William Dieterle

[HerrSchreck]

William Dieterle
1893 - 1972

"When Laughton acted that (whipping) scene (in Hunchback), enduring the terrible torture, he was not the poor crippled creature expecting compassion from the mob, but rather oppressed and enslaved mankind, suffering the most awful injustice."

Filmography (Director)

Ein Sommernachtstraum (1968) (TV)
Die Mongolenschlacht (1966) (TV)
Samba (1966) (TV) (as Wilhelm Dieterle)
The Confession (1964)
Antigone (1962/I) (TV)
Das Vergnügen, anständig zu sein (1962) (TV)
Gabriel Schillings Flucht (1962) (TV)
Die große Reise (1961) (TV)
Die Fastnachtsbeichte (1960)
Ich fand Julia Harrington (1960) (TV)
Die Herrin der Welt - Teil II (1960)
Die Herrin der Welt - Teil I (1960)
Il vendicatore (1959)
Omar Khayyam (1957)
"Screen Directors Playhouse" (1 episode, 1956)
- One Against Many (1956) TV episode
Magic Fire (1955)
Elephant Walk (1954)
Salome (1953)
The Turning Point (1952)
Boots Malone (1952)
Red Mountain (1951)
Peking Express (1951)
Dark City (1950)
September Affair (1950)
Vulcano (1950)
Paid in Full (1950)
Rope of Sand (1949)
The Accused (1949)
Portrait of Jennie (1948)
Duel in the Sun (1946) (uncredited)
The Searching Wind (1946)
This Love of Ours (1945)
Love Letters (1945)
I'll Be Seeing You (1944)
Kismet (1944)
Tennessee Johnson (1942)
Syncopation (1942)
All That Money Can Buy (1941)
... aka The Devil and Daniel Webster (International: English title) (USA: reissue title)
A Dispatch from Reuter's (1940)
Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
Juarez (1939)
Blockade (1938)
The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
Another Dawn (1937)
The Prince and the Pauper (1937)
The Great O'Malley (1937)
Satan Met a Lady (1936)
The White Angel (1936)
The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935)
Dr. Socrates (1935)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
The Secret Bride (1934)
The Firebird (1934)
Madame Du Barry (1934)
Dr. Monica (1934) (uncredited)
Fog Over Frisco (1934)
Fashions of 1934 (1934)
From Headquarters (1933)
Female (1933) (uncredited)
The Devil's in Love (1933)
Adorable (1933)
Grand Slam (1933)
Lawyer Man (1932)
Scarlet Dawn (1932)
6 Hours to Live (1932)
The Crash (1932)
Jewel Robbery (1932)
Man Wanted (1932)
Her Majesty, Love (1931)
The Last Flight (1931)
Die heilige Flamme (1931)
Eine Stunde Glück (1931)
Dämon des Meeres (1931) (uncredited)
Kismet (1931)
Der Tanz geht weiter (1930)
Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern (1930)
Die Maske fällt (1930)
Das Schweigen im Walde (1929)
Frühlingsrauschen (1929)
Ich lebe für Dich (1929)
Durchs Brandenburger Tor. Solang noch Untern Linden... (1929) (supervising)
Geschlecht in Fesseln - Die Sexualnot der Gefangenen (1928)
... aka Sex in Chains (USA: DVD title)
Die Heilige und ihr Narr (1928)
Das Geheimnis des Abbe X (1927)
Der Mensch am Wege (1923)


Web Resources:

Forum

The Devil and Daniel Webster (MoC)
The Last Flight
Silent Film on DVD
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
Edition Filmmuseum (re Ludwig der Zweite)
The Devil and Daniel Webster (CC)

Sites devoted to Dieterle and his work:

imdb
TSPDT
TCM on Dieterle
Dcairns on Dieterle
An appreciation by Mike Grost
mondo digital appreciation of Dieterle's classic films

..more to come.

[HerrSchreck]

After catching up on some forgotten Dieterle films that knocked my socks off, like The Great O'Malley, The Last Flight, and with with The Devil's In Love, and The Divine Lady on deck, I felt that an appreciation for this somewhat underappreciated/underrepresented-on-home-vid master filmmaker was in order. People like to tap his Expressionist roots, but his style varied quite widely, even in back to back films. If he was an auteur, it was because he allowed the material to speak to and through him, rather than an overarching style speaking cinsistently through his films. He had a great respect for whatever material he was handling at any given time. Compare the beautiful surfaces of Jennie or Devil's In.. or D Webster, with the generally lit canvasses of The Great O'Malley or The Last Flight. Very intelligent use of the grammar and punctuation of the visual surface, and when to turn on and off powerful lighting effects and dramatic composition.

Wonderful, wonderful director.

[HerrSchreck]

What are your thoughts on Sex In Chains, David? I don't think I've ever heard you express an opinion either way.

[zedz]

What are your thoughts on Sex In Chains, David? I don't think I've ever heard you express an opinion either way.

All I can say is, thank God for capitals and italics!

[GringoTex]

I never realized what Dieterle had directed. I mean, I never made a connection between him and the movies of his I've seen. Thanks, Shreck.

[HarryLong]

What!? There's only now a thread on Dieterle?

>>Compare the beautiful surfaces of Jennie or Devil's In.. or D Webster, with the generally lit canvasses of The Great O'Malley or The Last Flight. Very intelligent use of the grammar and punctuation of the visual surface, and when to turn on and off powerful lighting effects and dramatic composition.<<
A month or so back, planning to do some DVD burning for a friend, I turned on the TV, tuned, as always, to TCM, & encountered SALOME at some point well after it had started. The scene I landed on was a transitional scene of some character walking down some stairs and across the palace set, but it struck me that the composition of this throwaway scene was just marvelous. Shortly afterward Judith Anderson or Charles Laughton showed up and I realized what the film was and who the director was. Of course. Like good manners, German Expressionism will always tell. Dieterle's post-30s films may often be rather turgid, but they are still wonderful to look at.

[HerrSchreck]

What are your thoughts on Sex In Chains, David? I don't think I've ever heard you express an opinion either way.

All I can say is, thank God for capitals and italics!

Boy that attempt sailed over the outfield. Either that or Hare's once nuclear humor is headed for middle class retirement!

As the priest said to the pedo-- "Why so smallminded?" Who cares about Hare's opinion on a boring old silent film about a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman who winds up demo'ing hose & suction from cell to cell?

[myrnaloyisdope]

Jewel Robbery is one of the more bizarre pre-coders out there, with Kay Francis as a wealthy socialite who gets robbed at a party by jewel thief William Powell. Powell's getaway plans involve getting his victims high on marijuana. Pretty far out stuff.

The structure of the film is really fascinating as it's essentially 2 long sequences (or so it felt when I watched it) of about 30 minutes each. The first sequence is the party where Francis' and her cronies are robbed by Powell, and the second is Francis' mechanations to get her jewels back whilst also falling in love with Powell. It's a lively little film with a lot of fun interaction, and it's so briskly paced. Maybe it could be described as Lubitsch-lite, it makes for an interesting companion piece to Trouble in Paradise. It is probably Dieterle's second best pre-coder (at least of the 5 I've seen), after the astonishing The Last Flight.

Lawyer Man is a fun if slight Joan Blondell-William Powell vehicle, very similar in tone to Wyler's Counsellor At Law from the same period. The Devil's in Love is a very underwhelming foreign legion picture, that at best offers some atmospheric photography, while The Crash is a weirdly paced Ruth Chatterton vehicle set in the years leading up to the stock market crash of 1929. It's the kind of picture that could be quite good given 2 hours time (similar to Wellman's So Big!, an 80 minute epic that allows Barbara Stanwyck to age 40 years), but feels incredibly rushed and incomplete at 65 minutes.

[HarryLong]

Given Dieterle's work got a tad lugubrious by the 1940s (even HUNCHBACK has its torpid moments), it's surprising and refreshing to catch up with the work from the early 1930s, which is so amazingly brisk. I haven't seen near enough of them (not that I haven't done a certain amount of copying from TCM - just haven't had the chance to sit down & watch the dang things). The LAST FLIGHT is amazing -- one of the great barely-known films from the early 30s.

[HerrSchreck]

The Last Flight is wondeful stuff. I just love the cast, too... especially seeing Helen Morgan play a lush!

So I saw The Divine Lady... cough, I mean Madame DuBarry (I got my acquisitions crossed). Lots of fun-- shows the Will D of the 1930's could tackle virtually any style.,

[Ann Harding]

Great idea to create a topic for this underrated director. I recommend the wonderful book written by Hervé Dumont: William Dieterle, Un humaniste au pays du cinéma (CNRS Editions/Cinémathèque Française, 2002). Alas, no English translation is available unlike Dumont's wonderful volume on Borzage. The book is solely for French-speakers.

[HarryLong]

shows the Will D of the 1930's could tackle virtually any style.,

Given he landed at Warners he sorta had to. Whatever WB was in the early 1930s it was no Ufa. Just based on my admittedly limited viewing of Dieterle's work from this time, I think it's his most interesting period. It's almost a shame he went mostly upscale after MIDSUMMER & started doing things like the Muni biopics.
I'd almost trade MALTESE FALCON for SATAN MET A LADY. Definitive it ain't, but it's pure, demented fun.
(Yes, it's post-MIDSUMMER, but it's about the only thing afterward that doesn't scream "Prestige." Before that there's a film with Fields, a Berkely musical ...)

[domino harvey]

TCM's showing five Dieterle films on Friday morning, four of them unavailable on DVD: Her Majesty Love, Grand Slam, A Dispatch From Reuters, Boots Malone, and Salome (already in the Rita Hayworth collection)

[rohmerin]

Dumont's book is translated into Spanish. It's a wonderful book.

[Professor Wagstaff]

TCM's showing five Dieterle films on Friday morning, four of them unavailable on DVD: Her Majesty Love, Grand Slam, A Dispatch From Reuters, Boots Malone, and Salome (already in the Rita Hayworth collection)

How would people rate these in the Dieterle canon? I've been underwhelmed by some of his early films, at least in comparison to great entertainment like The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Devil and Daniel Webster.

[HerrSchreck]

I finally got around to watching something that'd been sitting in the kevyipeee pile for a very very long time marinating in dust and stale air. The film is William Dieterle's LUDWIG II.

First and foremost I should say that this film is beyond doubt his most accomplished silent film. The level of pictorialism on display seems peerless, the work wrought by Dieterle with universal cameraman Charles Stumar (who would go on to helm a few classic universal horror films) is matchless.

It's impossible to overstate how extremely impressive the pictorial surface is in this film. . it's simply ravishing. The amount of time put in to the creation of pictorial effects, the in camera dissolves, the adventurous camera movements.. whirling tracking tilting pivoting..
it's absolutely dazzling.

It's so dazzling in fact that it causes a question to pop up in one's mind and it's a question that popped into my mind when I was watching Sex In Chains as well- why isn't the silent era work of this director more known? Why haven't they entered that lofty pantheon of the greatest visual masterpieces of the late silent era?

On the surface there is an impulse to say to oneself when beholding this for the first time to say "Ohh my god, this is so far in advance of nearly anything that was happening at the time, this man was so ambitious, he put so much work into these visual surfaces it's like there was one of the greatest directors in the world that.. strangely... the history books decided to ignore. Yet another victim of the damage wrought by our neverendingly inflexible film canons.."

But it's not that simple, not that simple by a long shot. Halfway through, something rose up within me while watching this film that rose up in me when I also watched Sex in Chains, which is a sense that, despite all of the surface inventiveness, there was something missing. Despite Dieterle's ambition in acting and directing his films, despite the endless man hours spent laboring over the beauty of the images. . something was missing.

I'm tempted to call that missing something "mood", but that would be simplifying things greatly. It goes far deeper than that.

Although there is the occasional use of symbols in Dieterle's silent films, there is a certain kind of depth and poetry missing from them. I'm tempted to say that at this point in the man's career he quite simply was not a poet. Yet aside from being overly harsh it may be somewhat of an overstatement.

What Dieterle really seems to struggle with at this early phase of his career is the infusing of his images with emotional resonance. His images are ever finite, and seem to lack the infinite. Many directors of his era were capable of creating single images that could leave one nearly gasping over their mysterious ability to reach down deep into the viewer and strum an interior resonance, a process that is as concrete and significant a part of the films construction as the lighting, the acting, and the pictorial composition. Images that are far far more than the sum of their parts.

This is that division among film types that I mentioned on the MelancholIa thread. It also connects into something that I mentioned on my commentary (on my Schreckbabble.blog, which I guess I should here mention will be, due to some very flattering requests to continue, resuming, as mentioned in my last post on my Not In Style blog) for the film Menilmontant by Kirsanoff. . the difference between narrative blocks of film and emotional blocks of film. I mentioned them then as a key difference between the French Impressionist style of filmmaking and the standard style of hollywood melodrama filmmaking, to of course highlight the differences between what Kirsanoff was doing with his little film and what was going on in the world around him in popular film style.

I think this is an instructive comparison to make when thinking about what it is about these silent films by Dieterle that causes them to be, despite the intense ambition and the excess of labor that went into their construction, not quite forgotton, but not hugely remembered by history. His images are ever coming towards you in a tour de force fashion. . . yet they rarely strum an inner mystery in the viewer--this is my view of corse--that causes you to come towards them. These images seem to be purely a one way street.

Girls will tell you that there are 2 kinds of men in bed-- one who is constantly coming AT their partner, sometimes with a little modicum of variety but mostly with pounding hammering repetition. . . the girl hangs there under-or-unutilized while the male goes through his desperately gymnastic routine, just on this side of a razors edge of nervousness, as though the world hangs in the balance at the prospect of a weak moment or mistake; and then there are gents who sleep WITH their partners, who know that excessive speed and force and all manner of relentless showmanship can lead to the opposite effect of numbness and irreversible shutdown of the senses within their partners, often involuntary. They know the importance of the activation of deep forces in
their partner by slowing down to a crawl, alternating speeds, reverse psychology. . . quite simply the act of getting their partner involved to create a truly unforgettable experience.

In some ways Dieterle is, here in these early films, a young man of great promise not yet aware of the ways and means of getting his audience involved in contributing to the proceedings. The experience of cinema is like sex in so many ways, and Dieterle would soon, happily gain the experience neccessary to put his sound films on firmer aesthetic grounds.

Kudos to Ed Filmmuseum for another fine set!

[rohmerin]

I want to watch The Searching Wind for years because its Lillian Hellman script and anti fascist summary subjet, but this film seem to be a ghost. Has anyone been able to see it?

I have seen five Dieterles lately for first time. I enjoyed very much the 60 minutes of Scarlet Dawn, bad film but very funny. Fog over Frisco and Doctor Socrates were not good but were interesting, short films. I appreciate the 60 - 70 minutes movies.
Erlich's bullet is very good (but I prefer Juarez and specially Reuter's to the other fanous bio-pics).
I found marvellous Rope of Sand, really impressive adventure mix genre film.
A midsummer's... I did'nt like it at all.

[rohmerin]

Juarez DVD (Spain)

Screen captures from Juarez DVD (Spain) in my blog. It's not a VHS. I like the image (for being Impulso for WB is good). Optional subtitles, I repeat, not forced Spanish subs.

http://rohmerin.blogspot.com.es/2012/05 ... -1939.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;