Patrick Bade
Movies in the Weimar Republic

Patrick Bade - Movies in the Weimar Republic

- Thank you very much, Lauren. Well, I’m sure you all recognise this image. It’s the image which is always used to conjure up the spirits of the Weimar Republic, and it’s no coincidence that it’s a movie still. This period was a golden age of movie making, and any list of the greatest movies of the 20th century is going to contain several movies that were, were made in Germany in this short period of 15 years, from 1919 to 1933. So I’m going to start off with “The Cabinets of Dr. Caligari” and finish with “M” and “The Blue Angel” Now, looking at these films, you know, with hindsight, the thing that strikes us is how dark they are. There is an underlying sense of menace in nearly all the films that I’m going to show you tonight. There’s a sense, yes, there is something rotten in the state of Germany, and you can’t help wondering if these brilliant filmmakers sensed if they had a premonition that something appalling was about to happen. Now I wouldn’t want to suggest that, that through this that Hitler and the Third Reich and the Holocaust were in any way inevitable. I’ve heard Judy tell you so many times this was not the case. It could have been very different. And in fact, there had to be a whole set of circumstances that enabled the rise of Hitler. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, of course, the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were the 1929 Wall Street crash and the ensuing economic crisis. Hitler had seemed to be passe, he was, but by 1929, he’s, he lost his following, he, he seemed to have failed and of course, it was the economic crisis that gave him a second bite of the cherry.

Now, the first great film of the Weimar Republic is “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and it’s a film which still keeps its fascination. Above all, it’s famous for its visual aspect, for the absolutely extraordinary expressionist sets and costumes and, of course, the very exaggerated and stylized expressionist acting is all of a piece with the visual aspect of the film. It’s usually said that the, this kind of design was partly an accident. This film was one of the first to be made at, at the end of the first World War. Money was extremely short and so having painted sets like these, rather than trying to recreate reality more realistically was a, a good option from a purely economic point of view. And drawings have survived, and we can see how faithfully the sets were created from the artist drawings, not famous artists. I suppose expressionism was really in the air at the time, and certainly, you know, there’s incredibly effective. This, the star of, of the, well, several stars actually, but the one I suppose that we remember most is Conrad Veidt and he plays the part of Cesare who is controlled, he’s hypnotised by the evil Dr. Caligari, who keeps him in the coffin and then wakes him out at night, and sends him out to commit murders and horrible crimes. And he is really extraordinary in this part, this amazing mask like face and his angular elongated body, the way he moves. At the end, I’ve asked Lauren to, she has very kindly put together some clips and you’ll see him in action in one of those clips. He was one of, of many, many, many people in the arts in Germany who fled in 1933. He, he was not Jewish himself, but he was very anti-Nazi and his wife was Jewish.

So they fled very quickly and they landed up in America and ironically, of course, he landed up playing Nazis in Hollywood movies in the 1940s, most famously, Colonel Strasser in Casablanca, as you see on the right hand side, oh, here is the scene which I will be able to show you later. Lot of these, these films, black and white, but very often they were tinted, so this scene, it’s a night scene, you can see it’s tinted in blue, and it’s the scene where he, he, he’s been sent to murder this beautiful young girl played by Lil Dagover. And he, he comes zombie-like into the room, and he raises his dagger and he’s about to stab her, but he, when he sees, catches sight of her beauty, he drops the dagger, and instead he, he grabs her and abducts her. More of these extra extraordinary sets. Oh, here is the evil Dr. Caligari and Cesare in his coffin like box. Now what is this film actually about? And your guess is as good as mine or anybody’s really, it’s so complicated and so confusing, and it keeps on changing tack, sort of twists in the plot, who is mad, who is sane? Have the mad people taken over the insane asylum, is the whole thing a fantasy of, of an evil, insane man? So this is right at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, long before Hitler has really begun to become known and spread his evil ideas, but it certainly seem, in, in retrospect, it seems to be an extraordinary metaphor for what was going to happen in Germany. Oh, this is another one of the very, very, one of the most famous film stills, I suppose, in the history of the cinema.

This is Cesare escaping across the rooftops, carrying the fainting Jane. So, as I said, these films and a another film later in the same year, which is also a very dark film, is Der Golem made by a director called Paul Wegener. There is a list that went out this morning if you want to check on the titles of the movies and who made them, and the dates of the movies. So De Golem is also 1920, and it’s based on an old Jewish legend of a rabbi who creates a human out of clay through magic. Of course, it’s, it’s a, it’s of course one of the legends that’s also a, the source for the Frankenstein story. And here again, you see, although the sets here are much more elaborate, they’re not just painted, they’re 3D sets, but you see the same kind of expressionist twisting distortions. Here is the rabbi with the creature that he has created and no straight lines, of course, in expressionist images, everything is twisting and turning and distorted and bent. So that’s also 1920, 2 years later. This is Nosferatu directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and this is generally considered to be the prototype horror movie, all, all the later Hollywood horror movies really take their starting point from, from this film, which is by, as I said by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and visually they’re stunning these movies, really extraordinary.

A lot of the very paintully, and as I shall try and show you later, I think a lot of the imagery you find in these, these very dark German movies in the 1920’s derives ultimately from romantic painting. Here the shadow of Nosferatu, who’s course a vampire and this is the scene where he dies because he tarries too long in the bedroom of a beautiful girl and of course, he is destroyed by the rays of the sun, dawn. The most famous and prolific director of the Weimar period is Fritz Lang and this is another movie, which seems to be a harbinger of what was going to happen in Germany in the 1930s, Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler, Dr. Mabuse the gambler. And it, it’s a, a story of how a whole city goes into thraw of an, an evil genius, Dr. Mabuse. Again, who uses hypnosis to take over people’s lives, a scene of seance from Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler. So I mean, that’s is 1922. So again, of course, Hitler is really pretty well off the radar until two years later, 1924, of course is the year of the, his attempted butch in, in, in Munich, but, Fritz Lang made a sequel to the Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler in 1933, cause that just at the point where the, the Nazi regime was coming into being called the testament of Dr. Mabuse.

So, and by this time of course, I think one can see very clearly that it is a, a metaphor for the rise of Nazism. 1924, Fritz Lang makes his epic film of Die Nibelungen drawing, not so much on Wagner directly as on the sources of Wagner’s ring of the Nibelungen. So it’s based on old Nordic epic poems, very elaborate film, visually stunning, these extraordinary images of forests, the trees were actually made out of cement and concrete. And as I said, I think the, the imagery of the, the, the dark menacing forest goes back to German romanticism in the early 19th century. Here are two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, and more recently the symbolist, German Symbolist or Swiss symbolist artist, Arnold Böcklin, on the left hand side, I think was a direct source for these forest images in the Nibelungen film of Fritz Lang. Here are more of these stills from the, the Nibelungen plot, as I said, following more the the old sagas rather than, rather than Wagner. Now, I suppose Fritz Lang’s most famous and film of the 1920s is “Metropolis” that came out in, in 1927. It, it was incredibly lavish. It was actually the most expensive film to be made in the Weimar regime and at the time, although it was a critical success, it wasn’t a popular success, it didn’t make money, frankly, I think it lost money. And it’s another film that I think we’re all very familiar with through visual images, you know, even if you haven’t seen the whole movie, you are very likely to have seen stills from the movie.

These extraordinary futuristic sets, this vision, a sort of nightmare vision of the future. And it’s a, it’s a film with a, a strong political element, it’s very critical of capitalism, red in tooth and claw, the way workers are exploited. There’s a very famous scene where the, you know, everybody is controlled and they, they’re all having to, they’re all treated really as components of a machine and here on the workers on the way to work. I used to think of this scene quite often, actually, on my way to my office when I was still employed at Christie’s, going in the rush hour and seeing downtrodden people with their heads bent forward, nobody looking at anybody else. It is very much like The London Underground in the rush hour. And this scene, which I’m, and which Lauren is going to show you later, where you have this vast furnace like machine that opens up its jaws and it literally devours the workers as we see them. A terrifying image, I suppose, again, an unconscious image of what was going to happen into the Holocaust with people being marched into gas chambers. And another premonition really, in the, is this scene in Metropolis, which seems to look forward, of course, to the Nazi Olympics of 1933 with this architecture, which is very much, again, a premonition of the architecture favoured by Hitler and the other very famous images from Metropolis concerned the creation of the evil Maria. There, there are two Maria’s in the film, there’s the good saintly Maria, and there’s the robot evil version of her, they’re both played by the same actress in the movie Briggita Helm.

And here she is again, looking forward, very much what you could see, obviously, if you know your horror movies in the 1930s, and you know James Whale, “The Bride of Frankenstein”, you can see that is very much inspired by this scene in Metropolis. Now we move on to another very great director, although he was, he sort of blotted his copy, he did blot his copy book, having left Germany, strangely, went back and then worked for the Nazis during the Second World War. She said, of course, Fritz Lang, who was half Jewish, although I don’t think he particularly identified as Jewish, but he was, although the Nazis actually banned some of his movies, they certainly banned the, “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” They were very keen to make use of his talents, of course, Goebbels famously said, “I decide who is a Jew.” And he called Fritz Lang into his office and offered him honorary Arian status if you’d work for the Nazi regime and Fritz Lang said, thank you very much, left the office, went straight to the railway station and left Germany immediately, and then went on to another very distinguished career. Of course, it’s like, it’s, it’s one of those people like who has a German career and an American career and of course, there are, there are, there is a certain continuity, you can see individual trays, distinctive trays of both artists, but they, in both cases, of course, their American work is very, very different from their German work, but perhaps, I mean, he’d left Germany initially in the Nazi period and was working in France.

This is usually considered to be his masterpiece and it’s Pandora’s box. And in some ways it’s again, a throwback because it’s a filming of a play that dates from the start of the century by Frank Vader Kent. I’d mentioned Vader Kent in a couple of lectures. He started his career in very provocative cabaret in Munich, around 1900 and then he moved to Berlin and he was writing plays that were, were frequently in trouble with the sensor. They were very near the knuckle and he wrote a trilogy of plays about the character of Lulu, Pandora, of course, in Greek mythology, is the woman who opened up the box and let out all the troubles that have plagued us ever since. So, Lulu is, she’s a fun fertile, she’s incredibly destructive, she destroys everybody she comes into contact with. And yet she herself is somehow innocent and completely unaware of all this. And she is played in this movie by the absolutely extraordinary Louise Brooks, who only made a handful of films. She made, cause in the silent era, she could travel around the world and she could, she made films in France, she made films in Germany and then she went back to America to Hollywood and made a few films there, but did not repeat the great successes of her European films, particularly her German films. And she’s just, she has this very distinctive, luminous beauty. It surely is one of the most beautiful faces. She’s, I mean, she was a very intelligent woman as well, and that she was extremely self-destructive, career-wise and in her personal life, but later on wrote essays and analysis of the history of film, which are very important to historians. This is the scene where she’s just married this very wealthy middle-aged man, but she fascinates everybody she meets, everybody is, is attracted to her like moths to the flame and they all land up being destroyed.

And this is a lesbian countess who is desperately in love with her as well. Here she more or less accidentally shoots her new husband and then she lands up as a prostitute in London and at the end of the movie, she’s murdered by Jack the Ripper. Right, so now what the, I think the one movie I’m going to show you, which isn’t dark and menacing and threatening or the one movie I’m going to talk about is “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” by Lotte Reiniger. And this was, this was the first ever full length animated film made in entirely in cut silhouettes. The, in, it was an enormous work, I mean, it took, she made the whole thing and the work took her her three years with huge numbers of images needed per second to make the animation convincing. It’s a story that’s based on the thousand and one nights and has, has a lovely sort of, well, I suppose it’s also a little bit expressionist, but more art deco, It’s very, very decorative. She was not Jewish, but she was very left wing. So she was another one of those who was forced to leave in 1933 and wandered from place to place, unable to get visas or passports. She came first of all to Britain, then she went to Italy, then she got caught up in, in the Second World War and she went back to Berlin to look after her mother and got into the clutches of the Nazis, who, of course, very much against her will, forced her to work in the film industry for them, but she survived the war and she actually came to Britain.

After the war, she left Germany and spent the rest of her life in United Kingdom. So are more stills from “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” Now sound, I mean, in many ways the German film industry was technologically the, the the most advanced and it was feeding Hollywood all the way through this period, through the, even before the, the rise of the Nazis drove out so many talented people who, who then went on to Hollywood. Of course, as you know, in the late 30’s and, and during the Second World War, German was really the second language of Hollywood. You know, you would’ve heard an awful lot of German going around Hollywood during the, the Second World War. But so, but Hollywood, as I said was act, was acting as a magnet for talent, German talent and ideas that were developed in the German film industry, but it was the Americans who introduced sound to movies first and usually, of course it’s said to be The Jazz Singer 1927. Actually, it’s not that quite that simple cuz there are a couple of movies before that that had sound sequences. And actually The Jazz Singer itself is not a sound movie all the way through, but usually that is the considered to be the starting off date for sound movies in America, 1927. By 1929, pretty well the whole Hollywood film industry had moved out to, over to sound, but it took a little longer in, in Germany. And the first really big sound movie to be made in Germany was “Das Land des Lächelns” That is the “The Land of Smiles.”

And it was, that was based on an Operetta by Franz Lehár that had really taken Berlin by storm in 1929 with the great Richard Tauber playing a Chinese prince who falls in love with an Austrian girl, she falls in love with him and she goes to China, but it all ends very badly. Actually, looking at this movie now, I mean, it’s, the, the rather cleverly, instead of just filming the Operetta straight, they show the Operetta on a stage inside, it’s a, a, a story within the story you can say that reflects another story going on in the film. And from my point of view, it’s very fascinating because the scenes from the Operetta really are, I think pretty well as it would’ve been if you’d gone to see the Operetta in Berlin at the Metropolitan Theatre in 1929. And particularly interesting is the fact as this is an experimental film with the sound technology, the Tauber is actually singing and Lauren is going to play you, him singing his great hit number, “You Are My Heart’s Delight” in a few minutes time. And you’ll see, of course, when it’s quite operatic, it’s quite a strenuous piece to sing. So, of course, his face is distorted by the effort of singing and very quickly after the introduction, so only in the very, very first sound movies that people are actually singing because of this problem with, if you have closeups and the face is distorted by the physical effort of singing. So very quickly, I mean, in all Tauber’s later movies and all the famous musicals of the 1930s, people are not actually singing. The actors are miming to a soundtrack that’s been pre-recorded.

So this “Mädchen in Uniform” is the masterpiece of a director called Leontine Sagan and it is a very, very powerful film, a very, very moving film, but it’s her one masterpiece. I mean, she, she was Jewish and she was also very left wing, so she had to leave very quickly in 1933 and she continued her career in England, but never really had the opportunity to make another great movie like, like this one. I think as a left wing Jewish woman, the opportunities were probably not all that great in Britain in the 1930s. Mädchen in Uniform, it’s set in a very conservative, traditional girls boarding school, but again, this, I think this a film which is a very conscious political metaphor. It’s, the school is really a metaphor for Germany and the film is really a critique of authoritarianism. It’s run in a very brutal, authoritarian way. And the two heroines of the film are this young girl you see on the right hand side who comes from an aristocratic family, but her mother has died and her father is away and she comes from a very loveless background and the first person who ever shows her any care or affection is a teacher in the school and she reciprocates by falling desperately in love with her teacher and at the climax of the movie during amateur theatricals, she declares her love for the teacher. And of course she’s punished and humiliated and ashamed and she runs up the staircase and she attempts to commit suicide, but is dragged away the last minute. So it’s a tough film actually, but very moving. Then another one of the greatest films ever made without a doubt, but again, a very disturbing film, very morally ambiguous and that’s Fritz Lang’s “M” M is for murder, of course.

And it’s the film that made a star of Peter Lorre, who went on to a glorious Hollywood career in horror movies and movies like the, you know, noir movies and the whole genre of course, of Phil Noir as the French dubbed those very dark movies in Hollywood in 1940s derived from the the German film culture that I’m talking about today. So Peter Lorre gives an absolutely brilliant performance cuz he’s a murderer, he’s worse than that, He’s a paedophile child murderer. So what could be less sympathetic, really? I’m reminded that actually, love that at the moment, cause we’ve got two stories at the moment in, in my country, in United Kingdom, one of this guy in Liverpool who shot a little girl with a deliberate, well accidentally really, sort of accidentally, but anyway, the whole of the underworld criminal fraternity in Liverpool, this is the one crime, the worst crime isn’t. It is the absolute worst crime to murder a child and they cooperated with the priest, the police, and it’s been a huge thing in England, this story. And he’s just been sentenced to, for the, to spend the rest of his life in prison. And they’re saying, of course he’ll have to be kept separate from the other prisoners because otherwise he’ll be attacked or murdered by the other prisoners and the other story that is very, very shocking to me at moment in England is that the attacks on the Prime Minsiter Rishi Sunak, so cynical, actually accusing him of being sympathetic to paedophile criminals. I mean, shockingly populist tactic, I would say, of the Labour party against Rishi Sunak. But anyway, in this film, we see the police investigation and where we see these scenes where he, you can see him attracted to little girls and approaching them and buying them toys and so on.

So it’s what, the, there’s huge sense of menace and aura, but what is really extraordinary and disturbing about this film is that you land up identifying with the paedophile murderer. That it’s really seen from his point of view. In a strange way he is, although we’re appalled by what he does and we want him to be caught, Of course we do, but we, we find that we land up being, in a way, identifying with him and being sympathetic towards him. And the last film I’m going to talk about before showing you some excerpts is “The Blue Angel.” This came out in 1930, so very short, is one of the earliest German sound movies. And the director was Josef von Sternberg, of course, his fun was completely fake, he was actually of Vietnamese Jewish origin, but he liked to give himself like, like Erich von Stroheim, another case liked to give himself aristocratic heirs. And he had already made successful movies in Hollywood. He came back to Germany for this rather sensational story by the brother of Thomas Man, Heinrich Man, that, that the title of a novel was Professor Unrat and it’s about a school teacher in a small German town. The town is visited by theatrical troupe, which includes Marlene Dietrich, again, she’s in a kind of fun fertile role, not totally unlike Lulu. And he’s very disturbed that his pupils are getting into her clutches, so he goes to confront her and he succumbs and he falls into her clutches and he’s eventually degraded and humiliated by her. Now the film was meant to be primarily a vehicle for Emil Jannings, he was a, in the silent era, he was a huge star, both in Hollywood and in Germany, was considered to be one of the greatest actors of the era.

But of course the movie was completely stolen by the till then pretty well unknown Marlene Dietrich at the end of the 20’s, I mean, she wasn’t that young. She was approaching 30, which in film star standards of those times is, you know, approaching your sell by date, actually. But she was initially talent spotted by, as I said last time, Amisha Polyansky and then she was picked up by Josef von Sternberg. This movie, of course turned her into one of the biggest female stars of the 20th century. And this is the famous thing where sing, she sings a song in German, its which is not, the English version “Falling in Love Again” is very anodyne, it’s really nothing to do. switched onto love from head to toe, so nothing to do with falling in love. And the, this very iconic image that’s been parroted so many, many times of her sitting on the reverse chair with her famous legs splayed either side of the chair. So that’s what I’ve got to say for the moment. I’m going to hand back to Lauren and we’ve got four clips to show you and we’re going to start off with the clip from “The Cabinets of Dr. Caligari” at the scene where the young man, Cesare, he’s being sent by Dr. Caligari to murder this young woman, but instead he abducts her. Notice his very stylized movements and gestures and acting and, of course, the very stylized makeup as well. And the famous scene where he’s carrying her off across the rooftops.

Right, I think we’ll move on to our next excerpt, which should be Metropolis, I think This is the young man who’s the hero, who’s the son of the factory owner and he goes down into the bowels of the earth to see the workers in the factory and he is absolutely appalled at what he sees. The degradation, the dehumanisation of the workers. Right, let’s move on to our next clip, which will be a bit of light relief, I hope. Which will be the great Richard Tauber singing the song most associated with him, “You Are my Hearts Delight” You’re not really getting very much of him, are we? That’s really not very good, I think you can find your things on YouTube. So I think it might be best if we move on and see how, Marlene seems to have been very determined to break into everything we’ve been watching so far. So let’s see how that goes. Oh, here is “Professor Unrat” played by Emil Jannings sneaking into the backstage of the theatre and the film ends with the triumphant Marlene singing her, her big number on the stage.

SONG BEGINS

♪ Falling in love again ♪ ♪ Never wanted to ♪ ♪ What am I to do? ♪ ♪ Can’t help it ♪ ♪ Love’s always been my game ♪ ♪ Play it how I may ♪ ♪ I was made that way ♪ ♪ Can’t help it ♪ ♪ Men cluster to me like moths around a flame ♪ ♪ And if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame ♪ ♪ Falling in love again ♪ ♪ Never wanted to ♪ ♪ What am I to do? ♪ ♪ Can’t help it ♪

SONG ENDS

Right, well I think we'll…

Q&A and Comments:

I’m afraid there’s find better for yourselves on YouTube instantly. Of course, that film was made in two versions. It was made in German and it was also made in an English version. Yes it is, David, that’s, the money was very short in 1920. I don’t know where the finance came, but that is always the reason it’s given for the use of the painted sets rather than real sets.

Thank you Rita, she’s given you a connection to Metropolis and H.G. Wells, I mean, yeah, I think, I’m sure that the makers of Metropolis were very aware of the writings of H.G. Wells. Leni Riefenstahl made films showing the extravaganza of Nazi propaganda. I will be talking about Leni Riefenstahl when I get to films made in Nazi Germany, which will be in about two weeks time.

Yes, Lulu in Hollywood. Thank you, it’s a autobiographical book by Louise Brooks, Margaret, everybody had that, that 78, my, I’ve still got my grandparents copy of it. I think every single middle class family in England had the English version of that song. And of course Tauber, he went on singing it in England all the way through the Second World War. He toured England singing in performances of “The Land of Smiles.”

Carol saying she saw, God, I would not take a four year old to see “M”. I’m not surprised. I would’ve thought you’d be traumatised for life as a child to see that movie. Ooh. How much credit did composers get music being. Well, of course in silent movies there were scores commissioned from composers in the silent era, but only, there would’ve been only the sort of biggest cinemas in the big cities would’ve had an orchestra pit and an orchestra to play them. So you, it’s once you get to sound, of course that composers become much more important and particularly in the 1930s, from the mid 1930s, composers like Korngold and, and Franz Waxman and so on, and Alfred Newman, they received a lot of credit and were well paid for their efforts.

An underground setting in Metropolis was the basis for Patrice Sharrow’s Nibbleheim. Well, I can see there’s a yes, very much, of course, I think that was a rather intelligent thing to do cause it it certainly is rather wagnerian that scene of the, with the workers. Oh, I’m glad you managed to hear a bit of Richard Tauber’s voice despite our rather poor excerpt. It’s not just the voice, I wouldn’t, I mean to me he’s my favourite tenor of all time. He’s my God as far as tenors are concerned, but it’s much more than the voice. It’s his artistry and his humanity and the way he brings every, he lives everything he sings.

This is Joan who remembers the early 60’s hearing Marlene in concert in London, brought down the house when she sang the song in German. Yes, I heard her do it. When did I hear her do it, would’ve been in the 70’s, a bit later.

Thank you Vivian, very nice for you to say so.

Q: Do I see any historical connection?

A: Yes, I do, in Henry Fuseli, I see a connection between the darkness of the Weimar movies and as I said, and the romantic period. Of course, Henry Fuseli, Henry Fuseli is a great romantic artist and very often very, very cinematic actually. Yes, there’s a very interesting thesis to be developed there, I think connections between Fuseli and expressionist cinema and horror movies. I mean, a lot of images like The Nightmare and so on of Fuseli, anticipate images in horror movies.

Yes, Yom Kippur and Marty Agget, they not only made a film, they toured the years and years and years. They must have got hardly sick of it actually. They, they sang it all over America and all over Europe.

I, Katrine, I so agree with you that the darkness, it does seem to point to the what’s going to happen in the 1930s, but so what is that? Is that, are these artists, do artists sometimes have very sensitive antenna, they can pick up things underlying menacing tendencies. Yes, it’s very fascinating how it, the so, so much in these movies seems to anticipate what was going to happen. I don’t know about this, Harriet. I don’t think I can, I don’t know about, who is shouting death to the Jews, who is doing it. I’d be very surprised if it’s Germans. I really would. But I suppose Germany is full of all sorts of different elements and who are not necessarily German, who might have those sentiments. Disturbingly beautiful. And I think that’s true. That would be, it’s a very good description of many of these movies.

And of course the, as I said, Metropolis, the acting is very stylized, isn’t it? So balletic is, would seem to be appropriate. I’ve never seen the remake of Mädchen in Uniform, you know, remakes, although Lily Palmer was course a very, very fine actress, but remakes very rarely cut the mustard, do they and I’m not sure I’d want to see a remake of the, the Leontine Argon version, which is such a perfect movie. I’ve come across a film entitled The Private Secretary. No, I don’t think I have. I don’t think I have. Marlene Dietrich visited Israel against a Vice of everyone sang in German to great acclaim. Well, of course, Israel at the time would’ve been full of people for whom German was their, was their first language.

And that seems to be it, I’m going to return to the German film industry under the Nazis. Now, what is really, really strange, and it’s kind of spooky, got in the Weimar period, which is a democracy, you have all this darkness, all this menace, all this horror, and then we get to a period which is all dark, menace and horror and nearly all the movies are feelgood movies. So apart from a few propaganda movies, almost all, all the movies I’m going to show you from the Nazi period are actually feel good tuneful, harmless kind of movies. So that’s it for tonight. Thank you all very much indeed and see you again on Sunday.