Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

other sounds. The viewer experiences all that goes on behind the scenes. A woman (Georgia Lind) who wishes to become an actress against the wishes of her husband (Kurt Vespermann) is instructed to play a scene and bungles it, then has repeated confrontations with the director (Paul Graetz) and production manager before conceding her ineptitude.

We will only know the extent to which the resistant acoustic material has been successfully integrated when dialogues, sounds on the set, and film music are shown in the finished product. The advanced Tri-Ergon system, however, might well raise our hopes that we have moved ahead nicely in sound film.

B. Z. am Mittag, August 21, 1928

The Threepenny Opera, for the Fiftieth Time

At the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, The Threepenny Opera has now reached its fiftieth performance. The opera’s enduring appeal owes to its fusion of outrageous wit and social criticism. Kurt Weill’s music is a large part of that appeal. The Beggar King is now played by Hans Hermann Schaufuss, and his daughter, Polly, is Charlotte Ander. Rosa Valetti is superb as “a woman tailor-made for procuring and for the Gypsy trade,” whereas Harald Paulsen is a very likable murderer, robber, and swindler. Kate Kühl invariably gets extra applause for her brilliantly trenchant performance. Kurt Gerron lends tragicomic tenderness to the role of the sheriff of London, who takes kickbacks from that scoundrel Mackie. There was just as much applause for this fiftieth performance as there had been for the first.

B. Z. am Mittag, October 22, 1928

Frühling in Palästina / Aviv be’Erez Israel (Springtime in Palestine, 1928)

Twenty-five years ago a barren desert with noxious swamps, today a city with forty-five thousand residents, lovely wide streets, handsome garden villas, schools, sanatoriums, factories, the future seaside resort of the Orient—Tel Aviv. The second powerful impression is that of Haifa, the port city of Palestine, now being greatly expanded. The many communities appear before your eyes in vibrant images, extensive orange plantations, which already yield two million crates a year, the main export product, and there are fields and forests.

All wrested in hard, tedious work from the sandy, rocky soil. We see European girls from bourgeois families who did office work or studied at universities back home now building streets, men previously unaccustomed to agrarian life now cultivating the soil. Also of interest are the images from the interior of Palestine, of Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee, the rapids of the Jordan River, which will now be used to generate electricity.

This film is a unique cultural document, a paean to willpower and work. Josef Gal-Ezer made it quite skillfully. The applause was enthusiastic.

B. Z. am Mittag, December 11, 1928

First Silhouette Sound Film

FRÄULEIN FÄHNRICH (MISS MIDSHIPMAN, 1929)

Who doesn’t know the little [Julius] Pinschewer films, those amusing little animations that form the core of the preliminary program in many moving-picture theaters? Pinschewer has now gone a step further, and we’ve been following his experiment with great interest as we watch the results. The goal is to connect advertising films with sound films using the Tri-Ergon system.

The entertaining form Pinschewer chose drew on Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette animations. It took him seven months to put together seventy thousand individual images to create a little film, 275 yards in length, loosely based on Andersen’s The Chinese Nightingale. The contents amount to an advertisement for Tri-Ergon films. This type of filming continues to pose several technical difficulties, of course, in spite of good continuing development, and the text for the plot had to be supplied by the tinny voice of an announcer, because a dialogue simultaneous with the moving images could not be achieved. Even so, this and other tests show that there is still much to be accomplished in this arena.

The film Fräulein Fähnrich (Miss Midshipman, 1929), now playing at the Primus Palace, is meant to be a witty story about the navy. The three writers did not shy away from listing their names and claiming responsibility for the tritest absurdities in witless situations and situationless witticisms. The highest degree of goodwill: not a word about them and their crimes. You have to feel sorry for Mary Parker, Fritz Schulz, and the whole big crowd of extras who had to act so sweet and dopey, and for the audience that had to watch this.

B. Z. am Mittag, March 5, 1929

Was eine Frau im Frühling träumt (What a Woman Dreams in Spring, 1929)

AT THE BAVARIA LICHTSPIELE

What does a little shorthand typist dream of in the spring? Naturally, that’s the kind of person this film is about, just like so many other recent films. And it’s just as natural that a sudden windfall, beautiful clothing, the French Riviera town of Nice, an amorous adventure, and a famous film star add up to the sum of all hopes and dreams. If a few more painful cuts were to be made, a nice film would result—or so Hans Bietzke and Curt Blachnitzky thought. But the events and emotions they picked up from the hit song by Walter Kollo are unoriginal and not told well enough to arouse more interest.

On top of that, Blachnitzky’s directing lacks rhythm. The whole thing could use a bit of sun, of spring. Colette Brettel looks quite nice but suffers from the lifelessness of the direction, as does Ernst Rückert, the movie enthusiast in the film. Kurt Vespermann and Julius Falkenstein provide some amusement.

B. Z., April 2, 1929

“Youth Stage”?

I wonder whether the youngsters, the drama students at the Deutsches Theater, had a part in choosing the play that was presented yesterday on the rehearsal stage of the Kammerspiele. I hope not! This play, Young Woodley, by John van Druten, employs his boyish charm, sentimental sparkle, and the pure folly of his marvelously youthful mentality, but in essence it is undermined by his know-it-all attitude and precocious panache. Even so, it is deftly constructed, with slick dialogue, and some of its clever lines attest to meticulous craftsmanship.

It’s about the old, yet eternally new,