Nazi Films in America, 19331942 by Harry Waldman;

Author:Harry Waldman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Published: 2020-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Fanny Elssler (1937).

Erich Waschneck and the petite blonde Renate Müller (l906–37) collaborated one final time in Eskapade, produced by Tobis, a pro–Polish and pro–American spy tale set in prewar Paris and St. Petersburg. Müller plays a Polish agent trying to sneak into czarist Russia to help imprisoned friends. She meets an American (Georg Alexander) and asks for his help. He volunteers his services. She travels on his passport as his wife, but after they cross the border, the Russian-Jewish agent “Rakowsky” (Walter Franck) spots her. Complications follow but the young spy succeeds in her mission: she has an audience with, and receives the help of, the carefully guarded but supportive Grand Duke Ignatieff (Paul Otto). He promises clemency for her compatriots. She and the American return to Poland with the intention of making their fake marriage a real one. Eskapade had been made in 1936, when Germany hid its fangs. Also called Seine offizielle Frau, it was retitled and released in the U.S. by American Tobis Corp. under an apt Nazi title: For Her Country’s Sake, in late 1937.

Who could object to a nationalistic film like that one? Or who could object to Waschneck’s heartfelt, final film to screen in America? Ufa’s mother-love tale Streit um den Knaben Joe (Strife Over the Boy Joe, 1937), which screened at the 86th Street Garden near the end of the year, is about boys (Klaus Detlef Sierck and Eberhard Itzenplitz) who might have been exchanged at birth, in far off Cairo. When Jo and Erwin reach their thirteenth birthdays, they leave home in an effort to uncover their real German identities. The German mothers (Maria von Tasnady and Lil Dagover) panic. But the tale ends happily, for the boys turn out to be blood relations.

German blood is the element in the Heimat film Das Schweigen im Walde (The Silence of the Forest, l937), directed by Hans Deppe, which makes reference to three German cultural works. As the title of a famous painting by the late nineteenth-century artist Arnold Böcklin, the film touched the sentimental nerve of filmgoers aware of the era, if not the artist’s literary painting. Based on the novel of the same name by Ludwig Ganghofer, the sound film was a remake of the popular 1929 silent produced in Germany by Universal’s Jewish-owned subsidiary Deutsche Universal and directed by the German-Jew Wilhelm Dieterle. In the Nazi rendition, which screened in the U.S. in late 1937, even an aristocrat has a place in the new Germany—if he’s hiding his loathsome identity and willing to risk his life for German womanhood. In the silent forests of the Bavarian Alps a nobleman going incognito, Heinz von Ettingen (Paul Richter), saves the young Lo Petri (Hansi Knoteck) twice: once from a desperate forester, Toni Mezegger (Hermann Erhardt), and later, heroically, from a spectacular forest fire. Conversely, the young, strong forester Pepi Praxmaler (Gusti Stark-Gestettenbaur) is the prototypical German male in his courtship of an attractive country maiden, Burgl Brentlinger (played by the “dark beauty in the rough,” Käthe Merk).

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