third-generation son. Settings were updated from the 19th century.
Mann was consulted over the script, and consented to all changes, even
in places where Lamprecht secretly hoped for some improving intervention.
And after production, the actuality of Buddenbrooks didn’t
scar Mann’s interest in cinema’s artistic possibilities:
writing in 1928, he actively urged filmmakers to tackle other novels,
especially Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). (No-one
did until 1967, in a West German TV film.)
Why was Thomas Mann so pliant over the planning and script of Buddenbrooks?
Maybe he detected Lamprecht’s eye for realistic detail – a quality
of all his best films. To give precision and ballast to his portrait of Lübeck
bourgeois society – the world he himself was born into – Mann undertook
extensive research into the town’s economics, commodity prices, and the
like. Lamprecht secured his own kind of precision by shooting exteriors and selected
interiors in Lübeck’s Hanseatic splendour. As the camera follows the
travails of Thomas Buddenbrook, his neglected wife, his wayward brother Christian,
and the Lübeck Senate’s grain shipment from Argentina, we get early
evidence of Lamprecht’s knack for capturing the texture of everyday life,
the ebb and flow of character and environment. That is what links Mann’s
Lübeck bourgeoisie to the scampering Berlin children of Emil und die
Detektive (1931), Lamprecht’s best-known film.
Another pleasure of Buddenbrooks is the cast. Peter Esser, the incarnation
of Thomas, enjoyed no sustained film career, but with other players we’re
comfortably among familiar faces and distinctive talents. There’s Alfred
Abel (the icy master of Metropolis) as the troublesome Christian; popular,
versatile Ralph Arthur Roberts as Grünlich, a devious brother-in-law; and
Mady Christians, perpetually comely, suffering beautifully as Thomas’s
neglected wife. You couldn’t find them in Mann’s 1105 pages. – Geoff
Brown
Gerhard Lamprecht (Berlin, 1897–1974, West Berlin)
excelled at realist dramas recreating everyday settings and characters. A part-time
cinema projectionist from the age of 12, by 17 he had sold his first script,
to Eiko-Film. Contracted to join Messter-Film as a scenarist in 1917, he was
called up to fight and continued working from his military hospital sickbed,
writing among others Der Weltspiegel (1918), filmed by Lupu Pick. Lamprecht
subsequently became head of scriptwriting at Pick’s Rex-Film; he also supervised
the company’s starring vehicles for Bernd Aldor.
Lamprecht’s directorial debut was Es bleibt in der Familie (1920),
made for Paul Heidemann’s production company. He struck box-office gold
with quickly-made “confessions” films starring Ruth Weyer (Die
Beichte einer Mutter, and Die Beichte der Krankenschwester, both
1921). A talent for realist drama became more evident with his Thomas Mann adaptation, Buddenbrooks (1923). Die
Verrufen (1925), a collaboration with the illustrator and writer Heinrich
Zille, started the trend in German cinema for exposés of urban working-class
misery. Building on his success, for his own company Gerhard Lamprecht-Filmproduktion
he made Menschen untereinander, about life in a tenement, and Die
Unehelichen, based on reports by the Society for the Prevention of Child
Cruelty and Exploitation. When similar product flooded the market, Lamprecht
switched to melodrama (Der Katzensteg) and Prussian military pictures
(the two-part Der alte Fritz, 1927). His greatest international success
was the Ufa sound film Emil und die Detektive (1931), from a script
by Billie Wilder based on Erich Kästner’s popular children’s
novel.
During the Nazi years Lamprecht became a pedestrian if workmanlike director of
genre films, with occasional literary adaptations like Madame Bovary (1937)
and Der Spieler (1938). His best films from this period were two melodramas
with working-class protagonists: Frau im Strom (1939) and Du gehörst
zu mir (1943). After World War II, Lamprecht made the DEFA “rubble
film” Irgendwo in Berlin (1946), which drew heavily on Emil
und die Detektive, and continued making further entertainment pictures until
the mid-1950s.
A collector of film prints and memorabilia since the early 1910s, his 10-volume
catalogue of German silent films, published between 1967 and 1970 by the Deutsche
Kinemathek, Berlin, an institution he helped to establish, remains a standard
reference work. (Adapted from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited
by Hans-Michael Bock, Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
DAS ALTE GESETZ (Baruch) (Comedia-Film
GmbH, Berlin, DE 1923)
Regia/dir: Ewald André Dupont; scen: Paul Reno,
dalle memorie di/from the memoirs by Heinrich Laube; f./ph:
Theodor Sparkuhl; scg./des: Alfred Junge, Curt Kahle; cost: Ali
Hubert; cast: Ernst Deutsch (Baruch), Henny Porten (Erzherzogin/Archduchess Elisabeth
Theresia), Ruth Weyher (dama di corte/Lady in waiting), Hermann
Vallentin (Heinrich Laube), Avrom Morewsky (Rabbi Mayer), Grete
Berger (sua moglie/his wife), Robert Garrison (Ruben Pick), Fritz
Richard (Nathan), Margarete Schlegel (Esther), Jakob Tiedtke (direttore
della compagnia teatrale/Director of the theatre company), Olga
Limburg (seine Frau/his wife), Alice Hechy (la figlia/their
daughter), Julius M. Brandt (il vecchio attore/old comedian),
Robert Scholz, Alfred Krafft-Lortzing, Dominik Löscher, Philipp Manning,
Wolfgang Zilzer, Kálmán Zátony; riprese/filmed: 1923; data
v.c./censor date: 18.10.1923; première: 29.10.1923,
Marmorhaus, Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 3028 m.; 35mm, 2920 m.,
107’ (24 fps); fonte copia/print source:Deutsche Kinemathek,
Berlin.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.
To underlings working at British International Pictures
in the late 1920s, the years of his pomp, E.A. Dupont became notorious
for his lordly caprice, fussing endlessly over the minutiae of lighting,
or leaving the technical staff twiddling for hours while the great director
waited for inspiration to strike. But before the world success of Varieté in
1925, Dupont’s output and manner had been noticeably humbler. In
1918 he’d begun directing numerous detective thrillers, from his
own facile scripts, without attracting critical notice. The situation
changed significantly with his association with the leading actress (and
producer) Henny Porten. Die Geier-Wally, first of several film
adaptations of a popular Heimat novel, appeared in 1921. But
it was Das alte Gesetz, featuring Porten and Ernst Deutsch,
that firmly put Dupont on the map.
Like Varieté, the film deals with the entertainment world, but
we’re far removed from trapeze artists, jugglers, and other vaudeville
spectacle. Paul Reno’s script took inspiration from the autobiographical
writings of Heinrich Laube, who climaxed a varied theatrical career as director
of the Burgtheater, Vienna, in the 1870s. As portrayed in the film by Hermann
Vallentin he follows the usual show business cliché: rough on the outside,
a heart of gold within. Subtler dichotomies resonate elsewhere, stirred by the
figure of Baruch (Ernst Deutsch), the rabbi’s son whose pursuit of the
actor’s life prompts parental ire. (In a few years’ time Al Jolson
in The Jazz Singer would face similar problems.) Dupont, his cameraman
Theodor Sparkuhl, and his set designers Alfred Junge and Curt Kahle exert much
ingenuity charting the film’s clashing worlds. The east European shtetl – Baruch’s
family home and the root of the “old law” of the film’s title – is
pitted against Viennese theatre and the attractions of Henny Porten’s Archduchess.
Baruch himself, as an orthodox Jew, is a man divided, always on the fringe of
glittering Viennese society.
In this breakthrough film Dupont’s technical command hasn’t yet reached
the fluidity of movement, the psychological penetration, and the propulsive force
so strikingly achieved in Varieté. But we can see the Dupont
style beginning to grip in the careful image compositions, the concern for the
emotional significance of texture, light, and shadow. Roles in Walter Hasenclever’s
play Der Sohn and Karlheinz Martin’s film of Georg Kaiser’s Von
Morgen bis Mitternacht had earned Ernst Deutsch a reputation as an “expressionist” actor.
But Dupont and Sparkuhl’s camera lead him down a different route, towards
psychological realism and the projection of thought, rather than heightened emotional
states.
After not noticing Dupont’s detective films, German critics now gave the
director of Das alte Gesetz several celebratory paragraphs, praising
especially his mastery of atmosphere and detail. “A very tasteful picture
book,” declared Film-Kurier. Instead of consolidating his new
standing Dupont took a new position in 1924 as manager and director of the Apollotheater,
Mannheim, gaining the experience to direct the world-shaking Varieté.
Cinema and life for him would never be the same again. – Geoff Brown
Ewald André Dupont (Zeitz, Saxony-Anhalt, 1891-1956,
Los Angeles) started out in 1911 as a journalist, working for Berlin newspapers;
from 1915 he regularly wrote the “Variety and Cinema” column in the
daily B.Z. am Mittag. In 1916 he began supplying film scripts, mostly
for detective series; he also wrote three sequels to Richard Oswald’s sexual
enlightenment film, Es werde Licht! Hired by the production company
Stern-Film, in 1918 he began directing his scripts for their detective series
starring Max Landa (he made twelve entries in two years). Work with Gloria-Film
took him more upmarket, but he only gained widespread attention with his Henny
Porten vehicles Die Geier-Wally (1921) and Das alte Gesetz (1923).
In 1925, Dupont scored an international success with Varieté,
made for producer Erich Pommer at Ufa. Universal Pictures invited him to Hollywood,
but his single assignment, Love Me and the World Is Mine, proved unsuccessful.
Returning to Europe, he joined the recently-built Elstree studio of British International
Pictures (BIP). In 1928 his sophisticated melodramas Moulin Rouge and Piccadilly provided
star vehicles for Olga Tschechowa and Anna May Wong, and helped German set designer
Alfred Junge launch his British career. With Atlantic (1929), his epic
about the Titanic disaster, shot in English and German, Dupont played
a key role in the studio’s shift to sound; the German version, billed as “the
first 100% all-talking German picture”, did colossal business on the Continent.
Dupont’s portentous pacing in dialogue scenes attracted criticism, as did
his work on two subsequent BIP multi-linguals, Two Worlds and Cape
Forlorn, but for a time he remained a trophy acquisition for a studio anxious
for international prestige.
Back in Germany, he shot the circus melodrama Salto Mortale (1931) and,
as a tie-in to the Los Angeles Olympics, the sports picture Der Läufer
von Marathon (1932-33). Once again Hollywood beckoned; but, perceived as “difficult”,
he was only given lacklustre projects. Sacked following disagreements shooting Hell’s
Kitchen (1939), he didn’t direct again until 1951 (the modest drama The
Scarf). Only B-movies like The Neanderthal Man followed. His last
mainstream credit was as a writer on William Dieterle’s Wagner biography Magic
Fire (1955) – a poignant assignment for a talent who once had the magic
fire himself. (Adapted from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited
by Hans-Michael Bock, Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
LUMPEN UND SEIDE (De Klaplooper / Una coppa
di champagne) (Richard Oswald-Film AG, Berlin, DE 1925)
Regia/dir: Richard Oswald; scen: Adolf Lantz, Heinz
Goldberg, da un’idea di/from an idea by Richard Oswald; f./ph:
Mutz Greenbaum, Emil Schünemann; scg./des: Kurt Richter; cast: Reinhold
Schünzel (Max), Mary Parker (Irene), Johannes Riemann (Erik), Einar
Hanson (Werner), Maly Delschaft (Ulrike), Mary Kid (Hilde, una ragazza
del popolo/a girl of the people), Ferdinand Bonn (il padre di
Hilde/Hilde’s father); riprese/filmed: 1924; data
v.c./censor date: 2.12.1924; première: 9.1.1925,
Richard-Oswald-Lichtspiele, Alhambra Kurfürstendamm, Berlin; lg.
or./orig. l.: 2456 m.; 35mm, 1748 m., 69’ (22 fps); fonte
copia/print source: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin.
Didascalie in olandese / Dutch intertitles.
Lumpen und Seide means “rags and silk”,
and similar oppositions run through this sprightly Sittenfilm (an
entertainment with slight sexual and moral overtones) by Richard Oswald – a
modern fairytale all the way from its opening explanatory title to
its final burst of happiness. Rags and silk; the poor and the rich.
Within the film’s Berlin setting there are also two distinct
locations: Wedding, in the north-west, predominantly working-class
(and after World War I militantly Communist); and Grunewald, in the
south-west, since the turn of the 20th century the leafy home of mansions
for the leisured upper-class. The two worlds collide when Erik (Johannes
Riemann), the bored husband in a Grunewald mansion, decides to add
spice to his life by inviting a Wedding factory girl, Hilde (Mary Kid),
to take up residence. Erik’s wife Irene (played by Mary Parker,
real name Magdalena Prohaska) at first acquiesces. But equanimity doesn’t
survive Hilde’s up-market make-over, or the arrival of Hilde’s
jealous fiancé Max (a richly ornamented comic performance here
from Reinhold Schünzel).
Best remembered now for Es werde Licht! and other melodramatic “educational” films
of the latter 1910s, Oswald was never a director with his head in the sand. But
despite the blunt opposites in its title, and its sharp eye for human behaviour, Lumpen
und Seide features no shrill exploitation of the social divide. Rags and
silk rub against each other lightly in a film devised solely for the pleasure
of the mass-market audience. And as such, it’s quite clear where Oswald’s
sympathies rest: with the honest poor, not the game-playing rich.
The Film-Kurier reviewer in January 1925 summed it up as an hour’s
pleasant pastime, as strenuous an entertainment as flicking through the pictures
in a good magazine. But remember: trivial pictures can convey a good deal, especially
after 82 years. – Geoff Brown
Richard Oswald (Richard W. Ornstein; Vienna, 1880–1963,
Düsseldorf) studied acting from 1896, and subsequently toured as an actor
and director. After anti-Semitic attacks in Vienna, he moved to Düsseldorf
in 1911, where he acted in two films. Moving to Berlin, he started writing screenplays
for Deutsche Vitascope in 1914, and made his directorial debut the same year
with the war drama Das eiserne Kreuz, which came into conflict with
the censors. In the following years, he mixed detective films with ambitious
projects like the atmospheric Hoffmanns Erzählungen (1916) and Das
Bildnis des Dorian Gray (1917), adapted from Oscar Wilde. Es werde Licht! (1916),
concerning a painter who contracts syphilis, initiated a series of Aufklärungsfilme,
blending sex education with melodramatic storylines. The most ambitious and politically
radical was Anders als die Andern (1919), which used the story of a
blackmailed gay violinist to urge the repeal of Germany’s draconian homosexual
laws. A brief period of lax censorship after the war encouraged such films to
flourish, until the enforcement of new regulations ended the Aufklärungfilme boom.
In the early 1920s Oswald filmed ambitious historical epics (Lady Hamilton,
1921; Lucrezia Borgia, 1922). But the collapse of his production company
in 1926 enforced a concentration on cheaper popular fare – useful programming
fodder for the cinema he ran in Berlin. He returned to history for the lavishly-appointed Cagliostro (1929),
filmed in France. Smoothly adapting to talkies, Oswald initially specialized
in operettas and musical comedies, but also released historical subjects, among
them Dreyfus (1930), “1914”. Die letzten Tage vor dem
Weltbrand (1931), and Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (1931), based
on Carl Zuckmayer’s popular play about a small-time criminal who impersonates
a Prussian officer.
Following the Nazis’ rise to power, Oswald worked in Austria, France, the
Netherlands, and Britain, before moving permanently to the United States in 1938.
His few Hollywood assignments included a 1941 remake of Der Hauptmann von
Köpenick, starring Albert Bassermann, which had a delayed release (surfacing
as I Was a Criminal and Passport to Heaven), and the comedy The
Lovable Cheat (1949, after Balzac), with Charlie Ruggles, Curt Bois, and
Buster Keaton.
Oswald’s son Gerd Oswald (1918-1989) became a successful director and producer
in Hollywood. (Adapted from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited
by Hans-Michael Bock, Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
WEGE ZU KRAFT UND SCHÖNHEIT (Forza e bellezza
/ The Way to Strength and Beauty) (Universum-Film AG (Ufa) – Kulturabteilung,
Berlin, DE 1924-25)
Regia/dir., scen: Wilhelm Prager; f./ph: Friedrich
Weinmann, Eugen Hrich, Friedrich Paulmann, Max Brinck, Kurt Neubett,
Jakob Schatzow, Erich Stocker; scg./des: Hans Sohnle, Otto Erdmann; cast:
La Jana, Maria Caramonte [= Eva Liebenberg], Hertha von Walther, Kitty
Cauer, Hubert Houben, Rudolf Kobs, Luber, Artur Holz, Herrmann Westerhaus,
Henry Carr, Helen Wills; Charles William Paddock, Loren Murchison, Arthur
Porrit (velocisti/sprinters); Leni Riefenstahl, membri della/members
of the Bode-Schule, Laban-Schule, Schule Hellerau für Rhythmus,
Musik und Körperbildung, Gymnastik-Schule Bess Mensendiek, Gymnastik-Schule
Loheland (culturisti/body culture performers); Lydia Impekoven,
Tamara Karsavina, Peter Wladimiroff, Jenny Hasselqvist, Bac Ishii, Konami
Ishii, Mary Wigman, Carolina de la Riva (danzatrici/dancers); data
v.c./censor date: 16.2.1925; première: 16.3.1925,
Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Berlin; nuova versione/new version (1926):data
v.c./censor date: 4.6.1926, première: 11.6.1926,
Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Berlin; 35mm, 2536 m., 100’ (22 fps);fonte
copia / print source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, Wiesbaden.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
Germany’s stabilization crisis around 1924
for a while curtailed production of feature films, and the studios
increased their output of documentary and educational films (Lehrfilme),
which could be more cheaply produced. They were styled Kulturfilme,
and became major moneymakers for the Ufa conglomerate. Making a virtue
of necessity, an Ufa publicity brochure of the time grandly declared: “The
world is beautiful: its mirror is the Kulturfilm.” Ufa’s Kulturabteilung had
been established in July 1918, and by the mid-1920s this department
was preparing feature-length documentaries on general topics, such
as wine through the ages, etc. The biggest commercial success
was Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit, re-released in 1926
with almost 60% new material. Further changes, to fit national preferences
and needs, were made when the film was released abroad. Reviewing
the American version (The Way to Strength and Beauty) in 1927,
the New York Times told its readers the film had made a serious
contribution to “the craze for nudity and sunlight baths abroad”.
Siegfried Kracauer wrote in From Caligari to Hitler (1947):
“The first Kulturfilm to impress itself upon audiences
abroad was Ufa’s Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (Ways
to Health and Beauty) – a feature-length documentary, released in
1925 and reissued, one year later, in a somewhat altered version. Made
with the financial support of the German government, this film circulated
in the schools because of what was considered its educational value. In
an Ufa publicity pamphlet devoted to its merits, a professional eulogist
states that Ways to Health and Beauty promotes the concept of
the ‘regeneration of the human race’. As a matter of fact,
the film simply promoted calisthenics and sport. This was done in an omnivorous
manner: not content with recording actual achievements in the fields of
athletics, hygienic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, dancing, and so forth,
Ufa resurrected the Roman thermae and an antique Greek gymnasium
crowded with adolescents posing as the contemporaries of Pericles. The
masquerade was easy inasmuch as many of the athletes performed stark naked.
Of course, this sight offended the prudish, but Ufa held that perfect bodily
beauty was bound to evoke joys of a purely aesthetic order, and found its
idealism rewarded by good box-office takes. Aesthetically speaking, the
reconstructions of antiquity were tasteless, the sport pictures excellent,
and the bodily beauties so massed together that they affected one neither
sensually nor aesthetically.” – David Robinson
Wilhelm Prager (Augsburg, 1876-1955,
Prien am Chiemsee) started his career as a stage actor, served in World
War I, and began his film career in 1919, initially as an actor and assistant
director. In der Sommerfrisch’n (1920), a tourist film,
launched a directing career that lasted until 1945: he made 150 films for
the Ufa-Kulturabteilung, specializing in fairytale adaptations and interest
films about folklore, the countryside, and sport. His three fairytale films
of 1921, Der kleine Muck, Tischlein deck dich..., and Der
fremde Prinz, inspired by Wilhelm Hauff and the Brothers Grimm, were
the first German films in this genre, which Ufa was able to market successfully
internationally. But documentaries took over after Prager’s biggest
success, the feature-length Kulturfilm Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit,
made with producer Nicholas Kaufmann.
Prager had a preference for films about horse breeding; for Paradies der
Pferde (1936), a film about the East Prussian stud farm Trakehnen, he received
a gold medal at the 1937 Exposition Internationale “Arts et Techniques” in
Paris. In 1939 the Gestapo declared Prager a “half-Jew”, but he remained
a member of the Reichsfilmkammer, making Kulturfilme like Heuzug
im Allgäu. After World War II he briefly continued production with his
own company, Willi-Prager-Films. Financial problems intervened, and he abandoned
filmmaking. (Adapted from CineGraph)
DER FARMER AUS TEXAS (The Cowboy Count) (Universum-Film
AG (Ufa), Berlin, DE 1925)
Regia/dir., prod: Joe May; scen: Joe May, Rolf E. Vanloo, dalla
pièce/from the play Kolportage di/by Georg Kaiser; f./ph:
Carl Drews, Antonio Frenguelli; scg./des: Paul Leni; cast: Mady
Christians (Mabel Bratt), Edward Burns (Erik), Willy Fritsch (Akke),
Lilian Hall-Davis (Alice), Christian Bummerstedt (Conte/Count von
Stjernenhoe), Clara [Clare] Greet (Mrs. Appelboom), Hans Junkermann (Barone/Baron
Barrenkrona), Pauline Garon (Miss Abby Grant), Frida Richard (zia/aunt Jutta),
Ellen Plessow, Emmy Wyda; riprese/filmed: 1925; data v.c./censor
date: 25.7.1925; première: 22.10.1925, Tauentzien-Palast,
U.T. Turmstraße, Ufa-Palast Königstadt, U.T. Alexanderplatz,
Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2540 m.; 35mm, 2447 m., 106’ (20
fps); fonte copia/print source: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
To find a German film of the mid-1920s called Der Farmer aus
Texas should be no surprise. America, one way or another, occupied
many minds. The mighty conglomerate Ufa risked inflating production costs
by purposefully increasing spectacle levels to attract the American box-office.
At the same time, European collaborations were forged to strengthen Europe’s
internal market and break the march of America’s imports. Outside
the cinemas, in theatres and hotels American jazz and dance music intoxicated
the crowds; while to leftist writers like Brecht, America served as both
awful warning and fatal attraction. Schizophrenia.
Joe May’s Ufa production, adapted from one of Berlin’s most popular
stage comedies of 1924, Georg Kaiser’s Kolportage (Pulp Fiction),
exactly reflects these confusions. The title, the subject, the studio artifice,
the picturesque exteriors, the roster of American and English players, all point
to hopes for an international hit. (It didn’t happen.) At the same time,
there’s no reverent worship of America here: the New World is ribbed just
as strongly as the Old World of Europe. The Georg Kaiser of Kolportage had
moved on from his Expressionist dramas of World War I; in Kolportage he
was cynically assembling theatre clichés and parodying popular taste.
Key plot elements couldn’t be fustier: aside from the clash between Old
World and New World, old money and new, you get the aristocratic family split,
a nasty spot of dynasty trouble, and a variation on the old cradle switch (the
child of Count Stjernenhoe gets swapped with the offspring of a poor widow, Frau
Appelboom).
What pleased German theatre audiences so much found less success in the cinemas:
indeed, in 1926 the heavy production costs of Der Farmer aus Texas helped
pitch Ufa closer towards bankruptcy. Perhaps cinema audiences didn’t spot
the tongue in the cheek in this pulp fiction. Perhaps they failed to appreciate
the imported players moving around Paul Leni’s interesting castle sets
or the striking Swedish coastline exteriors. Players like the broad-shouldered
American Edward Burns (as the Count’s true son, the title character); or,
from Britain, Lilian Hall-Davis (love’s young dream, Alice) and Clare Greet
(the poor widow Appelboom). Audiences obviously enjoyed Willy Fritsch as the
amiable and energetic “false” offspring Akke: the role grew to define
his developing star persona. And no-one surely could mind Mady Christians, cast
as Mabel, the rich American farmer’s daughter whose marriage to Christian
Bummerstedt’s Stjernenhoe starts the ball rolling.
Joe May’s personal difficulties could not have helped the production: in
the month filming began, August 1925, his actress daughter Eva May took her own
life with a gun. But there should be no clouds for us now. Ambitious, jaunty,
and very much of its time, Der Farmer aus Texas is exactly the kind
of fascinating commercial film unfairly obscured by Kracauer and Eisner’s “warning
shadows”. – Geoff Brown
Joe May (Julius Otto Mandl; Vienna, 1880–1954, Hollywood).
A wealthy industrialist’s son, May squandered the family fortune living
high in Berlin. In 1902 he married the singer Hermine Pfleger; when she adopted
the stage name Mia May, Mandl became Joe May. He made his feature film debut
guiding Mia through her first screen role in Continental-Kunstfilm’s tragic
romance In der Tiefe des Schachtes (1912). After inaugurating Continental’s
Stuart Webbs detective series in 1913, he founded May-Film in 1915 and launched
a competing series featuring detective “Joe Deebs”. Simultaneously
he gave chances to up-and-coming talent like Fritz Lang and E.A. Dupont, and
fostered Mia’s career as a melodramatic tragedienne in ventures like Die
Herrin der Welt (1919), an eight-part exotic adventure.
Affiliated to Ufa during these years, in 1921 May shifted allegiance to the American-backed
EFA. With the two-part Das Indische Grabmal (1921) and the high-society
crime drama Tragödie der Liebe (1923) he became the company’s
foremost maker of prestige productions after Lubitsch. A rocky period followed:
Germany’s rampant inflation forced company restructuring; Mia retired following
the suicide of the couple’s actress-daughter Eva May; and Der Farmer
aus Texas, an attempt at an international hit, proved a financial disaster.
Good fortune returned under the auspices of Erich Pommer’s Ufa production
unit, with his late silent dramas Heimkehr (1928) and Asphalt (1929). May’s
sound film début, the comedy Ihre Majestät die Liebe, proved
his success in the sphere of comedy.
After the premiere of the Jan Kiepura musical Ein Lied für Dich (1933),
May emigrated via Paris and London to Hollywood, where Pommer, now at Fox, commissioned
him to make Music in the Air (1934). The first Hollywood production
whose cast and crew was chiefly composed of émigrés from
Nazi Germany, the film flopped badly, as did his stylish courtroom drama Confession (1937),
made at Warner Bros. Thereafter May turned out “B” pictures at Universal,
and gained a reputation for being difficult to handle – he was fired as
director of the anti-Nazi film The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (1943).
His final picture was the wartime comedy Johnny Doesn’t Live Here
Any More (1944). Five years later, with backing from friends, Joe and Mia
May opened a Viennese restaurant in Los Angeles; it closed down after a few weeks.
(Adapted from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited by Hans-Michael
Bock, Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
DER HERR DES TODES (Maxim Film, Ebner & Co.,
Berlin, DE 1926)
Regia/dir: Hans Steinhoff; scen: Hans Szekely, dal
romanzo di/based on the novel by Karl Rosner; f./ph: Hans
Theyer, Willibald Gaebel; scg./des: Robert Neppach; mus.
(1926 Berlin premiere): Pasquale Perris; cast: Alfred Solm
(Peter von Hersdorff), Hertha von Walther (Maja), Simone Vaudry (Heid
von Düren), Eduard von Winterstein (colonello/Colonel von
Hersdorff), Heinrich Peer (consigliere segreto/Privy Councillor von
Düren), Erna Hauck (Daisy Brown), Jenny Marba (Sig.ra /Mrs. von
Hersdorff), Hedwig Pauly-Winterstein (Consigliere segreto della moglie
di von Düren/Privy Councillor von Düren’s wife),
Ferdinand von Alten (Barone/Baron von Bassenheim),Szöke
Szakall (impresario Bordoni), Georg John, Hugo Döblin,
Maria Forescu, Teddy Bill, Paul Rehkopf, Mammey-Bassa, John Essaw; data
v.c./censor date: 22.11.1926; première:
26.11.1926, Tauentzien-Palast, Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2318
m.; 35mm, 2388 m., 95’ (22 fps); fonte copia/print source: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv,
Berlin.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.
Der Herr des Todes (The Master of Death) belongs
to a series of productions made to order by one of Ufa’s subsidiaries
in an attempt to fulfil the company’s contractual obligations
under its ill-conceived “Parufamet-Agreement” with Paramount
and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer of December 1925 (forcing the Germans to produce
a minimum of 40 German films in order to be able to import at least
20 pictures from each of the two Hollywood majors) and another, separate
deal with Carl Laemmle (under which Ufa agreed to present 50 Universal
productions in their cinemas in return for a loan of $ 275.000). Steinhoff
(who appears to have taken on the project at short notice) was no newcomer
to Maxim Film, Ebner & Co., having previously worked on two scripts
for the company, Die Fledermaus (Max Mack, 1922) and Der
Mann im Sattel (Manfred Noa, 1925).
Based on a novel by Karl Rosner and – according to one reviewer – sticking
close to Max Obald’s 1913-14 Deutsche Bioscop production of the same title,
the film tells the story of an aristocratic lieutenant who is forced to resign
his commission and give up his career in the cavalry after having defended himself
against deliberate provocations by a superior officer who is competing with him
for the love of the daughter of a respected privy councillor. Concerned about
their honour, his family bans him to New York, where he falls on hard times until
a former circus performer helps him to become a world-renowned trapeze and aerial
artiste. Before he is reunited with the girl he loves, he has to survive an act
of sabotage by a jealous lover.
Though set in the mid-1920s, the story’s characters, atmosphere, and mores
link the film closely to the pre-World War I era, and demonstrate their continued
attractiveness to certain sections of German society during the years of the
Weimar Republic. The presence of unknown performers in the leading roles, the
appearance in New York’s Central Park of pine trees characteristic of the
forests around Berlin, and the picture’s Munich premiere (five months after
its opening in Berlin) supporting Dimitri Buchowetzki’s The Midnight
Sun (1926; German release title, Die Tänzerin des Zaren) on
a double-bill at the city’s Ufa-Filmpalast, are some of the indicators
of the film’s status as a low-budget “quota quickie” production.
It also contains a fine example of the practice of product-placement: The passenger
liner Columbus (used regularly by Ufa’s managers for their business
trips to the States) is featured extensively enough for her owners, Norddeutsche
Lloyd, to have given free passages to the small film crew required for the shots
on board and in New York.
Berlin critics were strongly divided in their reactions, with a number of them
resorting to sarcastic remarks about this “antiquated” film’s “relevance” at
a time when Germans were trying to rid themselves of their imperial past, while
others – especially those of the trade press trying to predict its box-office
appeal – regarded it as solid cinema fare without any literary ambitions,
aiming above all at exciting entertainment. For Steinhoff it was a routine assignment
he carried out with the professionalism characteristic of his work. – Horst
Claus
Hans Steinhoff (Johannes Reiter; Marienberg,
Saxony,1882-1945, near the village of Glienig, near Berlin) Thanks
to the Steinhoff Project of the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv of Berlin, Giornate habitués have
some familiarity with the silent films of this long-eclipsed director. While
the careers of many artists featured in this series on “The Other Weimar” were
crippled by Nazi persecution, Steinhoff’s efficiently crafted Weimar
films have been unfairly overshadowed by his later notoriety as the director
of some of Nazi cinema’s most infamous propaganda productions.
Steinhoff grew up in Leipzig. He joined a local theatre company at 15. Varied
experiences followed: he played opposite the author Frank Wedekind in the first
production of Lulu (Steinhoff was Alwa, Wedekind Dr. Schön); he
sang, and directed, operetta. With the decline of traditional variety theatres
after World War I, Steinhoff founded his own film company in 1921. For the Gloria
company in Berlin he made the historical epic Der Falsche Dimitry (The
False Dimitri, 1922), and built a reputation as an efficient and versatile director
for the mass market. His ability to work within modest budgets made him especially
popular with smaller companies.
In 1933, contracted to a B-movie production unit at Ufa, Steinhoff made Hitlerjunge
Quex, which established his reputation as a Nazi propagandist. Though Steinhoff
was an ardent admirer of Hitler, he never joined the Party; people who knew him
described him as “totally apolitical”, an opportunist rather than
a political activist. His standing as one of the leading (and best) Third Reich
directors rests mainly on biopics like Ohm Krüger (1941) and Rembrandt (1942).
But Steinhoff was also responsible for Die Geier Wally (1940), one of
the most influential examples of the Heimatfilm genre, and the ambiguous Tanz
auf dem Vulkan (1938), in which Gustaf Gründgens seems to incite resistance
to dictatorship.
Steinhoff died in the last days of the war, when a plane taking him back to Prague – where
he was filming a Hans Albers vehicle – was shot down southeast of Berlin
by Russian anti-aircraft fire. (Adapted from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph,
edited by Hans-Michael Bock, Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
DER HIMMEL AUF ERDEN (Reinhold Schünzel-Film GmbH,
Berlin, DE 1927)
Regia/dir: Alfred Schirokauer; prod., supv: Reinhold Schünzel; scen: Reinhold
Schünzel, Alfred Schirokauer, dalla pièce/from the play Der
Doppelmenschdi/by Wilhelm Jacobi & Arthur Lippschütz; f./ph: Edgar
S. Ziesemer; scg./des: O.F. Werndorff; cast: Reinhold
Schünzel (Traugott Bellmann), Charlotte Ander (Juliette), Adele Sandrock
(presidentessa della lega per la moralità/morality league president),
Emmy Wyda, Erich Kaiser-Titz (Dr. Dresdner), Otto Wallburg (Louis Martiny),
Paul Morgan (Herr Kippel), Szöke Szakall (manager), Ellen Plessow (Frau
Kippel), Johanna Ewald, Frigga Braut, Ida Perry (Frau Martiny), Maria Kamradek; riprese/filmed: 1926-27; data
v.c./censor date: 27.1.1927; première: 25.7.1927, Gloria-Palast,
Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2410 m.; 35mm, 2450 m., 97’ (22
fps); fonte copia/print source: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.
Scan the indexes in those domineering books Siegfried Kracauer’s From
Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner’s L’Écran
démoniaque (The Haunted Screen) and you will not find the
name of Reinhold Schünzel, or even the transvestite comedy Viktor
und Viktoria, his best-known film. In Kracauer’s case at least,
the omission of such an enjoyable and significant actor-director seems
particularly short-sighted. Kracauer the social critic, the chronicler
of human types and mass technologies, could surely have seen in Schünzel’s
screen creations a distillation of the nervous hedonism of Weimar Berlin,
viewed in a crazy mirror.
As a film actor he came to the fore after World War I with devious, satanic figures
in Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern and other topical melodramas – playing
them with such force that one critic in 1926 called him “sin incarnate”.
Increasingly in the 1920s, he flipped over the coin from drama to comedy, though
in the hilarious Der Himmel auf Erden, Halloh – Caesar!,
and Hercules Maier the deceptions and disguises (moral and sexual) and
the dangerous elegance of his gestures continued unabated. You see his relatives
haunting the paintings of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann: those square-faced
Prussians, hooked on pleasure and capitalism, drinking the dregs of the night.
For Der Himmel auf Erden, Schünzel was not the film’s official
director; but as artistic supervisor, producer, co-writer, and star, there is
never any doubt who is in control, or who fixes our gaze. Despite the delights
of Charlotte Ander, Szöke Szakall, dancing girls, a black jazz band, a trained
monkey, and Oscar Werndorff’s nightclub sets, our eyes always seek out
Schünzel. The source material, the theatrical farce Der Doppelmensch,
gave him a perfect Weimar character: Bellmann, the upstanding, censorious, alcohol-hating
city councillor whose moral standing is sabotaged when his deceased brother bequeaths
to him 500,000 marks and an infamous nightclub, “Der Himmel auf Erden” (“Heaven
on Earth”).
To fulfil the terms of his brother’s will – where would farces be
without wills? – Bellmann must be physically present at the club every
night. Hence his paroxysms of embarrassment and disdain. Hence his desperate
appearance in drag, dancing festooned with jewellery, quite the belle of the
ball. (Schünzel, of undecided sexuality himself, probably enjoyed that.)
From the raised finger to the arched eyebrow, his command of comic body language
seems endless. And the director Alfred Schirokauer, following Schünzel’s
own dry directorial style, knows the value of watching and waiting; visually,
nothing is pushed or shoved. It’s Weimar captured in a miniature bottle;
and oh, so drinkable. – Geoff Brown
Reinhold Schünzel (Hamburg, 1888–1954, Munich)
first made his name in films as an actor, but is better remembered now as the
director of some of the biggest hits of the 1920s and 30s, second only to Lubitsch’s
films in wit and sophistication. He began in films in 1916, and joined Conrad
Veidt and the exotic dancer Anita Berber in director Richard Oswald’s team
of actors: in the homosexual emancipation melodrama Anders als die Andern (1919)
he played a slithering blackmailer. For Lubitsch, he portrayed a louche and shady
aristocrat in Madame Dubarry (1921).
A director from 1918, he concentrated on comedies, but also showed a talent for
historical spectacle in Katharina die Grosse (1920). Initially working
independently, Schünzel was contracted to Ufa in 1926, producing and starring
in popular slapstick comedies, including Halloh – Caesar! (1926), Der
Himmel auf Erden (1927), and Hercules Maier (1927). He
made a smooth transition to sound films, exploiting music, dialogue, and sound
to great comic effect. He also maintained his sense for irony and erotically risqué subjects,
as in his masterpiece Viktor und Viktoria (1933), a musical comedy about
a young woman who pretends to be a female impersonator. At the same time, Schünzel
continued to act for other directors: in Pabst’s Die 3-Groschen-Oper (1931)
he was the corrupt police chief Tiger Brown.
After the Nazis came to power, Schünzel, classified as a “half-Jew”,
was given special permission by the propaganda ministry to continue working for
Ufa. Seemingly unaffected by the regime change, he continued to deploy urbane
irony, most strikingly in Amphitryon (1935), a comedy about the domestic
life of the Greek gods, which was interpreted as poking fun at the new German
state. Land der Liebe (1937), his final German film, was a satirical
operetta, released in an extensively cut version.
Subsequently Schünzel left for Hollywood, where he found himself distrusted
by established German émigrés who had been forced to flee
earlier. Contracted to M-G-M, his attempt to duplicate his European successes
failed, and he returned to acting after New Wine (1941), a non-vintage
biography of Franz Schubert. Often he played Nazis, as in Lang’s Hangmen
Also Die! (1943). He was also one of Claude Rains’ sinister houseguests
in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946). Schünzel returned to Germany
in 1951, acting on stage, and occasionally in films, until his death. (Adapted
from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited by Hans-Michael Bock,
Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
Alfred Schirokauer (Breslau, 1880–1934, Vienna)
was a lawyer who in the 1910s and 20s published bestselling novels about historical
characters such as Ferdinand Lassalle, Lord Byron, Mirabeau, Napoleon, and Lucrezia
Borgia, which were often adapted for the screen. In 1913 he started writing film
scripts for Joe May. He worked in the Munich studios, primarily as a scriptwriter,
mainly with directors Franz Osten, Osten’s brother Ottmar Ostermayr, and
Franz Seitz (Sr.). From the early 1920s he dabbled in direction as well. In the
1920s Schirokauer moved to Berlin, where he collaborated on a series of films
with the multi-talented Reinhold Schünzel, and wrote scripts for directors
Georg Jacoby, Max Mack, Erich Waschneck, and others. When the Nazis took over
in Germany he emigrated to the Netherlands and then to Vienna. (Adapted from CineGraph)
DIE HOSE(A Royal Scandal) (Phoebus-Film
AG, Berlin, DE 1927)
Regia/dir: Hans Behrendt; scen: Franz Schulz, dalla
pièce di/from the play by Carl Sternheim; f./ph:
Carl Drews; scg./des: Heinrich Richter, Franz Schroedter; cast: Werner
Krauss (Theobald Maske), Jenny Jugo (Luise), Rudolf Forster (Scarron),
Veit Harlan (Mandelstam), Christian Bummerstedt (principe/Prince),
Olga Limburg (dirimpettaia/the woman across the street), Martin
Held; riprese/filmed: 1927; data v.c./censor date: 20.7.1927; première:
20.8.1927, Capitol, Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2425 m.; 35mm,
2170 m., 86’ (22 fps); fonte copia/print source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung,
Wiesbaden.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.
“Ein Champagner-Film, ‘extra-dry’,” proclaimed
the critic Willy Haas in Film-Kurier. And it was a champagne
that German audiences loved to drink: Hans Behrendt’s comedy
based on Carl Sternheim’s farce of 1911 proved a notable public
and critical success. The title refers to the falling undergarments
worn by Jenny Jugo’s demure little wife: an obvious attraction
for part of the audience. But general delight was probably sealed more
by Werner Krauss as Jugo’s petit-bourgeois husband – the
focal point for the social and political satire embedded in Sternheim’s
play.
Theobald Maske is the bureaucratic underling incarnate in a small German principality.
Image by image, his empty day is measured out. The morning wash. Off to the office.
Nothing to do, except watch the clock and fuss proudly over his moustache. Twelve
o’clock strikes. The unveiling and eating of the packed lunch. Then back
to idleness. Precisely delineated by Krauss (a far cry from his incarnation as
Robert Wiene’s Dr. Caligari), here was a character type that contemporary
audiences could both laugh at and laugh with, perhaps with a sigh of nostalgia
for the old pre-war order. Herbert Ihering in the Berliner Börsen-Courier compared
Krauss’s depiction to a George Grosz caricature of the ruling class, and
considered Krauss an actor who held all the possibilities of German films in
his hand. The critic couldn’t have foreseen Krauss’s participation
in Jud Süss (whose director Veit Harlan appears here as the Jewish
barber Mandelstam) and other Nazi propaganda films to come.
Behrendt’s control of gesture and pacing is crucial to the success of Die
Hose. But the champagne wouldn’t taste so fresh without the work of
Franz Schulz, the future writer of Ufa soundfilm-operettas. Schulz snips out
motifs and characterizations from Sternheim’s farce to create something
blithely cinematic. “One of the best films of the period,” Siegfried
Kracauer declared in From Caligari to Hitler (1947) – and that’s
from a man not easily pleased. – Geoff Brown
Hans Behrendt (Berlin, 1889-1942?, Auschwitz?) began
his career as a stage actor, and entered films as the gravedigger in Maria
Magdalene (1919), directed by his friend Reinhold Schünzel. In partnership
with Bobby E. Lüthge, he wrote scripts for Schünzel, Urban Gad, and
Arsen von Cserépy’s four-part Fridericus Rex (1920-1923) – the
first of numerous German films featuring Otto Gebühr as the Prussian king,
and popular both in right-wing and anti-republican circles. He also scripted
entertainment films by Richard Eichberg, Friedrich Zelnik, and others, and adapted
theatre classics like Shakespeare’s Ein Sommernachstraum (A Midsummer
Night’s Dream) and Schiller’s Wallenstein. He began
directing in 1920 (Die Boxerhanne), but became a dominant force only
after Prinz Louis Ferdinand and Die Hose in 1926-27. He earned
a reputation as an “actor’s director”, and a specialist in
Prussian topics. Behrendt’s first sound films were weakened remakes of
successful silents, like Kohlhiesels Töchter (1930) with Henny
Porten, the star of Lubitsch’s original of 1920. He also remade the film
version of Büchner’s play Danton with Fritz Kortner.
Following his popular heimatfilm, Grün ist die Heide,
Behrendt completed two more films before the Nazis forced his emigration to Spain.
One Spanish film resulted – a version of the popular zarzuela Doña
Francisquita (1934). Bad fortune multiplied after he retreated to
Vienna in 1936 just before the Spanish Civil War. He was sacked from the film Fräulein
Lilli after conflicts with the Hungarian star Franciska Gaal. In Brussels
when the German army invaded Austria in 1938, he stayed put, only to be arrested
by the Belgian police in 1940 when the city was bombed by the Germans. Attempts
to procure an American visa for him came too late: after two years interned in
camps in Vichy France, Behrendt’s name was placed on the Paris-Auschwitz
transport list for 14 August 1942. His arrival is not recorded. (Adapted from
the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited by Hans-Michael Bock, Oxford/NewYork: Berghahn
Books, 2008)
LOOPING THE LOOP(Die Todesschleife / Il cerchio
della morte) (Universum-Film AG (Ufa), Berlin, DE 1928)
Regia/dir: Arthur Robison; prod: Gregor Rabinowitsch; scen: Arthur
Robison, Robert Liebmann; f./ph: Carl Hoffmann; scg./des: Robert
Herlth, Walter Röhrig; cast: Werner Krauss (Botto), Jenny
Jugo (Blanche Valeite), Warwick Ward (André Melton), Gina Manès
(Hanna), Siegfried Arno (Sigi), Max Gülstorff, Lydia Potechina (parenti
di Blanche/Blanche’s relatives), Harry Grunwald, Julius
von Szöreghy [Julius Szöreghi] (agente/agent);riprese/filmed: 1927/1928; data
v.c./censor date: 24.05.1928; première: 15.9.1928,
U.T. Universum, Berlin; 35mm, 2880 m., 125’ (20 fps); fonte
copia/print source:Filmmuseum im Münchner Stadtmuseum, München.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.
A good thesis could be written on the clown motif in 1920s theatre
and cinema. Why did so many Pagliaccis suddenly spring up to face torture
by unrequited love in circus dramas across the world, from America
to Scandinavia, Germany, and Russia; from Lon Chaney in He Who
Gets Slapped to the Nordisk production Klovnen? Arthur
Robison’s 1928 Looping the Loop, one of a bustling German
contingent from the period, won’t solve the basic riddle, though
it certainly lays out numerous ingredients that kept circus dramas
in fashion.
Here is escapist spectacle, and danger and excitement, all funnelled into the “looping
the loop” circus stunt – a stunt also known as the “death leap”,
for reasons that will become obvious. Here’s the tinkle of that old love
triangle, whose three points are Jenny Jugo as the lovely girl, Werner Krauss
as the frustrated clown, and Warwick Ward as the handsome acrobat rival. Note,
too, the lure of pathos for actors, evident in Werner Krauss’s Botto – a
character who’s so convinced that clowns can’t succeed as lovers
that he disguises himself to Jenny Jugo as an electrical engineer who only works
at night. And she believes him. When Robison and his team assembled this production
for Ufa, the psychological penetration and shadow play of their 1923 landmark, Schatten,
were clearly not on the agenda; their chief goal was to make a rousing commercial
hit.
It proved not quite that; this was no international success like Dupont’s Varieté (an
obvious influence on the script). Paul Rotha, writing in 1930 in The Film
Till Now, presumed some of its weaknesses might have been due to the loss
of the original negative in a fire and the creation of a substitute version from
an assemblage of left-over takes. Weaknesses acknowledged, we can still draw
sustenance from Carl Hoffmann’s distinguished photography, a script that’s
never afraid of the absurd, and an acting range that encompasses both the melancholy
in Krauss’s eyes and the extravagance of Warwick Ward – able to wink
at the heroine even when suffering from a broken neck. – Geoff Brown
Arthur Robison (Chicago, 1888-1935, Berlin), a consummate
professional across a range of genres, was born in the United States, into a
family of German-Americans, but moved to Germany at the age of seven. At first
he studied medicine and worked as a doctor; he switched to films in 1914 after
stage acting experience in Germany and America. He made his directorial debut
with Nächte des Grauens (1916), starring Werner Krauss and Emil
Jannings. Zwischen Abend und Morgen (1921) marked his first collaboration
with cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, who also contributed much to the fearful,
claustrophobic atmosphere of Schatten (1923), Robison’s most famous
production. The film, starring Fritz Kortner as a jealous husband whose violent
fantasies find expression in a shadow play performance, remains a classic of
Weimar cinema’s “haunted screen”. Petro der Korsar (1925)
and Manon Lescaut (1926), lavish costume dramas made for Erich Pommer
at Ufa, confirmed Robison’s reputation. Following Looping the Loop,
partially shot in London, he made The Informer for British International
Pictures, an atmospheric adaptation of Liam O’Flaherty’s novel, elevated
by Werner Brandes’ chiaroscuro camerawork and Lya de Putti’s naturalistic
performance as the fiancée of an IRA informer. In the early 1930s in Hollywood,
Robison directed several foreign-language versions of M-G-M productions before
returning to Germany, and Ufa, in 1933. His final film was a remake of Der
Student von Prag (1935), with Adolf Wohlbrück [Anton Walbrook] in the
title role. (Adapted from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited
by Hans-Michael Bock, Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
DIE CARMEN VON ST. PAULI(Gestrandet) (Universum-Film
AG (Ufa), Berlin, DE 1928)
Regia/dir: Erich Waschneck; prod: Alfred Zeisler; scen: Bobby
E. Lüthge, Erich Waschneck; f./ph: Friedl Behn-Grund; scg./des: Alfred
Junge; cast: Jenny Jugo (Jenny Hummel), Willy Fritsch (Klaus Brandt),
Fritz Rasp (“il dottore”/“The Doctor”),
Wolfgang Zilzer (“Pince-nez”/“The Nipper”),
Tonio Gennaro (“Heinrich il cortese”/“Gentle
Heinrich”), Otto Kronburger (“Karl, il pilota”/“Karl
the Pilot”), Walter Seiler (“Alfred il lascivo”/“Randy Alfred”),
Charly Berger (“Il capitano”/“The Captain”),
Fritz Alberti (armatore/shipowner Rasmussen), Max Maximilian (Hein,
il suo vecchio servitore / Rasmussen’s old servant), Betty
Astor (Marie, la fidanzata di Klaus/Klaus’ fiancée),
Friedrich Benfer (Jimmy Swing, il ciclista/racing cyclist), Alfred
Zeisler; riprese/filmed: 1928; data v.c./censor date: 26.5.1928; première:
10.10.1928, Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2333
m.; 35mm, 2376 m., 114’ (18 fps); fonte copia/print source: Cinémathèque
Royale de Belgique/Koninklijk Filmarchief, Bruxelles.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.
Die Carmen von St. Pauli, a story of the Hamburg waterfront,
was among the many silent films made in the late 1920s that were lost
in the sweeping transition to sound. Filmed at Berlin’s Neubabelsberg
studios and on location in Hamburg’s harbour and the notorious
red-light district of St. Pauli, contemporary reviewers praised the film’s
sense of realism. The atmosphere of life in the harbour district, with
its ships at anchor, waterfront bars, and shadowy streets brimming with
temptations, was deftly captured by chief cameraman Friedel Behn-Grund
and art director Alfred Junge.
In this film atmosphere dominates the simple plot: ship-master Klaus Brandt (Willy
Fritsch) falls under the spell of the attractive Jenny, the “Carmen” of
a gang of bandits and smugglers who are eyeing his ship, the Alexandria.
One fateful night he leaves the Alexandria unguarded to follow Jenny
to the bar where she works, and the jealous bandits pillage his ship. Brandt
loses his post and determines to leave on a ship for Australia, but his good
resolutions dissolve at the thought of Jenny, and he stays on. (The film’s
alternate title was Gestrandet – “Stranded”.) He is
drawn into the bar’s low intrigues, and framed with a murder charge. Jenny,
transformed by her love, finds the real murderer, and the couple hope to start
a new, decent life together.
The film’s impressive cast includes some of Ufa’s popular stars of
the period, such as dimpled matinee idol Willy Fritsch (soon to co-star with
Lilian Harvey in a string of early musicals), attractive comedienne Jenny Jugo
as the waterfront temptress, and Fritz Rasp (character actor of films by Pabst
and Lang, and the villain pursued by the boys of Emil und die Detektive)
as one of the bandit gang. This moody drama gave Fritsch a chance to graduate
from endless juvenile roles – but the real star of the film was undoubtedly
its atmospheric and poetic waterfront locations. (Catherine A. Surowiec, The
LUMIERE Project: The European Film Archives at the Crossroads, Lisbon: Projecto
LUMIERE, 1996)
Erich Waschneck (Grimma, Saxony, 1887–1970, West
Berlin) studied painting in Leipzig, and worked as a poster designer. Through
his brother Kurt Waschneck, a producer at Projections-AG “Union” (PAGU),
he got a job as a camera assistant in 1920; the next year he photographed Wilhelm
Prager’s fairytale Der Kleine Muck. His directing career dates
from 1924 and the kulturfilm Der Kampf um die Scholle, though he made
his mark more in adventure films like Mein Freund, der Chauffeur, with
Hans Albers, and several featuring Olga Tschechowa. The emigrant drama Die
geheime Macht (1927), with Michael Bohnen and Suzy Vernon, proved very successful
in New York (where it was retitled Sajenko, the Soviet). Following Die
Carmen von St. Pauli, with its skilful exploitation of Hamburg harbour, in
1929 Waschneck resumed his association with Tschechowa (Die Liebe der Brüder
Rott; the costume drama Diane) and made two fashionable excursions
into urban glamour, Die Drei um Edith and Skandal in Baden-Baden.
Sound brought no problems. In 1932 he became an independent producer with Fanal-Film
GmbH and for a time veered away from studio confections. 8 Mädels im
Boot and Abel mit der Mundharmonika gained their aesthetic strength
chiefly from location work and were aimed at younger audiences. 8 Mädels
im Boot (1932) established Karin Hardt as the icon of the sportive, blonde,
modern woman; she married Waschneck the following year.
With Hitler in power, Waschneck made melodramas and women’s stories in
line with National Socialist film politics. Films like Anna Favetti,
featuring Brigitte Horney, helped nurture the myth of the father-focused woman,
willing to make sacrifices. But with the anti-Semitic Die Rothschilds (1940),
Waschneck moved beyond “apolitical” entertainment into direct propaganda
for the Nazi politics of destruction and annihilation. Affäre Roedern (1944),
a transfiguration of Prussian history, also served up propaganda in historical
dress.
Waschneck did not direct again until Drei Tage Angst, another youth
story, in 1952. Other planned subjects remained unfilmed. He retired from the
cinema after supervising Acht Mädels im Boot (1959), a German-Dutch
remake of his earlier success, directed by Alfred Bittins. (Adapted from the
forthcoming Concise CineGraph, edited by Hans-Michael Bock, Oxford/New
York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
RUTSCHBAHN (Luna Park / The Whirl of Life) (Eichberg-Film
GmbH, Berlin, per/for British International Pictures, London,
DE 1928)
Regia/dir., prod: Richard Eichberg; scen: Adolf Lantz,
Helen Gosewish, Ladislaus Vajda, dal romanzo/from the novel Das
Bekenntnis di/by Clara Ratzka; f./ph: Heinrich Gärtner; scg./des:
Robert Herlth; cast: Fee Malten (Heli), Heinrich George (Jig Hartford),
Fred Louis Lerch (Boris Berischeff), Harry Hardt (Sten), Erna Morena (Blida),
Arnold Hasenclever (Olaf), Szöke Szakall (Sam), Jutta Jol (Sonja),
Grete Reinwald (Nadja Berischeff); riprese/filmed: 1928; data
v.c./censor date: 5.12.1928; première: 20.12.1928,
Alhambra, Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2703 m.; 35mm, 2468 m., 89’ (24
fps); fonte copia/print source: Nederlands Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.
Didascalie in olandese / Dutch intertitles.
“Discussion of this story is useless,” wrote
Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times (25 March 1929), “for
it has a multiplicity of faults.” Eighty years on, the structural
deficiencies of Rutschbahn are still evident, but eclipsed by
the visual inventiveness and lively characterization. The setting-up
of the plot is certainly excessively elaborate:
Heli kills her nasty stepfather with an accidentally (but most accurately) hurled
axe. Fortunately Nadja, a young White Russian émigré whom
the family has adopted, dies at that moment, conveniently enabling Heli to assume
her identity for her flight to London. There she chances to meet Boris, the dead
girl’s brother. The two fall in love. This serves to establish an odd triangle.
Heli and Boris, unable to declare their love because they are posing as brother
and sister, earn a meagre living as street buskers, along with the enthusiastic
Sam (Szöke Szakall). Meanwhile, the famous clown Jig (Heinrich George) falls
in love with Heli, and puts Boris and Heli into his stage act. The denouement
gives George the opportunity for a virtuoso broken-hearted clown act that makes
Jannings’ Professor Rath in Der Blaue Engel seem to err in restraint.
George is a fine enough actor almost to get away with the excess. A very important
figure in theatre and film in the Nazi period, George was arrested after the
Red Army took Berlin, and died in the Soviet concentration camp at Sachsenhausen
in 1946. But others of the cast proved long-lived: the charming Fee Malten (here
a 17-year-old playing a 16-year-old), whose post-1933 career was in Hollywood,
survived until 2005. The Hungarian Szöke Szakall (as S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall)
became a familiar character actor in Hollywood films of the 1940s: this though
must be the only occasion on which the corpulent comedian appeared in a Scots
kilt.
Eichberg’s visual style – supported by his long-time cameraman Heinrich
Gärtner – is always original; and the locations, both in London’s
theatreland and in Berlin’s Wintergarten, are richly evocative. A special
fascination of the film is its close parallels to the story of St. Martin’s
Lane (the life of buskers; the show-business triangle complication): Erich
Pommer, co-producer and co-writer of the 1938 British film, had no formal connection
with Rutschbahn, but it seems more than likely that influential memories
of it had stayed with him from his German days.
David Robinson
Richard Eichberg (Berlin, 1888-1953, Munich). Long
overlooked by film history, Eichberg was one of most prominent directors of popular
German cinema from the 1910s to the 1930s, specializing in crime films, comedies,
and exotic melodramas. He was also a star-maker, developing talents as diverse
as Lilian Harvey, Anna May Wong, and Marta Eggerth. After beginning on the stage,
he entered film in 1912 as an actor, debuting as director and producer with Strohfeuer (1915). Das
Tagebuch Collins inaugurated a series of crime dramas starring Ellen Richter.
During World War I, he also directed Die im Schatten leben, a documentary
about children born out of wedlock, and the topical melodrama Im Zeichen
der Schuld, promoting the rehabilitation of ex-convicts. In 1918 he married
Lee Parry, showcasing her dancing and acrobatic skills in several star vehicles.
Backing from the Munich-based company Emelka gave him bigger budgets, though
apart from the historical epic Monna Vanna he continued to concentrate
on popular genres.
After separating from Parry, Eichberg promoted the British-born Lilian Harvey,
quickly establishing her as a major comedy star in Die tolle Lola and
other films. The cross-dressing farce Der Fürst von Pappenheim (The
Masked Mannequin) featured Curt Bois and yet another Eichberg discovery,
Mona Maris. Losing Harvey to Ufa in 1928, Eichberg signed a co-production deal
with British International Pictures, concentrating on emotionally wrenching melodramas
showcasing the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong (Song / Show Life,
and Großstadtschmetterling / Pavement Butterfly). Continuing in
talkies with BIP, he boosted Hans Albers’ career with the British-made
detective thriller Der Greifer (Night Birds), a sizeable hit
in Germany; he also launched the singer Marta Eggerth on her film career in Der
Draufgänger (The Dare-Devil). Further multi-lingual adventures
in Europe followed, climaxing in Ufa’s sound remake of Joe May’s
two-part adventure serial, Das Indische Grabmal and Der Tiger von
Eschnapur (1938). Its success emboldened Eichberg to emigrate to the United
States. No known film work resulted, and he returned to West Germany in 1949.
His two final films repeated the old formula – exotic spectacle, light
entertainment – but without success. (Adapted from the forthcoming Concise
CineGraph, edited by Hans-Michael Bock, Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books,
2008)
DER KAMPF DER TERTIA (Terra-Film AG,
Berlin, DE 1929)
Regia/dir: Max Mack; scen: Axel Eggebrecht, Max Mack, dal
romanzo di/from the novel by Wilhelm Speyer; f./ph: Emil
Schünemann; scg./des: Hans Jacoby; cast: Karl Hoffmann
(il Grande Elettore/The Great Elector), Fritz Draeger (Reppert),
August Wilhelm Keese (Otto Kirchholtes), Gustl Stark-Gstettenbaur (Borst),
Ilse Stobrawa (Daniela), Hermann Neut Paulsen (insegnante/teacher),
Aribert Mog (insegnante/teacher), Rudolf Klein-Rohden (borgomastro
di Boestrum/Burgomaster of Boestrum), Max Schreck (Biersack), Fritz Greiner
(agente/constable Holzapfel), Fritz Richard (scrivano comunale/town
council clerk Falk), allievi della scuola di Boestrum/pupils from
Boestrum school; riprese/filmed: 1928; data v.c./censor
date: 21.12.1928; première: 18.1.1929, Mozartsaal,
Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2978 m.;35mm, 2572 m., 101’ (22
fps), col. (imbibizione originale riprodotta su pellicola a colori/printed
on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); fonte copia/print
source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, Wiesbaden.
Didascalie in tedesco e francese / German & French intertitles.
Wilhelm Speyer’s Der Kampf der Tertia (The
Battle of the Tertia, 1928) was a best-selling contribution
to the flourishing 1920s literature of school stories: it was soon followed
by Erich Kästner’s Emil und die Detektive, itself
destined to be frequently filmed. On an offshore island, the teenage
pupils of a Tertia – the fourth-fifth year of a German
secondary school – pride themselves on their independence and rebellion
against the bourgeois conventions of Boestrum, the neighbouring town
on the mainland. They learn that the mean Boestrum furrier Biersack (Max
Schreck, in a worthy follow-up to his Nosferatu role) has persuaded
the local council to round up and destroy all the town’s cats,
naturally handing over the resulting pelts to him. The pupils of the Tertia declare
war, and their campaign – which includes kidnapping and terrorizing
Biersack – is in the end successful.
With a cast largely made up of pupils from the school of Boestrum, Mack reveals
exceptional sensitivity in portraying the feelings and vitality of early teenagers.
The film effectively gives the lie to the persistent myth that Weimar cinema
was set- and studio-bound. Emil Schünemann’s ravishing photography
captures the contrasting atmospheres of the seascapes, the children’s limitless
playground of the beach, the little island, and the stuffy bourgeois town of
Boestrum. The film is leisurely in development, allowing Mack space to develop
his attractive and idiosyncratic young characters. Modern audiences might be
a little more disconcerted by retroactive associations of such a gang of zealous
youngsters terrorizing a town and daubing (pro-feline) slogans on the house walls.
The dominant social role of the only girl, Daniela, is a remarkable proto-feminist
gesture: the charming actress who plays her, 17-year-old IlseStobrawa,
was to have a modest film career that lasted until 1943. – David Robinson
Max Mack (Moritz Myrthenzweig; Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt,
1884-1973, London), the son of a synagogue cantor, left home
in classic Jazz Singer tradition to become a touring actor. He had some
success in the theatre, specializing in oriental roles. In 1906 he adopted the
stage name of Max Mack, and in 1910 moved to Berlin. Very soon he was acting
in films, and discovering his talent for comedy (and scriptwriting). In 1911
he began to direct, working for the Continental-Filmkunst, Eiko, and Vitascope
companies, turning out as many as two films per month. In 1913, the operetta-style
films Wo ist Coletti, Die Tango-Königin, and Die
blaue Maus brought him success, but it was the prestigious production Der
Andere – a variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring the famous
stage actor Albert Bassermann – that elevated Mack’s work to the
status of autorenfilm. During this period Mack also wrote two books
on filmcraft.
In 1917 he established his own company, Max Mack-Film GmbH. His subsequent
production companies were Solar-Film GmbH and Terra-Film. Through the 1920s Mack
directed an average of three films a year. His output was eclectic, but always
with a leaning towards operetta and variety style. In the mid-1920s he worked
fruitfully with Ossi Oswalda and Willy Fritsch; and his tastes seemed well suited
to the new era of sound. Forced as a Jew to emigrate, he arrived via Prague and
Paris in London, where he was to direct one ill-fated production, Be Careful,
Mr. Smith (1935, but not released until 1940, as Singing Through).
He established a short-lived English company, Ocean Films, whose unrealized projects
included a remake of Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm. Subsequently,
he wrote his memoirs, translated French boulevard comedies for use by English
amateur groups, and married a wealthy widow, settling in Hampstead, London – a
safe haven at last. (Adapted from the forthcoming Concise CineGraph,
edited by Hans-Michael Bock, Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)
Supplemento alla retrospettiva /
Supplementary to the main Weimar programme
Weimar CineSalon
In a series of informal early evening “CineSalon” gatherings,
Giornate guests will be able to go further into the films and personalities
of “The Other Weimar”. There will be documentary screenings
and conversations with the curators and collaborators of the Other
Weimar retrospective, including Hans-Michael Bock, David Robinson,
Geoff Brown, and filmmaker and DVD producer Robert Fischer. On Monday,
the documentary profile Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin will be shown. (For
the credits and note for this film, please see the “Video Shows” section
of this catalogue.)Other directors and actors will be sampled
on Tuesday and Thursday. On Friday, breaking through the sound barrier,
Robert Fischer will offer an illustrated talk about the various language
versions of Fritz Lang’s M, in association with the
MLVs Multiple Language Versions Project promoted by the Gradisca International
Film Studies Spring School, the University of Udine, and CineGraph,
Hamburg. The CineSalon welcomes you every weekday (except Wednesday),
from 6pm.
Gli organizzatori del CineSalon ringraziano / The CineSalon organizers wish
to thank: Absolut Medien (Berlin), The Criterion Collection/Janus Films
(New York), Fiction Factory (München), Kinowelt/Arthaus (Leipzig), Transit
Film (München), Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin).
