Our Man in Vienna

Homage to the Thalia

I remember the old Thalia well. It was located off Broadway at 95th Street. The daily fare was two foreign double-feature films with subtitles which were shown for the duration of a day. There was an elaborate folded program on which the films were invariably described as “masterpieces.” Most of the films were French. They were directed by such masters as René Clair, Julian Duvivier, Marcel Carné and Jean Cocteau. The names alone are music.

You went to see Hollywood films in theaters that resembled Moroccan palaces. Some of the films were black-and-white, but many were in Technicolor. I saw a lot of good ones at those venues, but the Thalia is where I got my education. It was the antithesis of being luxurious. Rundown and ramshackle is the best description. The films were the “Vielle Vague.” The Nouvelle Vague had not yet struck the cinematic shore.

I frequented the Thalia in the mid-Fifties while I attended Columbia. I spent hours and hours sitting on its hard, uncomfortable seats, watching black-and-white French films of the Thirties and Forties. Now and then, the film would break and you had to wait for it to be spliced before you could continue watching it.

Yes there was irritation and discomfort, but film is the thing.

What can I say? Where else could I have seen those wonderful French films? I don’t know what my life would have been like if I could not look back on the Thalia.

Attending the Thalia was like drinking vin ordinaire to a crisp baguette – or in other words, a fare of nectar and ambrosia.

Remember the Days!

Who was Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry? He was Stepin Fetchit? Who dat? Here’s Stepin to provide he answer: “I was the Sammy Davis of the Stone Age.” Stepin was the “sacred nigger” of the Thirties and Forties Bs. He’d turn up on his tiptoes with eyes bugging when there was a threat of gangsters or ghosts. He was good for a laugh or two. Stepin was a nice fellow who wasn’t too smart and he was just plain scared when he thought that danger loomed.

Stepin Fetchit

That’s how we saw blacks in those days. The women were mammies and the men were “Stepin.” (Actually his Jewish counterpart was Jerry Lewis, who was the stereotypical schlemiel. But that cliché lasted longer.)

High Sierra, directed by Raoul Walsh in 1941, stars Bogey as gangster on the lam and Ida Lupino as his loyal girlfriend. Bogey’s star was rising and he’d go on to Casablanca. Ida’s star was falling and she’d go on to starring and directing Bs. Walsh was a good and successful director, but he stooped in Sierra to using Stepin for a few cheap laughs.

The “Stepin” image was so ingrained that even one of Hollywood’s best directors apparently couldn’t free himself from it.

Thank God those days are over!

From Stromboli to The Visit

Ingrid Bergman left Hollywood to make Stromboli for Roberto Rosselini in 1949. Her intention was to leave Tinsel-Town glamour behind her to in order make neo-realistic European films. And Roberto’s manly appeal may have influenced her decision. Roberto had made Roma, Open City and Paisa, which are indeed stunning. Some film buffs love the films he made with Bergman. I think Stromboli was so-so, but that all the others were duds.

Twenty-five years later she starred in a film version of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit directed by stickler Bernhard Wicki, which was a European production. Wicki had died a thousand deaths when he filmed Morituri with Marlon Brando. Brando had moved Heaven and Earth to get Wicki on the set, but once he had him, he made Wicki regret that he had ever been born. And the result of Wicki’s tribulations was nothing to be proud of. Ditto for Ingrid.

In Dürrenmatt’s play, an unattractive, crippled old lady returns to her hometown as a wealthy, powerful revenge-seeker in order to bring about the lynching of the man who seduced and ruined her. However, in the film “the old lady” turns out to be younger, attractive and with limbs intact. Instead of having her quondam lover, the present mayor, done in, she relents and shows mercy.

Thus Bergman rewrote and “glamorized” one of the most significant and successful contemporary plays, riding roughshod over author and director. And Hollywood celebrated a triumph over realism, neo-realism, surrealism and what-have-you, albeit in Europe. And thus Bergman propelled herself right smack back to the spirit she had left behind in Tinsel Town.

to be continued . . .

– Herbert Kuhner

The Devil’s General and the “Idealist”

Karl Zuckmayer and Ernst Udet were friends.

Zuckmayer, who was half-Jewish and an anti-Nazi, left Germany for Austria when Hitter rose to power. In 1938, he left Austria for Switzerland and then emigrated to the United States.

Udet, a daredevil pilot helped build the Luftwaffe up after Hitler came to power. He was not on good terms with the Nazis and was skeptical about their ability to win a world war. After the victory of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, his skepticism increased. He committed suicide in November of 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union – before victories turned into defeat.

I saw the film version of the Devil’s General in an East Side Art Theater in 1955, the year of its release. At the time something bothered me and it still does. Oberst Friedrich Eilers is described as a Nazi idealist General Harry Harras is The Devil’s General aka Ernst Udet., Ingenieur Karl Oderbruch is Harras’ friend. Oderbruch has been sabotaging fighter planes and Eilers flies in one of them to his death. Thus Oderbruch was responsible for the death of their mutual friend, a man who believed in “the cause.” The denouement is the death of Harras who commits suicide by crashing one of the defect planes into the airport.

Here’s my problem: How can a Nazi be a Nazi idealist? Isn’t that a contrast in terms? What as Zuckmayer getting at? Did he think there was such a conglomerate as a man of integrity who believed in the cause? The cause was dishonorable, and you cannot fight honorably for a dishonorable cause.
National Socialism was a German nationalistic ideology that advocated the conquest and enslavement of other nations, as well as racial purity, and in order to achieve that purity, Germany engaged in genocide

That’s as clear as can be. The goals were candidly stated by Hitler and his cohorts. You can very well be a Nazi, but you cannot be a Nazi and an idealist.

Marxism is another matter. Marxism is internationalist ideology that advocates meliorism. You can be a Marxist and an idealist (albeit, some might say a misguided one). Stalin used Marxism as a cover for conquest, enslavement and mass murder.

Autor: Carl Zuckmayer.Foto: Archiv S. Fischer Verlag.

What was Zuckmayer getting at? Did he want to provide an alibi for some advocates of National Socialism? Were they good people who were duped? I say definitely not! Those who believed in the “cause” knew what it was all about.

Inglorious Basterds (sic) and Inglorious Depictions

Here are some inglorious Third Reich depictions:

In Hogan’s Heroes, the Sixties World-War-Two sit-com series, the German officers and soldiers are presented as likeable bunglers constantly outsmarted by the allied prisoners. There is absolutely no reference to Nazi propaganda, nor is there ever any physical abuse. (Auschwitz must have been on another planet.)

This series, which is constantly rebroadcast on German TV, is an idealization of National Socialism, which goes far beyond what any Third-Reich Revisionist could cook up.

The award-winning Life Is Beautiful, starts out as a tepid B-film slapstick love-affair à la Buster Keaton, bicycle-for-two and all. Keaton was, however, A-fair, but Beautiful never pokes its head out of the B-category. (Buster, please forgive me for making this sacrilegious comparison!)

Then the romantic peace-time slapstick fades into war-time slapstick. The transition is very mild.

Even internment a German Death Camp can’t cast a shadow over the hero’s good mood and the sunny upbringing of his small son.

As he is marched to death, he parodies the goose step, giving his son, who is watching, the final comic touch. The “bang” is off-screen. Of course, the German guard didn’t knock him down and shoot him on the spot, which was the usual reaction to mockery.

“Violence is one of the most fun things to watch,” says Quentin Tarantino. “Would I watch a kung-fu movie three days after the Sandy Hook massacre?” he asks. “Maybe. Because they have nothing to do with each other,” he answers.

I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be so sure!

In Pulp Fiction, which is a fitting title, Samuel L. Jackson plays a hit man who quotes Biblical verse – a very amusing touch which provides some chuckles. Of course, there would have been no likelihood of any hit man delving into the Bible before 1994.

The Inglorious Basterds want to take revenge on the Nazis for Auschwitz, and indeed there were Jewish American soldiers, as well as other Jews, who hunted down SS members to give them their own medicine.

Christoph Waltz in is an SS Officer like no other. He’s a fine actor and his bravura over-the-top performance is a fascinating rug-chewing, leap away from reality, as is the whole film, minus the adjective “fascinating.”
In Basterds the roles are reversed. Is this wishful thinking? Here are some “fun things to watch.” The Jewish avengers emulate the Nazis in brutality, murdering and bludgeoning – and even scalping as they go along. In the last scene Waltz’s SS officer gets the swastika carved onto his forehead by a bloodthirsty Brad Pitt. Before this flesh-work scene, Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and consorts are burned to a crisp in a Paris movie theater. How’s that for historical accuracy?

Christoph Waltz

More Tarrantino: “I hate that hand-wringing shit. Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation….One of the things that’s interesting to me is equating the Jews in this case with the Indians in a Western. Maybe it’s not nothing that I’m 25percent Cherokee Indian. If I go do a movie of Jewish Americans fighting back in World War II, then I equate them with the other race that I am, and I use the Indian battle plan, their methods, to attack the Nazis. Why isn’t that all right? He’s a Nazi! They’re giving him a scar. I don’t know if I would even go so far as to call that torture. He’s scarring him. He’s not torturing him. What he’s doing isn’t so ridiculously painful.”

Tarantino’s characters speak and act. Brad Pitt‘s Lt. Aldo Raine: “We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. Every man under my command owes me 100 Nazi scalps.”

Bat-wielding “Bear Jew” (played by Eli Roth, the horror film director): “It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling. My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education. My grandparents got out of Poland and Russia and Austria, but their relatives did not.”[1]

A personal note: Members of my family were victims of the Nazis. I was present at the age of three when SA-marauders ransacked my grandmother’s apartment. If I’d had the chance in later years, I’d have polished off those SA-criminals without batting an eye. And I’d have gone off whistling. That of course would have been an “ideal” situation that almost never occurs.

I definitely do not want to be a victim, but the last thing I want to be on this earth is a Nazi.

The theme of Jewish revenge for Auschwitz is a serious theme which could indeed be brought to film, but with some sort of factual basis, rather than as a simple sadistic revenge-fantasy.

“Inglorious” fits these depictions to T!

to be continued . . .

– Herbert Kuhner

Casablanca and Serendipity

I favor starting out with a concept and carrying through to the denouement. However, sometimes chance is a better method than any method.

Ingrid Bergman didn’t jell with Humphrey Bogart and ditto for him. Ingrid also she wasn’t enthralled by the making of Casablanca. The script was ad lib, and there was no ending prior to the end of filming the film. The ending, in which the lovers sacrifice their love for the cause, was tacked on at the last minute. (Later, after Ingrid “eloped” with Roberto Rossellini, there would practically be no script at all for the five films he directed for her. So in a way, Casablanca broke her in.) My view on those films dissents from that of many film buffs. I think serendipity didn’t work out very well for Roberto.

Herman Hupfeld

Who is Herman Hupfeld? He is the composer and lyricist for Down The Old Back Road, A Hut in Hoboken and the stellar Goopy Geer. He also wrote that Fats Waller favorite Let’s Put Out The Lights (And Go To Sleep). And the classic As Time Goes By also came from his pen. Here’s the story of how Time became associated with Casablanca, as related by Frank Miller, the author of the book Casablanca:

”As Time Goes By had been written in the ’20s and had enjoyed moderate success in a recording by Rudy Vallee. But it was the favorite song Murray Burnett, one of the co-authors of the play Everybody Goes to Rick’s. He used the song as the love them for Rick and the leading lady (in the play she’s named Lois). Nobody at Warner’s questioned the use of that song, since the studio owned the rights anyway. When the film had been shot and Max Steiner was ready to score it, he tried to get them to change the song, claiming that it was so musically uninteresting that he couldn’t work it into the score. He also may have wanted to write a new song for the film and possibly make a hit (as he had done with It Can’t Be Wrong, the song he wrote for Now, Voyager). Hal Wallis was ready to make the change, but it meant re-shooting some lines for Ingrid Bergman. And she had already cut her hair short for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Unable to match up the shots, they had to stick with As Time Goes By, which became a bigger hit than ever as a result of its use in this film.”

Casablanca, in my view; is a pot boiler with nary a cliché missing. I’ve said that Michael Curtiz could get good juice out of bad oranges, and this juice is terrific. But Michael did get a little help from serendipity on this one. What if Ronald Reagan and Hedy Lamarr, who were first choice for the roles, had been the stars? And what if Ingrid had not had her hair cut?

At any rate, serendipity is responsible for the inclusion of As Time Goes By in Casablanca and it
“dictated” much of Casablanca, and in this case the right decisions were made.

The Best Screenplay

The Screen Writer’s Guild picked the screenplay of Casablanca as the best screenplay ever in 2006, 64 years after the film’s release. Wow!

Here’s what I wrote about Casablanca some years ago: “It is the melodrama of all melodramas and the pot boiler of all pot boilers. The camera is everything but static. It flows from one scene to the next, never stopping for breath, with rhythm that seems completely natural.

“I’ve seen it several times since first seeing it at the Princeton Playhouse, the year of its release. Nary a cliché is missing, but what marvelous direction! Michael Curtiz was a director who could get good juice out of the worst oranges. The script may be a bad orange, or even a lemon, but the film is so masterfully made that it hits the truth.”

Michael Curtiz

Michael Curtiz got good juice out of that orange with some help from Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. If Ronald Reagan and Hedy Lamarr, who were first choice for the roles, had played them, Curtiz could have squeezed and squeezed, but his efforts would have resulted in nothing but sour juice.

I suspect that the jurors, who picked the screenplay as number one, had judged the cinematic result, rather than the typescript.

On the other hand, due to the efforts of Michael, Bogey, Ingrid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet, etc., maybe Casablanca is the best screenplay ever put to
celluloid.

Making of Casablanca

Relishing Roles

Who was most instrumental in disseminating German and culture all over the world? That’s right, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler inadvertently helped disseminate German and Austrian culture internationally by driving artists out of those locations for “racial” and political reasons.

Not to be forgotten, there were many whose careers were permanently truncated by death and others whose careers were nipped in the bud. Yes, Hitler and his minions were efficient.

The ones that got away often ended up in the New World. Some went under, but others embarked on successful careers – especially in the arts and music

The roster of German and Austrian directors and actors who landed in Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties is endless.

After the United States entered the war, actors were needed to portray Third Reich villains. In the propaganda pot boilers of the time, who was better suited to play Gestapo and SS-officers than the emigrés in Tinsel Town? They had the accents without trying, and they had the mannerisms down to a T.

Many an emigré found himself donning the uniform of those who had driven him out of Europe.

Werner Klemperer

to be continued . . .

– Herbert Kuhner