Small German card by Ross Verlag for Hänsom Cigaretten by Jasmatzi Cigaretten-Fabrik G.m.b.H., Dresden, Tonfilmseries, no. 358. Photo: Eugene Robert Richee / Paramount. Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930).

Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) was the first German actress who became successful in Hollywood. Throughout her long career, she constantly reinvented herself. In 1920s Berlin, she started as a cabaret singer, chorus girl, and film actress. In the 1930s, she became a Hollywood star, then a World War II frontline entertainer, and finally, she was an international stage show performer from the 1950s till the 1970s. Now we remember her as one of the icons of the 20th century.

Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born in Berlin-Schöneberg, Germany, in 1901. She was the younger of two daughters of Louis Erich Otto Dietrich and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine née Felsing. Her mother was from a well-to-do Berlin family who owned a clock-making firm and her father was a police lieutenant. He died in 1911. His best friend, Eduard von Losch, an aristocrat first lieutenant in the Grenadiers courted Wilhelmina and eventually married her in 1916. He was killed on the Russian front in 1918. The young Marie Magdalene and her elder sister, Elisabeth, were brought up strictly in an upper-middle-class Prussian home. It would be this influence that would shape her acting career and her life as a citizen in years to come. Dietrich attended school in Berlin and Dessau from 1907 to 1919. She studied violin and became interested in theatre and poetry as a teenager. Her dreams of becoming a concert violinist were cut short when she injured her wrist. In 1921, she auditioned unsuccessfully for Max Reinhardt's drama academy, but she soon found herself working in his theatres as a chorus girl and playing small roles in dramas. The next year she played a part in the silent film So sind die Männer/The Little Napoleon (Georg Jacoby, 1922). On the set of another film, Tragödie der Liebe/The Tragedy of Love (Joe May, 1923), she met production assistant Rudolf Sieber. They were married in 1923. Her only child, daughter Maria Elisabeth Sieber, later billed as actress Maria Riva, was born in 1924. Throughout the 1920s Marlene continued to work on stage and in films both in Berlin and Vienna. She attracted most attention in stage musicals and revues, such as Broadway and Es Liegt in der Luft/It's in the Air. By the late 1920s, she was also playing leading parts in such films as Café Elektric/Cafe Electric (Gustav Ucicky, 1927) with Willi Forst, Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame/I Kiss Your Hand Madame (Robert Land, 1929) with Harry Liedtke, and Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt/The Woman One Longs For (Kurt/Curtis Bernhardt, 1929) opposite Fritz Kortner.

In 1929 Marlene Dietrich played her breakthrough role of Lola-Lola, a cabaret singer who causes the downfall of Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), a hitherto respected schoolmaster, in the Ufa production Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930). Josef von Sternberg thereafter took credit for having ‘discovered’ her. The film is also noteworthy for introducing her signature song Falling in Love Again. On the strength of Der blaue Engel's success, and with encouragement and promotion from Von Sternberg, Dietrich then moved to Hollywood. She left her husband and daughter behind. Paramount sought to market her as a German answer to MGM's Swedish sensation Greta Garbo. Her first American film, Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) opposite Gary Cooper earned her her only Oscar nomination. Between 1930 and 1935 she was the star of six films directed by von Sternberg at Paramount: Morocco (1930); Dishonored (1931), about a spy who betrays her country for love of a worthless man (Victor McLaglen); Shanghai Express (1932), a melodrama in which she is a China Coast prostitute who offers herself to a warlord (Warner Oland) to save the life of a former lover (Clive Brook); Blonde Venus (1932), a mother-love soap opera;, The Scarlet Empress (1934), an opulent and visually stunning melodrama about a lascivious Catherine the Great; and The Devil Is A Woman (1935), an erotic tale about a soldier-corrupting vamp in turn-of-the-century Seville. Wikipedia describes how Von Sternberg worked very effectively with Dietrich to create the image of a glamorous femme fatale: "He encouraged her to lose weight and coached her intensively as an actress – she, in turn, was willing to trust him and follow his sometimes imperious direction in a way that a number of other performers resisted. A crucial part of the overall effect was created by Von Sternberg's exceptional skill in lighting and photographing Dietrich to optimum effect — the use of light and shadow, including the impact of light passed through a veil or slatted blinds (as for example in Shanghai Express) — which, when combined with scrupulous attention to all aspects of set design and costumes, make this series of films among the most visually stylish in cinema history." Because it displayed her beauty most effectively, The Devil Is a Woman was her particular favourite. But after the dismal failure of The Devil Is A Woman, Paramount fired Von Sternberg, and the star and director would never work together again.

Without Von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich made her first comedy, Desire (Frank Borzage, 1936). It was a satire about an urbane jewel thief (Dietrich) who steals a choice necklace from a Parisian jeweller and, in efforts to keep it, becomes involved with a hayseed Detroit engineer (Gary Cooper). Although Dietrich's salary in the mid-1930s was enormous, she was never listed among the top ten box-office attractions, and depression-era audiences often felt she was preposterously exotic. She was even labelled 'box office poison' after Knight Without Armour (Jacques Feyder, 1937) proved an expensive flop. In 1939, her stardom revived when she played the freewheeling saloon entertainer Frenchie in the comic Western Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) opposite James Stewart. Hollywood's attempt to make her more 'ordinary' worked. The film also introduced another favourite song, The Boys in the Back Room. She played a similar role with John Wayne in The Spoilers (Ray Enright, 1942). In December 1941, the US had entered World War II, and Dietrich became one of the first celebrities to raise war bonds. She toured the US from January 1942 to September 1943 and it is said that she sold more war bonds than any other star. During two extended tours for the USO in 1944 and 1945, she sang and performed the singing saw for Allied troops on the front lines in Algeria, Italy, England, and France. For musical propaganda broadcasts designed to demoralize enemy soldiers, she recorded a number of songs in German, including the ballad Lili Marleen. The troops loved her. In 1947, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the US for her wartime work. In 1950, the French state conferred the title of Chevalier de la Légion d' Honneur (knight of the Legion of Honour) on her, in 1971 she was named Officier by President Pompidou and in 1989 Commandeur by President Mitterrand.

From the early 1950s until the mid-1970s, Marlene Dietrich worked almost exclusively as a highly-paid cabaret artist, performing live in large theatres in major cities worldwide. Her costumes (body-hugging dresses covered with thousands of crystals as well as a swansdown coat), body-sculpting undergarments, careful stage lighting helped to preserve Dietrich's glamorous image well into old age. She never fully regained her former screen glory, but she continued performing in films for distinguished directors. Her successful film roles included an exotic gypsy in Golden Earrings (Mitchell Leisen, 1947), with Ray Milland, an ex-Nazi cafe singer in A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948), a famous singer and murderer in Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950), an aging bandit queen in Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952), the wife of a suspected murderer in Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder, 1957), a cynical brothel-keeper in Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), and the aristocratic widow of a prominent Nazi general in Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961). Dietrich's show business career largely ended in 1975, when she broke her leg during a stage performance in Sydney, Australia. Her husband, Rudolf Sieber, died of cancer in 1976. Her final on-camera film appearance was a small role in Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo/Just a Gigolo (David Hemmings, 1979), starring David Bowie. Dietrich withdrew to her apartment in Paris. She spent the final 11 years of her life mostly bedridden, allowing only a select few — including family and employees — to enter the apartment. During this time, she was a prolific letter-writer and phone-caller. Her autobiography, Nehmt nur mein Leben/Marlene, was published in 1979. In 1982, she agreed to participate in a documentary film about her life, Marlene (1984), but refused to be filmed. The film's director, Maximilian Schell, was only allowed to record her voice. He used his interviews with her as the basis for the film, set to a collage of film clips from her career. The final film won several European film prizes and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary in 1984. Newsweek named it "a unique film, perhaps the most fascinating and affecting documentary ever made about a great movie star". In 1992, Marlene Dietrich died of renal failure at the age of 90 in Paris. Ten years after her death, Berlin - the city of Dietrich's birth which she shunned for most of her life - declared her an honorary citizen. In a 1992 obituary The New York Times wrote: "In her films and record-breaking cabaret performances, Miss Dietrich artfully projected cool sophistication, self-mockery and infinite experience. Her sexuality was audacious, her wit was insolent and her manner was ageless. With a world-weary charm and a diaphanous gown showing off her celebrated legs, she was the quintessential cabaret entertainer of Weimar-era Germany."

Sources: James Naremore (Senses of Cinema), Wikipedia, The New York Times, Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin, and IMDb.

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Austrian-American film director Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969) is known as a great stylist, as the director of the prototypical Hollywood gangster film, Underworld (1927), and especially as the discoverer of Marlene Dietrich. He worked with her for the first time at the Ufa in Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (1930) and would subsequently make six more films with her in Hollywood. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932). Along with Erich von Stroheim, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, Von Sternberg belonged to the large group of German and Austrian film emigrants who helped to shape Hollywood cinema.

Josef von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg in 1894, in Vienna, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sternberg was the son of Moses Sternberg, an impoverished Jewish businessman from Krakow and former soldier in the army of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Serafine, née Singer. The family moved to the U.S. in 1901. Jonas attended public school until the family, except Moses, returned to Vienna three years later. Throughout his life, Sternberg carried vivid memories of Vienna and nostalgia for some of his happiest childhood moments. In 1908, when Jonas was fourteen, he returned with his mother to Queens, New York, and settled in the United States. He acquired American citizenship in 1908. After a year, he stopped attending Jamaica High School and began working in various occupations, including millinery apprentice, door-to-door trinket salesman and stock clerk at a lace factory. At 17, he started working at the World Film Company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, as a film repairer and projectionist under the stage name Josef Sternberg. In 1914, when the company was purchased by actor and film producer William A. Brady, Sternberg rose to a chief assistant, responsible for writing (inter)titles and editing films to cover lapses in continuity for which he received his first official film credits. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he joined the US Army and was assigned to the Signal Corps headquartered in Washington, D.C., where he photographed training films for recruits. Sternberg left Brady's Fort Lee operation shortly after the war and worked for various studios. Sternberg travelled widely in Europe between 1922 and 1924, where he worked for the short-lived Alliance Film Corporation in London, on such films as The Bohemian Girl (Harley Knoles, 1922). When he returned to California in 1924, he started as an assistant to director Roy William Neill's Vanity's Price. Sternberg's aptitude for effective directing was recognized in his handling of the operating room scene, singled out for special mention by New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall. Through the agency of Charles Chaplin and Mary Pickford, he met the German writer and screenwriter Karl Gustav Vollmoeller, who invited him to Venice and Berlin in 1925 and introduced him to the actor Emil Jannings. He and actor George K. Arthur made The Salvation Hunters (1925) for only US $4,800. It was filmed on a large steam dredge in the marshes near San Pedro Bay. It depicted three young drifters who struggle to survive in a dystopian landscape. The film caught the attention of some critics who praised Sternberg's innovative use of light and shadow in the dramatisation of a scene. Plans to make a film with Mary Pickford subsequently fell through, but in the end, Von Sternberg was offered a contract by MGM. Signing an eight-film agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925, Sternberg entered into the increasingly rigid studio system at MGM, and cooperation with the studio executives and the stars was not easy. During the shooting of The Masked Bride (1925), Von Sternberg, who was notorious for being autocratic, argued violently with the leading actress Mae Murray for weeks. Eventually, the contract was terminated by mutual agreement and the film was directed by Christy Cabanne. A short time later he received an offer by Charles Chaplin to make the film A Woman of the Sea/The Sea Gull (Josef von Sternberg, 1926) as a comeback vehicle for Edna Purviance, Chaplin's former leading lady. However, Chaplin decided not to distribute the finished film as he considered it a "highly visual, almost Expressionistic" work, completely lacking in the humanism that he had anticipated". In the 1930s, Chaplin had the negative destroyed to be able to deduct the filming costs from his taxes. The tide turned for Von Sternberg when he got a contract with Paramount in 1927. After he had successfully re-produced some scenes for films that had already been shot, such as Children of Divorce (Frank Lloyd, 1927), with Clara Bow, he got the chance to shoot the film Underworld later that year. The script about Chicago gangsters by journalist Ben Hecht took a concerned look behind the scenes of organised crime for the first time and Von Sternberg turned it into a gripping gangster film. At the same time, he composed scenes out of light and shadow that prompted one critic to remark that von Sternberg used the camera the way a painter uses his brush. The film was an enormous box-office hit and Academy Award winner for Best Original Story. After this overwhelming commercial success, Paramount gave Von Sternberg a free hand with the direction of The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg, 1928), which was shot with Emil Jannings, the studio's most valuable star. A year later, Jannings won the Oscar in the Best Actor in a Leading Role category for his performance, the first actor to do so. In the same year followed the drama The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928) starring George Bancroft, Betty Compson, and Olga Baclanova, one of the most mature and visually beautiful films of his career. The story about a sailor and a prostitute was transformed by Von Sternberg into a symphony of shadows and lighting effects.

In 1929, Josef von Sternberg went to Germany to film the first sound film with star Emil Jannings at Paramount'sister studio Ufa. The contract with Ufa was brokered by Karl Gustav Vollmoeller, who was placed at his side by Ufa as screenwriter, technical advisor and general editor. It was also thanks to him that the film rights of the novel 'Professor Unrat' by Heinrich Mann were sold to Ufa under the title Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930). The female lead was initially to be given to a wide variety of actresses, including Louise Brooks. But in the end, the choice fell on Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola, the nemesis of Emil Jannings's character Professor Immanuel Rath. Sternberg's romantic infatuation with his new star created difficulties on and off the set. Jannings strenuously objected to Sternberg's lavish attention to Dietrich's performance, at the elder actor's expense. Dietrich became an international star overnight. The director and his new star left for America the same evening as the premiere, where they began shooting Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) with Gary Cooper. Dietrich was built up by the studio as an answer to Greta Garbo, but Von Sternberg turned the actress into a screen personality all her own throughout their six Hollywood films together: Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil is a Woman (1935). Wikipedia: "The stories are typically set in exotic locales including Saharan Africa, World War I Austria, revolutionary China, Imperial Russia, and fin-de-siècle Spain. Sternberg's 'outrageous aestheticism' is on full display in these richly stylized works, both in technique and scenario." However, von Sternberg was quickly accused by the press of paying too much attention to the visual aspects and staging of his leading lady and placing too little emphasis on a good script. Especially the film Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932), which they made immediately after their biggest financial success Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932), made Von Sternberg's implied weaknesses clear. Marlene Dietrich, who finally wanted a change of role, away from the eternal seductress, demanded material that showed her as a caring wife and good mother. Von Sternberg, however, did not like the concept and also showed Dietrich as a cabaret star. At no point was there a coherent script and in the end, according to critics, only the musical scenes were convincing, such as the famous 'hot voodoo' number in which Dietrich first comes on stage dressed as a gorilla and then peels herself out of the costume.
In 1931, the director took over a half-finished script that Sergei Eisenstein had written based on the social novel 'An American Tragedy' by Theodore Dreiser before he was forced out of the project. Von Sternberg discarded most of the ideas and started from scratch. The result, An American Tragedy (Josef von Sternberg, 1931), a tale of a sexually obsessed middle-class youth (Phillips Holmes) whose deceptions lead to the death of a poor factory girl (Sylvia Sidney), divided critics like few of his previous works. On the one hand, they praised the already familiar compositions of light and shadow and the performance of Sylvia Sidney as Drina. But overall the consensus was that Dreiser's biting social commentary and Von Sternberg's more lyrical narrative style were mutually exclusive. After Marlene Dietrich, under pressure from the studio and against the backdrop of the less-than-encouraging box office results of Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932), had made the less-than-successful film Song of Songs (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933), the two artists reunited in mid-1934. In response to the very successful film Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933), which showed Garbo as the Swedish queen a year earlier, Paramount wanted to present its glamour star as a famous ruler as well. Thus, under Sternberg's direction, the historical film The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934) was made with Dietrich as Catherine the Great. During the filming, which was again marked by endless changes to the script, and amid escalating production costs. The Von Sternberg-Dietrich collaboration ended the following year with The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, 1935), a story about a Spanish dancer. In this final tribute, he sets forth his reflections on their five-year professional and personal association. Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs, 'La Femme et le pantin' (The Woman and the Puppet, 1908), the drama unfolds in Spain's famous carnival at the end of the 19th century. A love triangle develops pitting the young revolutionary Antonio (Cesar Romero) against the middle-aged former military officer Don Pasqual (Lionel Atwill) in a contest for the love of the devastatingly beautiful demimondaine Concha (Dietrich). Despite the gaiety of the setting, the film has a dark, brooding, reflective quality. Dietrich liked the film more than any other because he made her look so beautiful. However, the film was a disaster financially.

In 1935, after the financial failures of The Scarlet Empress and The Devil is a Woman, Josef von Sternberg moved to Columbia Pictures, where he made Crime and Punishment (Josef von Sternberg, 1935), an adaption of the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel starring Peter Lorre. The film was shown this year at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022 and Ehsan Khoshbakht writes in the festival catalogue: "Sternberg uses intense closeups of a profusely sweating Lorre (already hooked on drugs in real life) to show his further drift into mental instability. But unlike with other adaptations, the director doesn’t care much about the moral dilemmas central to Dostoevsky’s work. Sternberg is a man of surfaces, the outer appearance of the world, and never delves into Raskolnikov’s delirious vision. As a result, the film confused and angered reviewers upon its release. Today, the same restraint has become the film’s main strength." Sternberg's next feature was The King Steps Out (Josef von Sternberg, 1936), based on Fritz Kreisler's 'Sissi', an operetta about the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria and starring soprano Grace Moore. The production was undermined by personal and professional discord between the opera diva and the director. Sternberg found himself unable to identify himself with his leading lady or adapt his style to the demands of operetta. He left Columbia. The following year he was hired by Alexander Korda to film I, Claudius (Josef von Sternberg, 1937), but the shoot turned into a disaster. The leading actress Merle Oberon almost died in a traffic accident, the financing of the film fell through and in the end, the production was cancelled. The few surviving scenes, however, are considered the best Von Sternberg ever shot. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer asked Sternberg to finish up a few scenes for departing French director Julien Duvivier's The Great Waltz (1938). At the personal request of Louis B. Mayer, Von Sternberg was commissioned in 1938 to turn his Austrian discovery Hedy Lamarr into the biggest star in the world. The production of I Take This Woman (W.S. Van Dyke, 1940) soon turned into a full-blown disaster that lasted over 16 months, with almost the entire cast replaced and three directors taking turns. Eventually, Von Sternberg found himself directing Wallace Beery in the police drama Sergeant Madden (Josef von Sternberg, 1939). The film is notable in that the theme and style strongly resemble German films of the post-WWI period. Despite some resistance from the bombastic Beery, Sternberg coaxed a relatively restrained performance that recalls Emil Jannings. Except for Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941), which tells the story of Mother Gin Sling and her brothel (a casino in the film), and the drama The Saga of Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953), his later work did not have the level of his years at Paramount. Wikipedia calls Shanghai Gesture "a tour-de-force with Sternberg's sheer 'physical expressiveness' of his characters that conveys both emotion and motivation". The Japanese war drama Anatahan/The Saga of Anatahan told the true story of Japanese soldiers who held their position on the island of Anatahan for seven years after the end of the war because they refused to accept the Japanese surrender. Von Sternberg had an unusually high degree of control over the film, made outside the studio system, which allowed him to not only direct, but also write, photograph, and narrate the action. Although Anatahan/The Saga of Anatahan opened modestly well in Japan, it did poorly in the US, where Von Sternberg continued to recut the film for four more years. He subsequently abandoned the project and went on to teach film at UCLA for most of the remainder of his lifetime. In 1963, Josef von Sternberg received the Filmband in Gold in Germany for his many years of outstanding work. Two years later, he presented his sardonic autobiography 'Fun in a Chinese Laundry' (1965) of which the title was drawn from an early film comedy. Josef von Sternberg died in 1969 in a Los Angeles County hospital as a result of a heart attack. He was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. He was married to film actress Riza Royce in his first marriage from 1926 to 1930. In 1945 he married Jean Avette McBride. The marriage was divorced in 1947. Von Sternberg was finally married to the art historian Meri Otis Wilner from 1948 until his death. From this marriage came his son Nicholas Josef von Sternberg, who was born in 1951.

Sources: Ehsan Khoshbakht (Il Cinema Ritrovato), Wikipedia (German, Dutch and English) and IMDb.

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German cigarette card for Hänsom cigarettes by Jasmatzi Cigarettenfabrik G.M.b.H, Dresden/Ross Verlag, Film Series 4 'Aus tönenden Filmen' (From sound films), no. 508. Photo: Froelich-Film.

Carl Froelich (1875-1953) was a German film pioneer and film director, who made many silent films with Henny Porten and produced such classics as Die Brüder Karamasoff/The Brothers Karamazov (1922), the first German sound film, Die Nacht gehört uns/The Night Belongs To Us (1929) and the groundbreaking Mädchen in Uniform/Girls in Uniform (1931). In 1933, Froelich became a member of the National Socialist Party and later became President of the Reichsfilmkammer. After the end of the war, Froelich was arrested and in 1948 he was de-Nazified. Between 1912 and 1951 he made 77 films.

Carl August Hugo Froelich was born in Berlin, Germany in 1875. From 1903 Froelich worked with Oskar Messter, one of the pioneers of German cinema. For Messter, he initially worked in the construction department for cinematographic apparatuses. In 1906, he started to work as a cinematographer. As a cameraman for Messter's weekly newsreels, he filmed among many other things the aftermath of a train accident on the Berlin elevated railway on 28 September 1908, one of the worst transport disasters of the time. In 1913 Froelich made his directorial debut with Richard Wagner (Carl Froelich, William Wauer, 1913) with Giuseppe Becce as the famous German composer. He directed Asta Nielsen in Irrende Seelen/Wandering Souls (Carl Froelich, 1921) which was based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1869 novel ‘The Idiot’. In 1920, he set up his own production company, Froelich-Film GmbH, in conjunction with film star Henny Porten,. who had made her screen debut at the Messter Studio. He produced such films as the Friedrich Schiller adaptation Luise Millerin/ Kabale und Liebe (1922) with Lil Dagover, the Fyodor Dostoevsky adaptation Die Brüder Karamasoff/The Brothers Karamazov (1922) starring Fritz Kortner and Emil Jannings, and the drama Mutter und Kind/Mother and Child (1924) with Henny Porten. During these years he made many films with Porten including Kammermusik/Chamber Music (1925), Das Abenteuer der Sibylle Brant/The Adventures of Sybil Brent (1925), Tragödie/Tragedy (1925) with Walter Janssen, and Die Flammen lügen/The Flames Lie (1926). In 1926 Froelich and Porten founded the production company Henny Portenm-Froelich-Produktion which ended in 1929. In between they made such comedies as Meine Tante - deine Tante/My Aunt, Your Aunt (1927) and Liebe im Kuhstall/Love in Kuhstall (1928) and drama like Violantha (1927) with Wilhelm Dieterle and Zuflucht/Refuge (1928) with Franz Lederer.

Carl Froelich made one of the first German sound films, Die Nacht gehört uns/The Night Belongs To Us (1929), starring Hans Albers. In 1930 he took over two glasshouses in Berlin-Tempelhof, which had been used as studios in the days of silent film. He converted them to sound film studios. Here he produced many films, including the short film Das Schönheitsfleckchen/The Beauty Spot (Rolf Hansen, 1936), the first German drama film in colour. In 1931 he was advisor, credited as ‘senior artistic director’, to Leontine Sagan's famous boarding-school film Mädchen in Uniform/Girls in Uniform (1931). The film is now seen as a lesbian classic. By 1933 Froelich was one of Germany's most noted film artists, producing successful films with the stars of the period, including Hans Albers, Heinz Rühmann, Ingrid Bergman and Zarah Leander. Froelich became a member of the National Socialist Party in 1933 and took over the direction of the Gesamtverbandes der Filmherstellung und Filmverwertung (Union of Film Manufacture and Film Evaluation). For the Reich Propaganda Directorate of the NSDAP, he directed the Propaganda film Ich für dich, du für mich/I'm for You, You're for Me (1934). Some of the best-known films he made during this period were: Heimat/Homeland (1938) starring Zarah Leander, Das Herz der Königin/The Queen's Heart (1940), an anti-British historical film about Mary, Queen of Scots (also Zarah Leander), and the comedy Der Gasmann/The Gasman (1941) in which Heinz Rühmann plays a gas-meter reader suspected of being a foreign spy. In 1937 Froelich was awarded a professorship and in 1939 was appointed president of the Reichsfilmkammer, an office which he retained until the end of the war in 1945. The Reichsfilmkammer was a subordinate to the Reichskulturkammer, which as a National Socialist trade organisation regulated and controlled access to all artistic professions. He was one of the few filmmakers who received the title ‘Filmprofessor’ from Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. After the end of the war, Froelich was arrested and in 1948 he was de-Nazified. His studio had been badly damaged during the war and did not resume production. He directed only two more films before his death: the comedies Drei Mädchen spinnen/Three Girls Spinning (1950) and Stips (1951) with Gustav Fröhlich. Carl Froelich died in 1953 in Berlin at 77. He was married to Emmy Hoffert (1905-1940) and Edith Faust (1941-1953).

Sources: Wikipedia (German and English), and IMDb.

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German cigarette card for Hänsom cigarettes by Jasmatzi Cigarettenfabrik G.M.b.H, Dresden/Ross Verlag, Film Series 4 'Aus tönenden Filmen' (From sound films), no. 509. Photo: Nero-Film.

Fritz Lang (1890-1976) was an Austrian-German-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the 'Master of Darkness' by the British Film Institute. Lang's most famous films include the groundbreaking futuristic Metropolis (1927) and the influential M (1931), a Film Noir precursor that he made before he moved to the United States. His other notable films include Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler/Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Woman in the Window (1944), and The Big Heat (1953).

Friedrich Christian Anton 'Fritz' Lang was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria), as the second son of Anton Lang, an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Paula Lang born Schlesinger. Paula was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. His parents took their religion seriously and were dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang frequently had Catholic-influenced themes in his films. After finishing school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. He left Vienna in 1910 to see the world, travelling throughout Europe and Africa, and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris. At the outbreak of World War I, Lang returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austrian army. He fought in Russia and Romania, where he was wounded four times and lost sight in his right eye. While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. These were filmed as Die Peitsche/The Whip (Adolf Gärtner, 1916), starring Ernst Reicher as the detective Stuart Webbs, and Hilde Warren und der Tod/Hilde Warren and Death (Joe May, 1917). He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theatre circuit for a short time. Then he was hired by Erich Pommer as a writer at Decla Film in Berlin. Lang's writing stint there was brief, but resulted in Die Pest in Florenz/The Plague in Florence (Otto Rippert, 1919), based on the story 'The Masque of the Red Death' by Edgar Allan Poe. Soon Lang started to work under Pommer as a director at the new German film studio Ufa, just as the Expressionist movement was building. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between such art films as Der Müde Tod/The Weary Death/Destiny (1921) and popular thrillers such as the two-parter Die Spinnen/The Spiders (1919). He combined popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema.

In 1920, Fritz Lang met his future wife, the writer Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his films from 1921 through 1933. In 1922 he became a German citizen. Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler/Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) ran for over four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy. Then followed the five-hour Die Nibelungen/Die Nibelungen: Siegfried & Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge (1924), starring Paul Richter and Margarete Schön. His most famous film, the Fantasy Metropolis (1927) starring Brigitte Helm and Gustav Fröhlich, went far over budget and nearly destroyed Ufa which was then bought by right-wing businessman and politician Alfred Hugenberg. Metropolis was a financial flop, as were his last silent films Spione/Spies (1928) with Willy Fritsch, and the Science Fiction film Frau im Mond/Woman in the Moon (1929) with Fritsch and Gerda Maurus, produced by Lang's own company. In 1931, independent producer Seymour Nebenzahl hired Lang to direct M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder/M (1931) for Nero-Film. Lang's first talking picture is considered by many film scholars to be a masterpiece of the early sound era. It is a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. M remains a powerful work. Wikipedia: "In the films of his German period, Lang produced a coherent oeuvre that established the characteristics later attributed to Film Noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity." At the end of 1932, Lang started filming Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse/The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), starring Rudolf Klein-Rogge. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the new regime soon banned the film as an incitement to public disorder. Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse is sometimes deemed an anti-Nazi film, as Lang had put phrases used by the Nazis into the mouth of the title character. Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage, whereas his wife and co-screenwriter Thea von Harbou had started to sympathise with the Nazis in the early 1930s, and went on to join the NSDAP in 1940. They soon divorced. According to Lang, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called him to his offices to inform him that Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse/The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was being banned but he was so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker that he offered him the position of head of the Ufa. Lang did not accept the position and decided to leave for Paris.

In 1933, Fritz Lang divorced Thea von Harbou, who stayed behind in Berlin. In Paris, Lang filmed a version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom (1933), starring Charles Boyer and Madeleine Ozeray. In 1934, he moved to Hollywood, where he signed with MGM. His first American film was the crime drama Fury (1936), which starred Spencer Tracy as a man who is wrongly accused of a crime and nearly is killed when a lynch mob sets fire to the jail where he is awaiting trial. From the beginning, Lang was struggling with restrictions in the United States. Thus, in Fury, he was not allowed to represent black victims in a lynching scenario or to criticise racism. Lang became a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1939. He made twenty-three features in his 20-year American career, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, and occasionally producing his films as an independent. Wikipedia: "His American films were often compared unfavourably to his earlier works by contemporary critics, but the restrained Expressionism of these films is now seen as integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, Film Noir in particular. His film Scarlet Street (1945) is considered a central film in the genre." One of Lang's most famous Film Noirs is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), noted for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. As Lang's visual style simplified, in part due to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).

In the 1950s, Fritz Lang found it increasingly hard to get work, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult to work with. His health also declined with age, and Lang contemplated retirement. Then the German producer Artur Brauner expressed interest in remaking Das indische Grabmal/The Indian Tomb (1921) a silent film that Lang had developed but had ultimately been directed by Joe May. Lang returned to Germany to make his 'Indian Epic': Der Tiger von Eschnapur/The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) and Das indische Grabmal/The Indian Tomb (1959) with Debra Paget, Paul Hubschmid, and Walter Reyer. Following this production, Brauner was preparing a remake of Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse/The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) when Lang approached him with the idea of adding a new original film to the series. The result was Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse/The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). The success of the film led to a series of new Mabuse films, which were produced by Brauner, including the remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Lang did not direct any of the sequels. He was approaching blindness during the production of The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960) and it was his final project as director. In 1963, he appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris/Contempt (1963) with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. Fritz Lang died from a stroke in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. He was 85. Langs was married three times: In 1919 he married Lisa Rosenthal, who died in 1921. He was married to Thea von Harbou, from 1922 till 1933, and to Lily Latté from 1971 till his death in 1976. While his career had ended without fanfare, Lang's American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma, such as François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

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German cigarette card for Hänsom cigarettes by Jasmatzi Cigarettenfabrik G.M.b.H, Dresden/Ross Verlag, Film Series 4 'Aus tönenden Filmen' (From sound films), no. 510. Photo: Nero Film.

Austrian film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1885-1967)
was together with Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch one of the great film directors of the Weimar Republic of Germany. He worked in Germany, France, Italy and the US. Some of his best-known films deal with the situation of women in the Weimar Republic. His best-known films include Die freudlose Gasse (1925), Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), Die Dreigroschenoper (1931) and Kameradschaft (1931). During World War II, he made the films Komödianten (1941) and Paracelsus (1943) in Nazi Germany.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst (or G.W. Pabst) was born in the Bohemian town of Raudnitz, Austria-Hungary (today's Roudnice nad Labem, Czech Republic) in 1885. He was the son of a railway clerk. While growing up in Vienna, he studied drama at the Academy of Decorative Arts and initially began his career as a stage actor in Switzerland, Austria and Germany. In 1910, Pabst travelled to the United States, where he worked as an actor and director at the German Theater in New York City. In 1914, he decided to become a director, and he returned to recruit actors in Europe. Pabst was in France when World War I began, he was arrested and held as an enemy alien and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp near Brest. While imprisoned, Pabst organised a theatre group at the camp and directed French-language plays. Upon his release in 1919, he returned to Vienna, where he became director of the Neue Wiener Bühne, an avant-garde theatre. Pabst began his career as a film director at the behest of Carl Froelich who hired Pabst as an assistant director. He directed his first film, the silent melodrama Der Schatz/The Treasure, in 1923. He directed Henny Porten in the drama Gräfin Donelli/Countess Donelli (1924). His first major success was the silent drama Die freudlose Gasse/Joyless Street (1925) with Greta Garbo and Asta Nielsen. This socially critical, often censored film marked the beginning of an extremely productive period with numerous artistically valuable and commercially successful films including such silent films as Geheimnisse einer Seele/Secrets of a Soul (1926) with Werner Krauss and Ruth Weyher, Die Liebe der Jeanne NeyThe Loves of Jeanne Ney (1927) with Edith Jehanne and Brigitte Helm,Die Büchse der Pandora/Pandora's Box (1928), based on Frank Wedekind's 'Pandora's Box' and 'Earth Spirit', and Tagebuch einer Verlorenen/Diary of a Lost Woman (1929). In the latter two films, the lead role was played by then-still-unknown American actress Louise Brooks. Together with Arnold Fanck, Pabst also directed the mountain film Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü/The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929) starring Leni Riefenstahl and Gustav Diessl.

With the entry of the sound film, Georg Wilhelm Pabst made a trilogy of films that secured his reputation. He achieved international success with the war film Westfront 1918 (1930). Like Lewis Milestone's film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), the uncompromising anti-war tone of the film led to heated discussions in Germany. His next successes were Die 3-Groschenoper/The Threepenny Opera (1931), based on the Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill musical, and the drama Kameradschaft/Comradeship (1931), a French-German co-production concerning a mine disaster where German miners rescue French miners from an underground fire and explosion. With these films, Pabst placed his work firmly on the left-wing political spectrum and earned the nickname ‘the red Pabst’. Pabst also filmed three versions of Pierre Benoit's novel L'Atlantide in 1932, in German, English, and French, titled Die Herrin von Atlantis, The Mistress of Atlantis, and L'Atlantide, respectively. In 1933, Pabst directed Don Quixote, once again in German, English, and French versions. At the time the National Socialists seized power, Pabst was filming in France. He decided to stay in France, where he made another film. In the same year, his next stop was Hollywood, where he had little success with A Modern Hero (1934) starring Richard Barthelmess. Then he returned to France to make the Spy film Mademoiselle Docteur/Street of Shadows (1937) starring Pierre Blanchar and Dita Parlo. When he was visiting his family in Austria in 1939, he was surprised by the start of the Second World War. As he was no longer able to leave the German Reich, he now made films for Bavaria Film under the auspices of propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels. The film biographies Komödianten/The Comedians (1941) and Paracelsus (1943) romanticised historical figures from German history and are typical of the era with their subtle propaganda tendencies. Leni Riefenstahl asked Pabst to help direct the film Tiefland, as she felt she was Pabst's pupil. However, the collaboration soon ended in a dispute because Riefenstahl had completely different ideas about directing actors. Unfinished remained the drama Der Fall Molander/The Molander Case (1945) based on the novel 'Die Sternegeige' by Alfred Karrasch. On August 28, 1944, Pabst started shooting the film for Terra Film. As shooting was just completed at the Barrandov Studios in Prague and editing had already begun, Prague was liberated by the Red Army and Pabst was forced to abandon the work. The remaining film is kept at the Národní Filmový Archiv in Prague.

After the war, Georg Wilhelm Pabst was unable to continue the success of the films of the Weimar Republic. He made films in Austria, Italy and Germany. For his film Der Prozeß/The Trial (1948) starring Ewald Balser and Ernst Deutsch, he was awarded the director's prize at the Venice Film Festival. The film deals with the Tiszaeszlár affair. In 1949, the City of Vienna promised to fund four films by Pabst. The first film Geheimnisvolle Tiefe/Mysterious Depths (1949) with a screenplay written by his wife Gertrude was such a failure that it ended the whole project. Pabst directed four opera productions in Italy in 1953: 'La forza del destino' for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence and a few weeks later, for the Arena di Verona Festival, a spectacular 'Aïda', with Maria Callas in the title role, 'Il trovatore' and again 'La forza del destino'. His films Der letzte Akt/The Last Ten Days (1955) and Es geschah am 20. Juli/It Happened on 20 July (1955) dealt with anti-Semitism and the ‘Third Reich’. Der letzte Akt was the first film in post-World War II Germany to feature the character of Adolf Hitler, played by Albin Skoda. Both films were considered quite remarkable attempts to deal with the shadows of the past. Pabst's career and reputation were increasingly damaged by commissioned work such as his last two films, Rosen für Bettina/Roses for Bettina (1956) with Elisabeth Müller and Durch die Wälder, durch die Auen[/Through the Woods, Through the Meadows (1956) with Eva Bartok. Pabst's illness with Parkinson's disease in 1957 finally made it impossible for him to continue his film work. Georg Wilhelm Pabst died in Vienna in 1967 at 81. He is buried in a grave of honour in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery). In 1968, Georg-Wilhelm-Pabst-Gasse in Vienna-Favoriten was named after him. In 2024, the forecourt of the old cinema in Leibnitz was also named after G. W. Pabst, as he lived in the private Fünfturm castle in Tillmitsch near Leibnitz for several years. Pabst was married to Gertrude (Trude) Hennings (born 1899) from 1924. Their son Peter (born 1924) was his father's assistant after the Second World War and later an editor at Bavarian television. In 1964/1965, their second son Michael (born 1941) conducted interviews to prepare a biography, which remained unfinished. G. W. Pabst is the fictional protagonist of Daniel Kehlmann's acclaimed novel 'Lichtspiel', published in autumn 2023.

Sources: Wikipedia (Dutch, German and English) and IMDb.

And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

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