Siegfried Kracauer by Graeme Gilloch

Author:Graeme Gilloch [Gilloch, Graeme]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780745689494
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

6

Orpheus in Hollywood

1 Long Shot

Paris. 1864. A crowded boulevard on a late spring evening. Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, Jacques Offenbach's librettists, are strolling along to the composer's house, exchanging pleasantries and witticisms with acquaintances encountered en route. The imperial carriage rolls past pursued by the usual procession of vehicles occupied by a motley array of notables, fashionable figures, courtesans and other hangers-on. Among them is Hortense Schneider, Offenbach's capricious leading lady for the last decade. Her carriage pulls up. She ‘waves the two men over and, with slightly vulgar aplomb, rails against Offenbach’ (MPT: 2). The carriage moves off. Meilhac's response to this petulant outburst is telling. He turns to Halévy and declares that Hortense was ‘born to play the part of Helen of Troy in an operetta’ (ibid.).

This comic incident opens Kracauer's ‘Jacques Offenbach: Motion Picture Treatment’, a 22-page German text now held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv. With this rather peculiar script, written around 1938, Kracauer hoped to interest Hollywood film companies, producers and directors1 in acquiring the motion picture rights to his then recently published Jacques Offenbach und die Paris seiner Zeit (1937), a book already translated into English. Had the ‘Motion Picture Treatment’ plan succeeded, the ensuing rights sale would not only have generated much needed funds for the impoverished exile but also have initiated an important contact with, indeed a potential lifeline to, influential figures in America. It failed. Although Kracauer later notes in a letter to Max Horkheimer2 that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did indeed take out an option on the American edition of the book, nothing came of it. The rights remained unsold, the film unrealized. Kracauer remained poor and in Paris.3

The prospect of Kracauer, then nearing his fiftieth birthday, becoming a Hollywood screenplay writer should not surprise us. The ‘Motion Picture Treatment’ was certainly not his only (unsuccessful) attempt to write for the cinematic medium which so fascinated him. Sometime between 1933 and 1936 he had penned a five-page ‘Thematic sketch [Ideen-Entwurf] for a short film’ to be entitled Dimanche;4 and in the mid-1940s he was involved in writing the script of The Accident, later retitled Below the Surface, a so-called test film intended to elicit and examine audience reactions as part of the Frankfurt School's ongoing studies in prejudice and anti-Semitism.5

Moreover, Kracauer had reason to be quietly optimistic: in a letter of 22 August 1939, he points to the production of a Fox film biography of Offenbach starring Lily Pons.6 Indeed, Offenbach's music was enjoying fresh acclaim on the East Coast: the 1937 New York Metropolitan Opera House performance of The Tales of Hoffmann remains today one of the great recordings for collectors. Furthermore, in 1938 MGM released Julien Duvivier's The Great Waltz, a musical film biography of Johann Strauss, Offenbach's great rival and eventual successor. If this production could be a box office hit then why not an Offenbach movie? Duvivier's film was to prove a mixed blessing for Kracauer, however. On the one hand, it was to provide, in Kracauer's terms, an

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