#Otto Kanturek

[byneddiedingo]

Gerda Maurus in Woman in the Moon (Fritz Lang, 1929)

Cast: Willy Fritsch, Gerda Maurus, Klaus Pohl, Fritz Rasp, Gustl Gstettenbaur, Gustav von Wangenheim, Tilla Durieux, Margarete Kupfer, Alexa von Porembsky, Gerhard Dammann. Screenplay: Thea von Harbou. Cinematography: Curt Courant, Oskar Fischinger, Konstantin Irmen-Tschet, Otto Kanturek. Art direction: Emil Hasler, Otto Hunte, Karl Vollbrecht. 

Classic space-travel science fiction, Woman in the Moon was hugely influential on movies up until the time when human beings actually began to travel into space. You can find its traces in everything from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials to Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950) and Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956), and even into the space age in TV series like Lost in Space (1965-68) and the first Star Trek series (1965-69). None of this should be surprising: Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist who was a technical adviser on Fritz Lang's film, came to the United States in 1935 and became an ardent popularizer of space travel and consultant to many science fiction writers and film directors. Actual space travel made some of Woman in the Moon obsolete: the notion that the moon has a breathable atmosphere and a temperate climate, for example. But Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, also consulted with another rocket scientist, Hermann Oberth, while writing the screenplay, and got a few things exactly and presciently right, like multistage rocketry, the need for zero-gravity restraints, and the firing of retro-rockets to slow the descent of the ship to the moon's surface. But perhaps their most influential contribution is the suspenseful (and often hokey) melodrama of the plot. They invented the familiar clichés: the discredited scientist whose theories turn out to be right; corporate villainy and greed at odds with the idealism of the scientists; the romantic triangle heightened by the isolation of the spaceship; the unexpected but useful stowaway; the need to sacrifice a member of the crew to return to safety. Fortunately, Lang never lets things bog down in the nascent clichés, and he has a capable cast to work with. Willy Fritsch is Wolf Helius, an idealistic rocketeer who has planned the space flight with the help of the discredited professor, Georg Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl). Gustav von Wangenheim and Gerda Maurus are Helius's assistants, Hans Windegger and Friede Velten, who have just gotten engaged, to the dismay of Helius, who is in love with Friede. Fritz Rasp is the evil mastermind Walter Turner, who threatens to destroy the rocket unless Helius allows him to come along on the voyage to advance the interests of the greedy corporate types who want to get their hands on the gold deposits that Manfeldt has theorized are plentiful on the moon. (With his hair slicked back across one side of his forehead, Rasp has a surprising resemblance to Adolf Hitler in this movie.) And the stowaway is Gustav (Gustl Gstettenbaur), a boy obsessed with space travel who brings his collection of sci-fi pulp magazines along with him. Even today, Woman in the Moon is good, larky fun.

[sesiondemadrugada]

Four Around the Woman (Fritz Lang, 1921).

[dweemeister]

Woman in the Moon (1929, Germany)

By the end of the 1920s, humanity could envision a world where spaceflight might be possible. Several decades before that, the science fiction books of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and others thrilled viewers with promise of adventure and the unknown. Also capturing that interest in space would be Georges Méliès’ film, A Trip to the Moon (1902, France) – even if you have never heard of this film, you may be familiar with its most iconic frame. A Trip to the Moon is one of the first science fiction films ever made and, for the 1900s decade, among the most innovative of its time. Though other filmmakers around the world dabbled in science fiction, the genre never truly took off until mid-century.

One of the few filmmakers bringing a sense of spectacle to sci-fi silent films was German director Fritz Lang, best known today for Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). Because of its release in between Metropolis and M, Woman in the Moon tends to be underseen and undermentioned. But, like Metropolis and A Trip to the Moon, it is a silent film exemplar of science fiction. It is a remarkable piece of entertainment in its second half, even as it wastes too much of its runtime on a tiresome subplots that involve gangsters and romance. When Lang brings his showmanship during the crew’s trip to the Moon, the results are unlike any other filmmaker working in cinema at that time.

Businessman Helius (Willy Fritsch) meets with his friend, Professor Mannfeldt (Klaus Pohl), to discuss developments over Helius’ plans to journey to the Moon. The mission was inspired by the Professor’s hypothesis that the Moon, “is rich in gold” – something that has attracted the mockery of his fellow academics. In the shadows, an unidentified gang sends a man calling himself “Walter Turner” (Fritz Rasp) to spy on Mannfeldt and Helius. More trouble comes to Helius when he learns his assistants Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim) and Friede (Gerda Maurus) announce their engagement. Helius, who has never confessed his love for Friede, finds himself in an awkward romantic bind in the events leading up to launch. On launch day, Helius, his assistants, and Professor Manfeldt board the Friede. But their crew complement includes two others: Walter Turner (who threatens his way onboard) and a stowaway child, Gustav (Gustl Gstettenbaur).

Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife from 1922-1933, wrote the screenplay, adapting her book The Rocket to the Moon. Just a quick glance through her filmography recalls a number of great Lang-von Harbou collaborations: Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), the Die Nibelungen saga (1924), and Metropolis. She truly is one of the great screenwriters of early cinema, but Woman in the Moon is an underwhelming display of her talents. Von Harbou mires with its Earth-bound scenes, and Woman in the Moon reaps no benefits from its spy subplot. There is a straight science-fiction story buried somewhere in this overlong 169-minute film, but von Harbou overstuffs her screenplay with the potential sabotage of the rocket to the Moon. Never does the viewer feel that Lang’s astronauts are in danger of being blasted to smithereens in outer space or that “Walter Turner” will ever succeed in whatever murderous plots he has hatched. Isolated from whatever themes Woman in the Moon wishes to present, the love triangle that slowly overtakes the rest of the film always feels vestigial to this overcooked story. Compare this overwrought, yet underwritten romantic drama to Metropolis, where the relationship between Gustav Fröhlich’s Freder and Brigitte Helm’s Maria outlines perfectly the tension of their society’s industrial hierarchies and the geography that separates the classes.

Woman in the Moon truly defies gravity only after its launch and touchdown on the lunar surface. The cinematography team led by Curt Courant (1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1938’s La Bête Humaine) capture the terror of early spaceflight better than some of the more expensive American sci-fi productions would in the 1950s and ‘60s. The speculative lunar sets – which look more like Méliès’ vision for A Trip to the Moon than anything recognizable from the Moon – tower over the movie’s intrepid astronauts as they explore this lifeless (unlike Méliès’ vision) celestial body.

The screenplay, camerawork, production design, and special effects seen in The Woman in the Moon come from the most widely accepted scientific theories of the late 1920s concerning astrophysics and the nature of the Moon. Where some aspects might feel dated (that includes the appearance and breathable atmosphere of the lunar surface and the submersion of the rocket into water before launch), others are prescient. The explanation of how the rocket’s flightpath is so prophetic that it seems as if Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang sat in on an Apollo mission briefing by NASA. Woman in the Moon also contains the first countdown to launch seen in a sci-fi film (yes, the launch countdown is an invention of Woman in the Moon), as well as a multistage rocket that jettisons parts of the rocket as it exits Earth’s atmosphere. Prior to launch, the rocket’s assembly in a separate structure before transportation out to the launchpad – where it will blast off to space. For a film released in an era that did not make much use of seat belts and Velcro, the utter violence and human disorientation of a rocket launch requires the astronauts to strap themselves into their bunks and hold onto surface restraints.

The frantic editing and startling cinematography of these scenes, coupled with the film’s undercurrent of distrust and ulterior motives, are a Lang staple during the most technically accomplished scenes of his filmography. It is there in the worker montages of Metropolis, the elaborate assassination scene of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, and the horrific battle sequence of Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge. Those Lang hallmarks find their way late in Woman in the Moon, well past the point where they might have been effective in alleviating the film of its structural issues. Though Woman in the Moon might not be as influential as any of those aforementioned movies, Lang’s propulsive sense of action is apparent in the film’s second half. Like a silent era John Frankenheimer, Lang is in full control of the film’s tension – knowing when and when not to apply these techniques to heighten the viewer’s adrenaline.

Not nearly as a widely-discussed for Woman in the Moon is its final moments. The film’s concluding dilemma is startling. It precipitates into a situational solution that does not grant a narrative resolution. Are Lang and von Harbou attempting to comment on the lengths of selfishness, of the tension intrinsic between science and human avarice that can endanger others? Or is it more cynical of scientific discovery and technological progression than it might appear? Woman in the Moon wastes too much time on its romantic triangle before even approaching questions as nuanced as these.

However one interprets this, Woman in the Moon – more popular with general audiences than film critics and those noting that Universum Film AG (UFA) executive Alfred Hugenberg was beginning to align himself with the Nazi Party – arrived in German theaters at a time of political upheaval. Among the politically inclined, Woman in the Moon proved divisive: leftists derided its alleged Nazi subtext and the Nazis approved of this depiction of a technologically advanced, forward-thinking Germany. Shortly following Hitler’s ascendancy to German Chancellor in 1933, the Nazis banned A Woman in the Moon and seized the film’s rocket models due to how accurate its depiction of rocketry was. At this time, the Nazis, with a team led by Wernher von Braun, were deep into researching the V-2 rocket – the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile.

Detractors of Woman in the Moon dismissed Lang and the film as curios of Germany’s cinematic past. With synchronized sound films all the rage since 1927, Woman in the Moon proved to be Lang’s final silent film. Today, the movie is Lang’s final epic, before he transitioned into a career leaning heavily on film noir. The scenes of greatest interest to silent film and sci-fi fans arrives deep in the film, after too many stultifying conversations and lovelorn looks from the main characters. In its greatest spurts, Woman in the Moon’s scientific speculation heralds a future beset by self-interest, yet heaven-bound.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[lifejustgotawkward]

365 Day Movie Challenge (2019) - #25: Night Train to Munich (1940) - dir. Carol Reed

As a kind of wartime companion piece to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich features a number of overlaps between the two films: star Margaret Lockwood as a young lady attempting to solve a conspiracy (involving Nazis in this case), suspense sequences set on a train and in other forms of transportation, the possibility of romance with a goofy yet exceedingly charming Englishman (Michael Redgrave in Vanishes, Rex Harrison in Munich) and the presence of actors Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in a reprise of the same roles they played in The Lady Vanishes, comic relief in the form of a pair of bumbling but well-meaning Brits called Charters and Caldicott.

The plot of Munich is rather more absurd than that of the Hitchcock predecessor since the villains, a cluster of Third Reich officials, are often buffoonish and give the main characters the benefit of the doubt far too frequently; it’s hard to be as frightened by Lockwood and Harrison’s foes as one ought to be. The other supporting performances in the film are quite good - Paul Henreid, Felix Aylmer, Eliot Makeham and Raymond Huntley chief among them - and Otto Kanturek contributed fine B&W cinematography (sadly he was killed in a plane crash during WWII), but on the whole Night Train to Munich doesn’t quite live up to the hype. On the plus side, however, the Criterion Collection disc’s featurette with Carol Reed historians Bruce Babington and Peter Evans is excellent, giving well-informed and witty insight into the making of the film.

[classicfilmfreak]

New Post has been published on http://www.classicfilmfreak.com/2017/11/30/20418/

Night Train to Munich (1940) starring Margaret Lockwood and Rex Harrison 

 “It’s a pity [nature] didn’t endow you with a voice.  Nothing that happened to me in the concentration camp was quite as dreadful as listening to you day after day singing those appalling songs.” — Anna to Gus Bennett

September 3, 1939.  The Berghof, Adolf Hitler’s Alpine retreat.  A man, clearly the madman himself—the aggressive music, the uncontrolled shouting, the swastika armband—stands in the great hall, with its famous retractable picture window.  He pounds a fist on a map of Austria on the large table.  It’s that country he wants.  Newsreel footage of invading, stiff-legged Nazi troops and war machines.

Then, again, the pounding fist, the shouting, the unattractive music, only now it’s a map of the Sudetenland.  That part of Europe, too, the madman wants—and gets.  More invading troops.  Next,Prague, and next . . .

England was well into the Battle of Britain by the time of the U.K. release, in August of 1940, of Night Train to Munich, the U.S. release coming the following December, a whole year before Pearl Harbor.

At this point in the two major stars’ careers, Margaret Lockwood was better known than her co-star Rex Harrison, thus her top billing above him.  She would remain popular until the 1950s.  Beginning with Night Train, Harrison’s career would continue to grow with Blithe Spirit (1945), Anna and the King of Siam (1946) and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), and later, whether the films were catastrophes, great or indifferent, he would reach the heights with Cleopatra (1963), My Fair Lady(1964) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965).

Speaking of this last film, the story of the strained relationship between painter Michelangelo and Pope Julius II over the Sistine Chapel, its director Carol Reed also gave Night Train to Munich its style and pace, a rewarding blend of espionage thriller, light romance and contrasting humor.

The humor comes mainly from the second screen airing of the two cricket-loving Englishmen abroad, twits who constantly grumble when their limited interests and travel are inconvenienced by the intruding real world, in this case, in 1939, a world on the brink of war.  Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) were delightfully introduced in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes(1938), creations of screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who also share the same literary credit in Night Train.  In the Hitch film, they are introduced in the beginning; here they enter at the film’s midpoint.  The pair would appear in two subsequent films, Crook’s Tour (1941) and Millions Like Us (1943).

When the Nazis invade Prague, Axel Bomasch (James Harcourt), who works for the Allied defense industry, tries to flee to England.  His daughter, Anna (Lockwood), is captured and placed in a concentration camp.  Even the little she knows of her father’s work she refuses to divulge, and is befriended by an anti-Nazi prisoner, Karl Marsen (Paul Henreid).

Together, they escape to London, but in a hush-hush meeting with a contact (Felix Alymer, the Archbishop of Canterbury in Olivier’s Henry V, 1944) Karl is revealed to be a Gestapo agent who hopes Anna will lead him to her father.

In England, Anna receives an enigmatic phone call to meet a man named Gus Bennett in Brightbourne.  Not telling Karl, though she is followed, she meets Gus (Harrison), a cocky British intelligence officer masquerading as a seaside singer.  She is reunited with her father, but resents Gus’ constraints on her father’s security.

Anna and Gus quarrel over Karl.  Anna wants to contact him, but Gus is suspicious of the man.  Gus proves right when Anna and her father are kidnapped, and Karl threatens the concentration camp unless Axel agrees to work for the Nazis.

As Karl posed as someone else, so Gus now infiltrates the German high command as an engineer, Major Ulrich Herzog.  In a ruse to deceive the controller (Kenneth Kent) and an admiral (C.V. France), he implies he has had a past affair with Anna and thus can persuade her to win her father’s cooperation.  After Gus and Anna have spent the night in a hotel, a jealous Karl foils Gus’ planned escape and escorts the pair on a train bound for Munich.

At the station the two Englishmen, Caldicott and Charters, recognize Gus, an old school chum they knew as “Dickie” Randall.  At first unsure it is “Dickie” in the Nazi uniform, they overhear on an extension phone Karl conversing with the Nazis and realize that Gus is an undercover British agent—and now in danger, his real identity revealed.

Caldicott and Charters, who have stowed away on the train, warn Gus of the danger and help tie up Karl and two guards.  With the two Englishmen disguised as Nazi soldiers, the five, now including Alex, escape by car, only to be chased to the Swiss border by Karl and his cohorts, and flee to an aerial tram station.  While Anna and the others flee in one tram across a valley to Switzerland, Gus holds off Karl and his gang until the companion tram arrives.  After a gunfight and Gus’ heroic jump, mid-air, to a Swiss-bound tramp, a wounded Karl is unable to reach the winch to return the tram, and can only watch as Anna and Gus embrace in a safe, Nazi-free country.

Night Train is a well made spy caper, deftly paced and beautifully photographed by Otto Kanturek, who was later killed when a Hurricane fighter collided with his camera plane during the filming of A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941).  Leon Shamroy, his successor, was given screen credit.

Margaret Lockwood, though attractive and competent in her role, is no longer the central interest she is in The Lady Vanishes, an emphasis assumed now by Rex Harrison.  Always impressive in a uniform, even a Nazi one, he is convincing in the part, if sometimes he could slow down a little, though he is adhering to the tempo of the film.  For a distinct contrast, and a more nuanced performance, he plays the charismatic dead sea captain, who comes to love Gene Tierney, and she him, in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947).

When disguised as an anti-Nazi damning his concentration camp interrogators, Paul Henreid is more fervent, however falsely so, than he is as the dull Victor Laszlo, the Czech underground leader, in Casablanca (1942).  Strangely, Karl isn’t all that unlikable a villain; perhaps the screenwriters felt the same way, since they allow him to live in the end.

The humor provided by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne is much more subdued than their previous appearance, and their plot participation highly reduced, compared with their film-length contribution in The Lady Vanishes.

Even if the train journey in Night Train to Munich is less than half the film and the characters in general are fewer and less interesting than in Hitchcock’s thriller, the entire trip is well worth it.  For one thing, the Nazis, this early in the war, can still be seen, without too much guilt, as comic buffoons before their true bestiality is revealed in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka.