#albert bassermann

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Foreign Correspondent (1940) Alfred Hitchcock

July 30th 2023

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[postcard-from-the-past]

Hans Albers, Albert Bassermann and Olga Tschechowa

German vintage postcard

[ulrichgebert]

Seine Affairen mit all den schönen Frauen, die ihm scharenweise verfallen, nutzt der Halunke und Tunichtgut Bel Ami nur, um sich auf der Karriereleiter hinaufzubewegen. Natürlich entgeht er seiner gerechten Strafe nicht, interessanterweise allerdings nur in der Hollywoodvariante, nicht in Maupassants berühmten Roman, habe ich jetzt herausgefunden. Läuft im Rahmen der stark vernachlässigten immerwährenden George-Sanders-Wochen und Angela-Lansbury-Wertschätzung-Maßnahmen.

[ruleof3bobby]

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT (1940) Grade: B-

Not the typical Hitchcock film you would think of. Still, it's a master class in spy movies. It def set a road map for future spy scripts.

[monkeyssalad-blog]

Lee Parry by Truus, Bob & Jan too! Via Flickr: German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4646/2, 1929-1930. Photo: Atelier Balàzs, Berlin. Collection: Geoffrey Donaldson Institute. Lee Parry (1901-1977) was a German film actress of the silent and the early sound era, often in films by her husband Richard Eichberg. She appeared in 48 films between 1919 and 1939. Lee Parry was born Mathilde Benz in 1901 in Munich, Germany. She was the daughter of an opera tenor, actor and variety director. When she was sixteen, she moved to Berlin. There she was discovered by director and producer Richard Eichberg. She made her debut in 1919 in the leading role of Sünden der Eltern/Sins of the Parents (Richard Eichberg, 1919). Later Eichberg would become her husband. The following years she starred under his direction in several films for his studio like Nonne und Tänzerin/Nun and Dancer (1919), Hypnose/Hypnosis (1920), and two-parters like Der Tanz auf dem Vulkan/Dance on the Volcano (1920), and Die Fluch der Menschheit/The Curse of Man (1920). In these films she often appeared opposite Violetta Napierska, Robert Scholz and a young Béla Lugosi. These three actors were again her co-stars in Ihre Hoheit die Tänzerin/Her Highness the Dancer (Richard Eichberg, 1922). In the historical epic Monna Vanna (Richard Eichberg, 1922), based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, her co-star was Paul Wegener, the legendary star of Der Golem/The Golem (Carl Boese, Paul Wegener, 1920). Werner Krauss, famous for his role as Dr. Caligari, was her partner in Fräulein Raffke/Miss Raffke (Richard Eichberg, 1923). Lee Parry continued working with Richard Eichberg in hits like Die Motorbraut/The Motor Bride (Richard Eichberg, 1925) and Luxusweibchen/Luxury Wife (Erich Schönfelder, 1925) with Hans Albers. Around that time Parry and Eichberg divorced. The following year Lee worked for another studio, Maxim-Film/Ebner and starred in Fedora (Jean Manoussi, 1926) next to Anita Dorris. For this studio she also featured in Wenn das Herz der Jugend spricht/When the heart of Youth Speaks (Fred Sauer, 1926) opposite Albert Bassermann, Die Frau die nicht nein sagen kann/The Woman Who Can't say No (Fred Sauer, 1927) with Hans Albers, and the comedy Die leichte Isabell/Light Isabell (Eddy Busch, Arthur Wellin, 1927) with Gustav Fröhlich. In France she appeared in L'eau du Nil/The water of the Nile (Marcel Vandal, 1928), but at the end of the 1920s her roles became smaller and less frequent. After a hiatus of two years Lee Parry made her first appearance in a sound film in Die lustigen Weiber von Wien/The Merry Wives of Vienna (Géza von Bolváry, 1931) opposite Willi Forst. The following year she featured again in three films: the marital-mix-up farce Ein bißchen Liebe für Dich/A Bit of Love (Max Neufeld, 1932) as the wife of Hermann Thimig, the operetta Johann Strauss, k. u. k. Hofkapellmeister/Viennese Waltz (1932, Conrad Wiene), and another operetta Liebe auf den ersten Ton/Love at First Sight (Carl Froelich, 1932). In 1933 she starred again in three films, Keinen Tag ohne Dich/No Day Without You (Hans Behrendt, 1933), Der große Bluff/The Big Bluff (Georg Jacoby, 1933) and Die Herren vom Maxim/The Gentlemen from Maxim's (Carl Boese, 1933). But after this successful year she would make only two more pictures. After the comedy Das Einmaleins der Liebe/Love's Arithmetic (Carl Hoffmann, 1935) starring Luise Ullrich and Paul Hörbiger she retired. Shortly before WWII she appeared in the French production Adieu Vienne/Farewell Vienna (Jacques Séverac, 1939) with Gustav Fröhlich. It would be her last film. She was also a well-known singer who made many records. Her second marriage was to Siegmund Breslauer, director of the German theater in Buenos Aires, in 1956, She moved to South-America where she made her theater comeback as Manon and performed there on many stages. Lee Parry died in Bad Tölz, Germany, in 1977. Sources: Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), Wikipedia, AllMovie, and IMDb. And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

[weimarhaus]

Anita Berber as noblewoman Julia Orsini with Tibor Lubinsky in a still image from the surviving 1922 Richard Oswald film adaptation of Lucrezia Borgia. This film stars Austrian star Liane Haid in the title role with Conrad Veidt as Cesare Borgia and Albert Bassermann as Pope Alexander VI.

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

The Shanghai Gesture

Josef von Sternberg’s THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) takes place in such an artificial world a shot of a plane flying across a real sky seems out of place. Yet the director’s style is so consistent and strong that even the film’s flaws, chief among them a truly atrocious drunk scene played by Gene Tierney, can’t detract from its overall power. To appease the censors, von Sternberg had to transform Mother Goddam’s brothel from John Colton’s play into Mother Gin Sling’s casino and have her enemy’s daughter succumb not to opium addiction but to addictions to gambling, alcohol and a hunky Syrian (he was a Japanese prince in the original, but many states banned films with interracial romances). Almost everything is shot on sound stages, with the casino, a wonder of art direction, arranged in descending circles like Dante’s vision of hell. At the center is Ona Munson, a skinny, freckled blonde transformed into the Orientalized image of corruption, Mother Gin Sling, pitched somewhere between Norma Desmond and Lucretia Borgia. It’s a marvelous performance, with Munson dominating every shot she’s in and even piercing the heavy “yellowing up” makeup to create a rich picture of a woman who’s allowed a life of pain to turn her into a dragon. Tierney is the object of her revenge, and though her line readings are tinny and unconvincing, she looks marvelous in gowns designed by Oleg Cassini, and her physical deterioration is a great visual trope. Walter Huston is reliably good as the tycoon who once wronged Munson and now is trying to close her casino (it’s a post-colonial comment as the Western politicos and businessmen decide to turn the city’s Chinese-run casino district into homes for wealthy Europeans). The real surprise, however, is Victor Mature as Doctor Omar, who seduces Tierney so he can get rich off her gifts and a little blackmail. He thrives under von Strenberg’s controlling direction to create a powerful and very sexy image of decadence. The cast also includes Phyllis Brooks as a wise-cracking chorus girl, Albert Bassermann as the colonial leader, Eric Blore as Mother Gin Sling’s bookkeeper, Maria Ouspenskaya as her silent servant (her lines were cut when preview audiences roared at seeing a Chinese woman with a thick Russian accent), Grayce Hampton as a society doyenne and Marcel Dalio as the croupier. Mike Mazurki made his film debut as a rickshaw driver who seems to be flirting successfully with Houston.

[byneddiedingo]

Joel McCrea and Laraine Day in Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Cast: Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders, Albert Bassermann, Robert Benchley, Edmund Gwenn, Eduardo Ciannelli, Harry Davenport. Screenplay: Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison, James Hilton, Robert Benchley. Cinematography: Rudolph Maté. Art direction: Alexander Golitzen. Film editing: Dorothy Spencer. Music: Alfred Newman.

Foreign Correspondent displays Alfred Hitchcock's gift for witty surprises and edgy suspense, but it was made at a peculiar moment in history: Britain had gone to war against Hitler, but the United States was officially neutral -- thanks to a series of Neutrality Acts forced through Congress by isolationists. Moreover, Hitchcock himself had left his native country, signing a contract with David O. Selznick shortly before the war began in Europe.* So making a film about espionage and the outbreak of war in Europe that stuck to the American party line was tricky business, especially if your director was an Englishman. The surprise is that Foreign Correspondent turned out as well as it did. The plotting is fairly ramshackle, which is not surprising, considering the number of hands that were put to it: The screenplay is credited to Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, but there's also a dialogue credit for James Hilton and Robert Benchley, and it's well known that lots of others, including the ubiquitous script-doctoring Ben Hecht, were involved. The romantic subplot involving the titular foreign correspondent Johnny Jones aka Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) and peace activist Carol Fisher (Laraine Day), whose father (Herbert Marshall) turns out to be the villain, is particularly flimsy, but even the central espionage plot, involving an especially obscure MacGuffin, doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. And yet Foreign Correspondent zips along because Hitchcock's direction distracts us from the niggling inconsistencies. If we ever start to wonder if things make sense, there's a new gag -- a chase through a crowd of umbrellas, a windmill whose blades are turning backward,  a new threat on the hero's life, a spectacular plane crash at sea -- to distract us. Or there's a bit of witty casting: Edmund Gwenn, who also played Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard) in 1940 and later became one of the more beloved embodiments of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947), here plays a murderous Cockney, and the usually villainous George Sanders is the stalwart if cynical good guy named Scott ffolliott, complete with funny story about why his surname is spelled without a capital letter. So much is going on in Foreign Correspondent, in short, that thinking too closely about its plausibility feels irrelevant. Despite the pressures to keep the film's message neutral, at its end there's a sense that even isolationist America is about to yield to reality, with a stirring speech, written by Hecht, urging the United States to "keep the lights burning." Foreign Correspondent received a best picture Oscar nomination but lost to Hitchcock's other film of the year, Rebecca. *Hitchcock's American stay was much criticized in Britain, although he didn't become a citizen of the United States until 1955. His absence from Britain, especially during the war, may be one reason why, even though he retained dual citizenship, he was not knighted by Queen Elizabeth II until the year of his death, 1980. In 1943 and early 1944, partly in response to the criticism, he went to Britain to make two short propaganda films for the British Ministry of Information. Both of them, Aventure Malgache and Bon Voyage, were in French and were designed to be shown to the Free French forces as morale boosters for the Resistance, although whether they were actually released as such is unclear. After the war they disappeared into the British National Archives and were not rediscovered until the 1990s, when Hitchcock scholars retrieved them for public showing and video release. The story of Aventure Malgache is framed by a group of actors putting on their makeup. One of them remarks on how much another of the group resembles a Vichy official he knew when he was in the Resistance on Madagascar. The official had the actor imprisoned, but after the Vichy government was ousted by the Battle of Madagascar in 1942, the official hid his portrait of Pétain, hung a portrait of Queen Victoria, and stuck his bottle of Vichy water in a cabinet -- perhaps an echo of Claude Rains's dropping the Vichy bottle in a wastebasket in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Bon Voyage is a more complex narrative about an RAF pilot who is shot down in France and is aided in his return to Britain by the Resistance -- or so he thinks. When he reaches London he learns that the supposed Resistance man was actually a German counter-spy using him to unmask real members of the Resistance. Neither film is first-rate, though both, especially the unreliable narrative of Bon Voyage, show the sure-handedness of an experienced director.

[genevieveetguy]

I'm in love with a girl, and I'm going to help hang her father.

Foreign Correspondent, Alfred Hitchcock (1940)

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The Red Shoes (1948) Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

December 11th 2022

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[clemsfilmdiary]

Foreign Correspondent (1940, Alfred Hitchcock)

4/30/22

[ulrichgebert]

Wir feiern 100 Jahre Rhapsody in Blue (sie wurde am 12. Februar 1924 uraufgeführt) mit der dramaturgisch und faktenchecktechnisch etwas wackligen Gershwin-Filmbiographie Rhapsody in Blue, die aber jede Menge fabelhafte Musiknummern enthält, darunter -Sie ahnen es! Und nicht zu knapp!- die Rhapsody in Blue.

[scenesandscreens]

The Red Shoes (1948)

Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, Cinematography by Jack Cardiff

"One day when I'm old, I want some lovely young girl to say to me, "Tell me, where in your long life, Mr. Craster, were you most happy?" And I shall say, 'Well, my dear, I never knew the exact place. It was somewhere on the Mediterranean. I was with Victoria Page." "What?" she will say. "Do you mean the famous dancer?" I will nod. "Yes, my dear, I do. Then she was quite young, comparatively unspoiled. We were, I remember, very much in love."