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Champagne & Caviar: Four Weimar Comedies is a new Blu-ray release from Flicker Alley presenting four early German talkies marked by music and romance in the middle of the Great Depression. For the most part, these films were made by people who’d shortly be leaving the country, if they were lucky.
Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic, was founded in 1918 after the end of WWI and came to a disastrous end with the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933. His domination seemed to indicate that most of the German people preferred a “strong leader” in a Fascist state to a progressive republic floundering in Depression, inflation, and unemployment.
It mightn’t be out of order for everyone to look in a mirror and ask themselves which they’d prefer, as long as they could be reasonably certain which side of the firing squad they’d be on, or how expansive would be the area of their own internment.
Did Weimar cinema predict Germany’s yearning for a strong leader? Or was it largely the escapist nonsense everyone else was making? The films in Champagne & Caviar: Four Weimar Comedies certainly know there’s a Depression going on, and they know that newfangled talkies present new artistic opportunities for artistic expression and social comment. Let’s take a closer look.
The Private Secretary Comes to the City for Love, More or Less
Have you heard the one about the secretary who married her boss? You should have, as it’s among the most popular and predictable of “shopgirl romance” plots. By the time Wilhelm Thiele’s The Private Secretary (Die Privatsekretärin) became a 1931 hit in Germany, this specific incarnation of the trope was almost 20 years old. Its source was a 1905 Hungarian novel that was filmed as early as 1916 and also became an operetta, all of which warns us not to underestimate the fervid aspirational fantasy of hitching the wealthy boss.
This particular secretary is Vilma Förster, a star-making breakthrough role for Renate Müller. She arrives fresh off the train with a suitcase that doesn’t look too heavy, but she sits on it for a rest and sings a ditty about being new to the city. Some weaselly fellow, dressed a bit Mack-the-Knife-pimpishly in bowler and bowtie with cane, tries to hit her up, and she smiles shyly and bats her lashes until he calls a cab. Then she gets in and closes the door on him and whatever plans he’s been hatching. Vilma is fresh but not green.
At an all-female boarding house, Vilma expresses the ambition to find secretarial work. Everyone laughs knowingly, not least because jobs are scarce in the Depression. They all discuss looking for husbands, and Vilma says she’s ambitious and aims for a wealthy one, which causes more mocking laughter. She’s not looking for an office career to stand on her own feet; she’s not declaring herself a radical.
In popular novels, magazines, and movies, the era’s “working girls” were commonly understood as biding their time in a game of mutual marital (or sexual) shopping while taking dictation. Shorthand was itself shorthand for this shopping, while Good Girls leaving home were a product of urbanization, capitalism, and mechanization.
Vilma’s strategy will be as shown in the first scene of The Private Secretary: to flash her stockinged legs and smile until she charms men into hiring her, and then to ignore any expectation of “being friendly” in return. It’s hard to decide if Vilma’s procedure is more ethical or more cynical than the option pursued by Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Alfred E. Green’s Baby Face (1933), a notorious pre-Code Hollywood film in which she literally sleeps her way up a corporate skyscraper floor by floor; at least everybody’s getting what they want there.
There’s little point in mentally upbraiding Vilma for exploiting the exploitive world in which she must earn her living. She didn’t invent it, she’s only working the system, and fantasies like The Private Secretary present it bluntly behind the snappy songs. The bossmen, like the piggish entitled Klapper (Ludwig Stossel), look upon the rows of typing secretaries as pretty objects for plucking. When he hires her for her chutzpah, she trips singing down the street and leads her whole building in warbling out the windows. Alas, he punishes her with overtime work when she fails to keep his evening appointments.
The plots of romances like The Private Secretary dictate that the heroine must meet the boss, or the millionaire, or the prince, without realizing who he is. The sparks he generates must be for himself, not his status. As Vilma clicks at a club with the slumming Director Arvai (Hermann Thimig), who seems more a smirking neutered otter than a sophisticated charmer, she turns down his instant invitation to his place because settling for middle management doesn’t fit her plans. She sings a song of regret because she’s already in love with him.
The least objectionable male is the comical, sexless Hasel, whose name is the feminine noun for “hazel” and sounds close to the word for “hare” or “rabbit.” When Vilma butters him up about his choral group, he takes the bait but warns her not to get intimate. As played by the storkish Felix Bressart, he drunkenly leads a crowd into a riotous song about the benefits of having a rich aunt. The Private Secretary is a highly money-conscious, class-conscious, sex-conscious Weimar comedy.
It’s also a showcase for how many denizens of Weimar cinema, behind the camera and in front, were dropped en masse into Hollywood after the Nazis took over. Director Thiele and writer Franz Schulz made the jump. Bressart, forever rolling his R’s under a brushy mustache, played funny foreigners in items like Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and To Be or Not To Be (1942). Stossel played in more than 40 Hollywood productions of the ‘40s, most famously in Casablanca as the man who practices English by saying “What watch? Such much?” Photographer Otto Heller went to England.
If only Müller had taken a similar powder. Instead, nobody knows why or how she died at 31 in October 1937. Her life spiraled downward, allegedly under pressure from the Nazi Party (according to various theories), and she seems to have died by defenestration, which was initially covered up. Did she jump? Was she pushed? Did she fall while drunk? She’s become one of those mysterious cinematic tragedies.
Her hits included Reinhold Schünzel’s cross-dressing romance Viktor und Viktoria (1933), famously remade by Blake Edwards as Victor/Victoria (1982). A biopic about her, Sweetheart of the Gods (Liebling der Götter, 1960), was made by Gottfried Reinhardt, another of those who successfully leaped to Hollywood.
The Upright Sinner Counts the Money
Bressart’s character in The Private Secretary jokes that bosses have bars on their windows to get them used to it, and a more brazen illustration of that joke is a dark Weimar comedy from the same year, Fritz Kortner’s The Upright Sinner (Der brave Sünder). Both films are independent productions from Jewish-owned companies, and both have more artists who would leave the country after the Nazis took over.
The Upright Sinner is the only film starring a celebrated stage actor and cabaret artist named Max Pallenberg, who left Germany and died in a 1934 plane crash. He dominates this Weimar comedy as Leopold Pichler, a petty family tyrant and incompetent accountant, a typical “little man”. The film opens at his raucous family table, complete with noisy dog and parrot, where he insists that daughter Hedwig (androgynous ingenue Dolly Haas) shan’t work for a living – like those shameless modern hussies in The Private Secretary, he might as well say.
Pichler doesn’t know that his younger colleague in the company, Wittek, wants to marry Hedwig but can’t get up the gumption to mention it. Wittek is tongue-tied while Pichler sputters a constant stream of disconnected phrases expressing his disapproval of the world. Wittek is played by Heinz Ruehmann, the most prominent actor in The Upright Sinner to remain during the Nazi regime.
When Pichler and Wittek fail to deliver 7,000 marks from the bank to their boss before he leaves for Vienna, they follow him with the money in a briefcase to rectify their reputations. They intend to meet the boss in a certain nightclub, but stuff happens.
Posters for The Upright Sinner pose Pallenberg with a sexy black actress. Who is this? She’s an American named Rose Poindexter, and apparently she was a well-known nightclub performer along the lines of Josephine Baker and other African-Americans who found some career autonomy in Europe. That wasn’t going to last through the Nazi regime, and Poindexter eventually returned to the US and briefly married future novelist Ralph Ellison.
In her only film, Poindexter plays a carefree, laughing, openly sexual sophisticate who delivers her entire role in American English. She sings a lively song in a kind of barely-there “jungle” skirt with a chorus of four elegant black males in tuxedos. Her forwardness flummoxes and stupefies Pichler, who says things like “Africa speaks.” In the saucy highlight, the hung-over Pichler will wake in her bed, literally next to her.
Her dialogue will say they never even kissed but she got a lot of money out of him. She’s never judged or punished, at least not by the screenplay of The Upright Sinner. This is so far beyond anything in the era’s Hollywood films, it can take the modern viewer’s breath away. Then she draws a bath for Pichler, leading to peekaboo business about his nudity for the camera, and more embarrassing events take place before he gets home.
Kortner and photographer Guenther Krampf pull off a surreal drunken dream in the middle of The Upright Sinner that throws all kinds of effects at the viewer’s dazzled brain. We have distorted slow-motion images. We have Cupid statues that turn out to be real people. We have a montage of superimposed images about trains running Pichler over. Hmm, trains as a symbol for the modern world and death; let’s table that.
The humiliated and baffled Pichler and Wittek, like a much put-upon Laurel and Hardy, are Fate’s patsies and its winds blow them whither it will. There’s no guarantee that they’ll get out of this topsy-turvy comedy of errors that their once-proper little world has turned into, but The Upright Sinner is a comedy after all. It feels like a sadder dry run for the skating-on-thin-ice twists that would structure the films of Preston Sturges, without getting that frantic, and its cynicism is reminiscent of Billy Wilder.
The Upright Sinner isn’t just Pallenberg’s only film; it’s among the few screenplays by Alfred Polgar, an illustrious, witty, politically engaged literary figure who went to Hollywood. Polgar is adapting a Soviet satire of bureaucracy, Valentin Kataev’s The Embezzlers (Rastratchiki, 1926), a novel that was turned into a popular play at Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre. In this light, Pichler can be traced to figures like Nikolai Gogol’s bewildered and downtrodden accountants and petty officials.
Kortner also landed in Hollywood, mainly as a writer in a long illustrious career in theatre and film. So did producer Arnold Pressburger, who, during the war produced indies directed by refugees Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, and René Clair. Haas arrived for stage work, and she can be seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953). Europe’s loss was Hollywood’s bonanza.
The Trunks of Mr. O.F. Uses Illusion As Allusion
From the same year of 1931 emerges an even stranger satire, Alexis Granowsky’s The Trunks of Mr. O.F. Labeling itself a fairy tale for adults, this Weimar comedy opens with a spinning animated globe dotted by shiny cities as we hear the first of several instructive and comical songs in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.
The song tells us that while the world suffers from economic crisis, the villagers of Ostend are so podunk they haven’t noticed. Their 17th Century motto is that it’s better to take two steps backward than one step forward. We see children running in a ring around the village fountain, going nowhere, and a moment of associational montage (à la Sergei Eisenstein) shows us a herd of swine munching contentedly on the cobbles.
Suddenly, all is disrupted. Thirteen lucky or unlucky trunks arrive at the village inn pasted with stickers from all over the outside world and promising the imminent arrival of the mysterious O.F. The hotel owner (Stossel of The Private Secretary) jumps into a flurry of preparation.
Two local opportunists turn this incident to their advantage, thus implying that people are only waiting to be bamboozled to dig their way out of their holes. Peter Lorre, who found his ticket to Hollywood this same year by starring in Fritz Lang’s M, plays the devilishly named Stix, a newspaper editor who claims to know O.F. as billionaire Oskar Flott, thus creating news for his paper and elevating his social status.
Stix’s winking buddy, Architect Stark (Harald Paulsen, the first actor to play Mack the Knife), declares this is the moment for the village to invest in the construction of the trappings of a big city. “Buy and build!” is his motto. Overnight, Ostend transforms into a decadent metropolis with nightclubs and film palaces. Ruses are employed to conceal O.F.’s non-appearance but everyone soon forgets him or her or it; perhaps O.F. means “Ostend fantasy”.
Aside from this satirical idea about the triumph of self-invention, not much happens in the 80-minute The Trunks of Mr. O.F., which mostly shows a cast of dozens interacting in their various routines.
Stark’s girlfriend is played by the actress who would soon change her name to Hedy Lamarr and be celebrated in Hollywood as the world’s most beautiful woman. Margo Lion, a willowy cabaret star who would move to France, plays the singer wooed by Stix. Liska March, an American Ziegfeld Follies dancer, plays the modiste who gives lessons in chic to the local wives. Alfred Abel, most famous as the technocratic dictator of Lang’s Metropolis (1927), is the befuddled mayor. Another noted Lang actor, Bernhard Goetzke, plays an economics professor who holds a world conference in this miracle town of Ostend.
The Trunks of Mr. O.F. connects many important artists behind the camera. The songs are by Erich Kästner, one of Germany’s most popular writers, now admired for children’s books like The Parent Trap. A pacifist, he chose the difficult path of remaining in Germany, despite having his works banned and burned for their whiff of Bolshevism. He kept diaries and later published his experiences, including his visit to his obliterated hometown of Dresden. Near the end of the war, he relocated from Berlin to avoid alleged SS death threats and the oncoming Soviet army.
Director Granowsky (born Abram Azarkh in Russia) is an important theatrical figure who, among other triumphs, founded the Moscow State Jewish Theatre in 1919. From this background he directed an important silent film, Jewish Luck (Еврейское счастье, 1925) from a Sholem Aleichem story, starring the man who would succeed him as the theatre’s director, Solomon Mikhoels. (Mikhoels remained in Russia and got liquidated.)
Leaving Moscow for Berlin, Granowsky directed two 1931 films that explore visual techniques. The first was the controversial and profitable The Song of Life (Das Lied vom Leben), whose plot involved caesarian birth. The second was The Trunks of Mr. O.F. After the Nazis took over, Granowsky departed for Paris and directed a handful of expensive literary productions that deserve investigation.
One screenwriter is an equally important figure. Born in Russia as Lazar Herrmann, Léo Lania as a dramatist admired Brecht’s alienation strategies, those self-conscious gestures designed to distance the audience from the story to encourage thinking critically about the message. This explains the sardonic songs dropped into The Trunks of Mr. O.F., not to mention the superimpositions of the mayor’s fanciful dream sequence. There’s even a scene where a film producer looks into the camera and asserts that the public doesn’t want films that tell the truth. How meta can you get?
As a politically committed journalist, Lania pulled off two notorious accomplishments in 1924. Posing as an Italian admirer, he stayed with Adolf Hitler for several days and wrote an exposé called “The Gravedigger of Germany” (Die Totengraber Deutschlands: Das Urteiler im Hitler Prozess). He was indicted for treason for “Traffic in Arms” (Gewehre auf Reisen), which revealed the extent of German rearmament. He refused to name his sources, and this led to the Reichstag passing the Lania Law (or Lex Lania) extending confidentiality to journalists. That must have been fun while it lasted.
When the Nazis came in, Lania moved to Paris and was interned there in 1940 as a dangerous enemy to the Reich, which he truly was. He escaped, eventually landing in the US and publishing two memoirs, The Darkest Hour (1941) and Today We Are Brothers (1942). He spent the war working for the US Office of War Information, where he wrote scripts for Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America.
Most of this information is courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society, which retains his papers. For the record, his correspondents on file include Fritz Lang, innovative theatre director Erwin Piscator, activist Brigid Brophy, political writers Max Eastman and Granville Hicks, novelists Lion Feuchtwanger and W. Somerset Maugham, radio announcer H.V. Kaltenborn, columnist Walter Lippmann, Pulitzer winners Edgar Ansell Mowrer and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Dorothy Thompson (first US journalist expelled from Nazi Germany) and Nobel-winning novelists Pearl Buck and Sigrid Undset. It’s all awaiting some enterprising researcher.
It’s easy to perceive that Lania and Granowsky thought of The Trunks of Mr. O.F. as a satire of capitalism, where the mantra of “buy and build” disregards practical reality to create its own economic bubble based on consensus delusion. Only a town so backward as to remain unaffected by the Depression is capable of creating its own renaissance, even if by mistake, while the world looks on in stupefaction. When you think about it, this theme amounts to a satire of all economic systems, including the self-enclosed one generated in the Soviet Union at the same moment. When satire hits a deep vein, it reverberates beyond its local origin.
I By Day, You By Night Makes Its Bed and Sleeps in It
You know there’s a housing shortage when two people rent the same room and sleep in the same bed without ever meeting. Such is the premise of Ludwig Berger’s 1932 frivolity I By Day, You By Night (Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht), in which double-shifting waiter Hans (Willy Fritsch) and manicurist Grete (Käthe Von Nagy) fall in love. Each imagines the other is rich and neither realizes they’re the same annoying invisible co-tenants who sleep in the same bed and trash each other’s clothes.
I By Day, You By Night is the most ambitious and “meta” of the four Weimar comedies in Champagne & Caviar, and the line “champagne and caviar” comes from one of its signature songs performed by the Comedian Harmonists. Berger’s idea was that although the film should have music and songs, they should all be diegetic; that is, emerging realistically from the film’s world.
He pulls this off by locating the apartment next to a cinema playing a film within the film: an absurd romantic musical called All This Is Yours (Dies alles ist dein) starring Vera Veranda (Ursula van Diemen) and Tito Da Capo (Walther Ludwig) who sing while walking up and down giant steps attended by throngs of servants. We keep cross-cutting into their movie as their music bleeds into the apartment and various street performers and restaurant orchestras regurgitate the songs. The stately landlady (Amanda Lindner), once an operatic tragedienne, laments the trash that assaults the ears today.
I By Day, You By Night begins with a voice yelling “Begin” (Anfang!) over a black screen, and then a projectionist (Friedrich Gnass) begins the film within the film, making acerbic little comments. He’s a chum of Hans who helps him mistakenly track Grete to a rich man’s house, where another subplot involves a Jewish man (Julius Falkenstein) teetering on bankruptcy while his menorah stands discreetly in the background. His bespectacled modern daughter, the spunky and positive Trude (Elisabeth Lennartz), avoids a rich banker-suitor (Anton Pointner) for a poor bewildered student named Wolf (Albert Levien).
Giving the lie to the notion that early talkies must be stagy, Berger directs I By Day, You By Night with great fluency by having characters approach the camera from one angle and letting it sweep around to follow them. One remarkable shot begins with Trude and Wolf rushing down the sidewalk and passing Hans and the projectionist, who take us back in the other direction and across the street while Grete and her client emerge from his house and drive away in his Mercedes, and then we sweep forward to rejoin Hans.
The writers of I By Day, You By Night are Hans Székely and Robert Liebmann. Székely would win an Oscar for the original story of Mitchell Leisen’s Arise My Love (1940), as scripted by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. In a perfect demonstration that romantic comedies are about more than they seem, that film ends with Ray Milland’s character broadcasting from a freshly invaded Paris, imploring America to “arise” to the Nazi threat.
I happened to see this film in a Paris theatre in 1989, where I heard a few sniffles at this conclusion. As the subdued crowd left the theatre, time vanished for just a moment as I trod the cobbles of a conquered city, and I realized the street must have looked much the same. I was moved.
Liebmann’s career ended less happily. He went to work in the French industry and was among those arrested after the invasion depicted in Arise My Love. He was killed at Auschwitz.
All four films in Champagne & Caviar: Four Weimar Comedies come with critical commentary tracks, but Christian Rogowski‘s observations on I By Day, You By Night feel especially deep and informed. He points out, for example, the subtle political commentary in the scene where Hans and Grete visit Frederick the Great’s mansion and, contrary to Nazi propaganda, the Prussian conqueror is revealed as an intellectual Francophile. Such insights increase our understanding of the grit behind the fizz of escapist entertainment.
Time and history have made Weimar comedies even worthier of our attention than they seemed in their era. Flicker Alley deserves praise for this thoughtful resurrection. Let’s hope for more on the way.
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