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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2007 |
The Other Weimar -- Prog. 4 |
| Film Title |
BUDDENBROOKS |
| Alternative Title 1 |
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| Alternative Title 2 |
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| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
Germany |
| Release Date |
1923 |
| Production Co. |
Dea-Film GmbH Albert Pommer, Berlin, per/for Universum-Film AG (Ufa) |
| Director |
Gerhard Lamprecht |
| Format |
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Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
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24 |
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| Footage |
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Time |
| 2301 m. |
|
85' |
| Archive Source |
Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin |
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| Print Notes |
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles
col. (imbibizione originale riprodotta su pellicola a colori/printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); fonte copia/print source |
| 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) |
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| Other Credits |
| 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 |
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| Other Information |
| riprese/filmed: 1923; data v.c./censor date: 16.8.1923; première: 31.8.1923, Tauentzien-Palast, Berlin; lg. or./orig. l.: 2383 m |
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| Program Notes |
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)
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