Walter Reisch
Bernhard Frankfurter, a young Austrian filmmaker, follows the trails and roots of several German-speaking filmmakers who had been forced into exil by Hitler faschism. He interviewed prominent and less well-known artists who were forced to leave their (artistic) heimat because they were politically or racially no longer "acceptable"... A documentary film in which the personal commitment of the filmmaker is purposely brought to the attention of the viewer.
An Edinburgh professor and assorted colleagues follow an explorer's trail down an extinct Icelandic volcano to the earth's center.
In early 1900s' Pennsylvania, Mr. Pennypacker has two company offices and two families with a combined total of 17 children. With an office in Harrisburg and an office in Philadelphia, he has successfully kept two separate homes. However, when an emergency requires his oldest son to find him, Mr. Pennypacker's dual life is revealed.
An American intelligence agent is sent to Tokyo to track down a Communist spy ring.
Nancy Fallon gets her teenage daughter back from her ex-husband when she remarries and must win her love.
Broadway showgirl Evelyn Nesbit (Joan Collins) is the object of affection of two men: playboy architect Stanford White (Ray Milland) and wealthy but unstable Harry Thaw (Farley Granger). She marries Thaw, but White’s continued pursuit puts him in the path of Thaw’s volatile temper. Inspired by true events that occurred at the turn of the 20th century.
As soon as he graduated from the Naples Conservatory, Vincenzo Bellini meets Maddalena Fumaroli and immediately falls in love with her.
Rose Loomis and her older, gloomier husband, George, are vacationing at a cabin in Niagara Falls, N.Y. The couple befriend Polly and Ray Cutler, who are honeymooning in the area. Polly begins to suspect that something is amiss between Rose and George, and her suspicions grow when she sees Rose in the arms of another man. While Ray initially thinks Polly is overreacting, things between George and Rose soon take a shockingly dark turn.
A marriage broker can't resist meddling in the life of a model, with disastrous results.
Ellen McNulty leaves her New Jersey hamburger stand and heads west to pay a surprise visit to her son and his new bride. When Ellen arrives, her daughter-in-law mistakes her for the maid she has hired for a big party they are throwing. Rather than cause any embarrassment, Ellen goes along with the charade, which leads to many complications.
Lord Windermere appears to all - including his young wife Margaret - to be the perfect husband. The couple's happy marriage is placed at risk when he starts paying visits to a mysterious beautiful newcomer, Mrs. Erylnne, who is determined to make her entry into London's high society. Worse, the secret gets back to Margaret that Windermere has been giving Mrs. Erylnne large sums of money.
This musical tells the tales of two movie extras who abscond to an expensive resort with their costumes and pretend to be aristocrats. Included in the film are ice skating numbers and songs.
The beautiful wife of a tweedy astronomer becomes convinced that her astrologer's prediction of a new dream man in her life will come true.
Brothers feud over a girl they both fall for while covering World War II.
Little Deft Michigan follows the customs of old-world Holland and is known for its Tulip Festival. The owner of the hotel insists that his seven daughters marry in order, from eldest to youngest.
The story of courtesan and dance-hall girl Emma Hamilton, including her relationships with Sir William Hamilton and Admiral Horatio Nelson and her rise and fall, set during the Napoleonic Wars.
A happily married woman sees a psychoanalyst and develops doubts about her husband.
Amelia is a gifted violinist who is in danger of quitting the Brissac Academy of Music. Julius arranges to have a scholarship given to her through his employee Tony so that Julius can escort Amelia to every musical event in the city. The trouble begins when he cannot meet her one night and Tony goes in his place. Tony believes that Julius and Amelia are a couple and then son Paul thinks that Tony and Amelia are a couple as he is sending her the money. The worst part is that Amelia might leave classical music for swing music with classmates Dusty, Joy and the band.
Composer Johann Strauss risks his marriage over his infatuation with a beautiful singer.
Actor Edmund Davey becomes a star overnight when his wife and co-star teams up with the secretary of a noted stage critic to produce a glowing review of his 'Othello'.
Vienna, 1922. Due to a sudden financial tragedy, a young woman begins accepting checks from an older, rich gentleman for companionship in order for her to keep attending college. Their relationship is purely platonic, but eventually she begins a romance with the tutor of the older man's sons who has a completely wrong impression as to the nature of her arrangement with his employer.
Martha Eggerth heads the cast of Casta Diva, but the central character is famed Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini, here played by American actor Phillips Holmes. Paying but scant attention the facts, the film concentrates on Bellini's colorful love life. Evidently the film went through several rewriting processes, as witness the curious performances of Donald Calthrop and Arthur Margetson, whose characters do complete about-faces halfway through the story. Amidst so many British accents, Martha Eggerth's Polish intonations seem out of place, but she photographs beautifully and sings quite well. Casta Diva was attractively filmed on location in Naples. Not to be confused with the 1954 remake (by Gallone himself) or to the English language version "The Divine Spark" (also directed by Gallone and starred by Eggerth).
A distraught movie extra (Fay Wray) flees a movie set with a fancy costume and car. Circumstances lead her to begin impersonating a Countess, while a fellow extra (Patsy Kelly) takes on the role of her servant.
After a masked carnival ball, Gerda Harrandt, wife of the surgeon Carl Ludwig Harrandt, allows the fashionable artist Ferdinand von Heidenick to paint a portrait of her wearing only a mask and a muff. This muff however belongs to Anita Keller, in secret the painter's lover but also the fiancée of the court orchestra director Paul Harrandt. The picture is then published in the newspaper. When Paul sees it and asks von Heidenick some questions about the identity of the model, the artist is forced to improvise a story and on the spur of the moment invents a woman called Leopoldine Dur as the alleged model. Leopoldine Dur however turns out to be a real woman whose acquaintance Heidenick makes shortly afterwards.
Composer Franz Schubert--broke, struggling and unhappy--gets a break when a wealthy friend wangles him an invitation to a command performance in front of a princess of the royal family. Schubert performs a version of his new work, "Symphony in B Minor", for the princess, but a misunderstanding results in Schubert storming out of the concert in a rage. Complications ensue.
A section from the life of composer Franz Schubert as a material for a love story.
A dashing marquis bends from his horse when he discovers a lost garter in the woods and falls. During his delirium he is serenaded by a little hairdresser. She is the person who lost the garter to begin with and has only come to get it back having borrowed it from her employer--the empress of France. The marquis mistakenly thinks he was nursed by the empress, herself, and decides to woo her.
Comedy with an Egyptian backdrop: Businessman Tobby and the Countess Stafanie wish to take all the fun away from their single parents and make them marry each other. Their parents have the same plan, too ... but with regards to their nosy kids. And so it happens, that Tobby wants to surprise the parents with the announcement of their -- the parents' -- engagement at a party (so nice to let them know), but is one-upped by Stefanie's father, the old Count, who announces the engagement of the kids. To avoid a scandal, they have to get married, but will divorce later.
F.P.1 is a huge airplane landing dock in the Atlantic where pilots making the transatlantic flight can stop. Yet a saboteur tries to sink the technical wonder in this classic German science fiction film from 1932. The film was also created with English and French speaking actors at the same time.
The two aspiring actresses Jeanette and Mimi are waiting for their big chance. But the real breakthrough is slow in coming. Jeanette especially desperately needs a big success, since her friend, the journalist Stephan, is about to lose his job. When the two have their chance to take a ride in a posh car during a shooting, Jeanette slams on the throttle and the two friends take off. Their aimless journey takes them to a fashionable winter sports’ hotel, where Jeanette reserves a name under “The Countess of Monte Christo”. Everything’s going dandy; no one suspects a thing. That is, until two impostors, Rumowski and “The Baron” take residence in the same hotel.
Both the King and his son have been deposed by popular demand. The now Prinz of Arkadia certainly enjoys his new role, which without much changing his lifestyle leaves him free to concentrate on his main interest -women. Including an actress who once wrote a mocking song about him -a song that he likes to sing.
Rival window cleaners Willy I and Willy 2 befriend Jou-Jou, an aspiring dancer, who has been tricked out of money by a con-man posing as an American movie mogul, and together they turn an old railway carriage into a "Villa Hollywood" for her.
This German crime drama was based on a true story. Willy Forst stars as a poverty-stricken Italian glazier who falls in love with French hotel maid Rosa Valletti. Struck by the girl's resemblance to Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Forst manages to steal the painting from the Louvre in hopes of impressing his sweetheart. But when the girl proves to be a fickle sort, the crestfallen hero confesses his crime and is carted off to jail. Unwilling to admit that he'd been led astray by a woman, Forst claims that he stole the Mona Lisa to restore it to his native Italy, and as a result is hailed as a national hero! Raub der Mona Lisa was distributed in the U.S. by RKO Radio, under the title The Theft of the Mona Lisa.
It begins with a Tannhäuser performance and ends with the premiere of The Tales of Hoffmann. In between a young ingénue cast in her first big role, the Hoffmann rehearsals, the theatre director and his stage director exchanging cynicisms, a budding love affair. Gründgens at his most repulsive, trying to woo both lovers. And a hair-raising finale. Add to this some snappy dialogue and "pre-code" scenes that make you sit up and stare.
Hokuspokus is a 1930 German comedy film directed by Gustav Ucicky and starring Lilian Harvey, Willy Fritsch and Oskar Homolka. It was an adaptation of the play Hokuspokus by Curt Goetz.
Das Lied ist Aus (The Song Is Ended) is a typical early-talkie German musical in every respect, save one. The story, concerning the lives and loves of show folk, ends unhappily -- and surprisingly so. The doleful denouement didn't seem to have much effect on the film's box-office appeal, since Das Lied ist Aus proved a major moneymaker.
"Der Herr auf Bestellung" has the Weimar dream team of Walter Reisch as scriptwriter, Geza von Bolvary as director and most importantly, the incomparable Willi Forst as main actor. This 'musical burlesque' tells about a stylish young gentleman (Willi Forst) who works as a so-called 'Festredner'; an untranslatable term, it indicates a person who makes speeches at important events like marriages etc. for people who don't feel able to do it themselves. Willi lends his voice to a speech-impaired professor (Paul Hörbiger), but the baroness (Trude Lieske) who falls in love with Hörbiger only does so because of Willi's voice, and you can guess that this leads to all sorts of complications…
Kitty Kellermann is put on trial for murdering her husband, a failed painter. When her counsel resigns from his mandate, the mysterious Peter Bille steps in, though it becomes apparent that he actually is not an advocate but Kitty's lover and moreover confesses the murder. The widow has to admit that the pictures by her deceased spouse sell much better, only for him to suddenly appear alive.
The survived print of the film is incomplete. This exciting, modern crime story focuses on a young woman, a prisoner who was dressed to steal by her lover, and therefore she was in jail. She would like to see her sweetheart. One night she succeeds in persuading the doctor of the prison who also is a woman, to be released. She finds the man, a waiter in an elegant hotel, behaving as a cynical Don Juan, he was preparing to rob the safe of the hotel and go away with his new lover, a dancer. This dancer suffers a fatal accident.
Die elf Teufel / The Eleven Devils was made in Berlin in the summer of 1927, in the last throes of the silent movie era. But Die elf Teufel strikes one today as a prophetic film. One of its early captions is "Football, the sport of the century ". We are shown a ball bathed in light like some sacred relic, and observe how, even in those early days, fans on the terraces wouldn't shy away from using their fists.
This film is included in the collections of Deutsche Kinemathek, Filmarchiv Austria, and the CNC.
A young Jewish woman in an Eastern European shtetl struggles to reconcile her aspirations with her duty to her family. As her lifestyle grows wilder, her mother is shocked by her immoral behaviour and commits suicide by drowning - repeating "the curse" which has haunted the family for centuries.
