Anton Walbrook was born in Vienna – as Adolf Anton Wilhelm Wohlbruck – on this day in 1896, less than eight months after the arrival of the Cinématographe.
The Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis, had unveiled their Cinématographe – a lightweight device combining camera, printer and projector – to the public in Paris in December 1895 but were now touring their new invention around the world. The Vienna screenings opened on 27 March 1896 and followed the same pattern as in Paris, with a private show at the city’s k. k. Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt [Graphic Research Institute] followed by public demonstrations at Kärtner Straße 45 in the city centre. These screenings ran throughout the day from 10 in the morning until 8 at night and, for a fee of fifty kreuzer, visitors could watch a selection of short documentary films accompanied by live piano music. To make the shows more attractive to Viennese citizens, the Lumière agents Alexander Promio and Alexander Werschinger filmed a series of sequences around the capital in early April: shots of St Stephan’s Cathedral, the huge Ferris wheel in the Prater (which would feature in The Third Man five decades later) and scenes of crowds strolling through the Stadtpark. A special screening of these was arranged for the Emperor Franz Joseph in the Hofburg on 18 April 1896. Werschinger recalled the scene:
We had a small room on the second floor of the Burg, as the palace is known, which we were able to try out two days in advance. The entire presentation was to be limited to five minutes, as it was feared that the flickering pictures could damage His Majesty’s eyes. It was also very difficult to explain to the attendant that the demonstration had to be carried out in the dark. He said that this was not possible because court protocol demanded that two candles should always be lit in the presence of His Majesty. Everyone was amazed that after he had seen the pictures, the Emperor demanded very animatedly that they be shown again twice.
The cinema had arrived in Vienna.
Vienna was still buzzing with excitement over this new form of entertainment when young Adolf Wohlbrück was born, but nobody at the time could foresee that ‘moving pictures’ would provide a career for the newborn child. Nor could they have foreseen that within twenty years the Emperor’s candles would be extinguished and his Empire dismembered. For the time being, Vienna was on the rise.
Reinhold Völkel, ‘Café Griensteidl’, painted in the year of Wohlbrück’s birth
Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party had recently wrestled power from the Liberals and with Lueger as Mayor, Vienna began its transformation into a city of elegant gardens and parks. Artists, writers, musicians and other intellectuals met to discuss their views over coffee in Café Griensteidl, Café Central, or Café Museum. Prominent among these was a group known as Jung Wien [Young Vienna], whose members included the playwrights Arthur Schnitzler – then writing his controversial Reigen – and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Egon Schiele was about to spearhead the Wiener Secession art movement, ‘Waltz King’ Johann Strauss the Younger – composer of the Blue Danube waltz, Die Fledermaus and Der Zigeunerbaron [The Gypsy Baron] – lived in Igelgasse, Freud had just coined the term ‘psychoanalysis’, Gustav Mahler had recently been appointed Director of the State Opera House, and cinema was the newest addition to the arts in which the Wohlbrück family had been involved for centuries.
Adolf Ferdinand Bernhard Hermann Wohlbrück (1864-1940), a much-loved and well-known clown with the Schumann circus.
The future actor’s father Adolf Wohlbrück had married – at the age of 32 – Gisela Rosa Cohn, a 17-year-old girl from a respectable Viennese family. Born on 21 July 1879 in Vienna, she was the daughter of Wilhelm and Antonia Kohn. Her father – a merchant – had recently died, and it seems her parents had hoped for a better match: having a clown for a son-in-law was rather a disappointment. Nonetheless, Gisela fell pregnant almost immediately and their first child, Adolf Anton Wilhelm Wohlbrück, was born at their home at Jörgerstraße 32, in northwest Vienna, on Thursday 19 November 1896. He was baptised exactly a month later by Fr. Emil Janetzky, the parish priest of Hernals, with religion marked as ‘Catholic’ in the final column (below.)
Although it is frequently stated that Wohlbrück’s mother was Jewish – and the Kohn name clearly indicates Jewish ancestry – her family seem to have embraced Catholicism with ardour: Theodor Kohn (1845–1915), the Catholic archbishop of Olmütz, in Austro-Hungarian Moravia, was a close relative. As I recently discussed in another blogpost elsewhere, the actor’s sense of Jewish identity was more complex and nuanced than is generally stated.
Archbishop Theodor Kohn (1893–1904)
Barely a year later, his sister Antonie Marie was born on 13 November 1897 – in Stuttgart, due to the itinerant nature of circus life. Gisela’s mother was unhappy with the prospect of her grandchildren spending their young lives on the road with a caravan of circus performers, and insisted that they remain in Vienna. In consequence, the siblings were raised largely by their grandmother Antonia, who lived in the same street. Over the next few years, his Viennese childhood would involve both the spectacular performances of the circus and the more serious atmosphere of his monastic education at the ‘Lazarenkloster’, run by the Christian Brothers in Schopenhauerstraße – twin strands of performance and discipline that he would pull together in his acting career. The latter only began, however, when the family moved to Berlin in 1904 and another chapter in his life began…
Adolf and his younger sister Antoinette Marie Wohlbrück in Berlin 1904
AW was born on this day in 1896 and this will be the last time I celebrate the anniversary of his birth before the publication of my biography, Anton Walbrook. A Life of Masks and Mirrors, which should be available in a few weeks time.
As many of you know, my original aim had been to have the biography published in the summer of 2017 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death. For various reasons, however, that was not to be. Although I regret this in some regards, it was probably a good thing because my research uncovered so much more over the last three years. In fact, even since submitting the manuscript and doing final proof checks on the printer’s drafts, I’m still coming up with new nuggets of information or further thoughts about AW’s life and work.
At some point, though, one needs to draw a line under a project and get it out there, otherwise it will never see the light of day. It is too tempting to keep revising, improving, correcting, expanding, pushing an evolving work-in-progress towards an ever-receding horizon, and then find yourself at the end of life with a crumpled, dog-eared manuscript that no one will know what to do with when you’re gone. A Life of Masks and Mirrors will never be the definitive word on Walbrook/Wohlbrück, but it represents the fruits of over a decade of work as it now stands; any amendments, corrections or additions will need to wait for a second edition.
To mark today’s anniversary, I thought I would share a sneak preview of the opening pages of the biography, heralding AW’s birth in the city of Vienna:
“In March 1896 the Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis, brought their new invention to Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Cinématographe – a lightweight device combining camera, printer and projector – had been unveiled to the public in Paris a few months earlier and was now touring the world. The Vienna screenings opened on 27 March 1896 and followed the same pattern as in Paris, with a private show at the city’s k. k. Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt [Graphic Research Institute] followed by public demonstrations at Kärtner Straße 45 in the city centre. These screenings ran throughout the day from 10 in the morning until 8 at night and, for a fee of fifty kreuzer, visitors could watch a selection of short documentary films accompanied by live piano music. To make the shows more attractive to Viennese citizens, the Lumière agents Alexander Promio and Alexander Werschinger filmed a series of sequences around the capital in early April: shots of St Stephan’s Cathedral, the huge Ferris wheel in the Prater (which would feature in The Third Man five decades later) and scenes of crowds strolling through the Stadtpark. A special screening of these was arranged for the Emperor Franz Joseph in the Hofburg on 18 April 1896. Werschinger recalled the scene:
We had a small room on the second floor of the Burg, as the palace is known, which we were able to try out two days in advance. The entire presentation was to be limited to five minutes, as it was feared that the flickering pictures could damage His Majesty’s eyes. It was also very difficult to explain to the attendant that the demonstration had to be carried out in the dark. He said that this was not possible because court protocol demanded that two candles should always be lit in the presence of His Majesty. Everyone was amazed that after he had seen the pictures, the Emperor demanded very animatedly that they be shown again twice.
The cinema had arrived in Vienna.
Seven months later, in the same city, Adolf Anton Wilhelm Wohlbrück was born.
Vienna was still buzzing with excitement over this new form of entertainment, but nobody at the time could foresee that ‘moving pictures’ would provide a career for the newborn child. Nor could they have foreseen that within twenty years the Emperor’s candles would be extinguished and his Empire dismembered. For the time being, Vienna was on the rise.
Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party had recently wrestled power from the Liberals and with Lueger as Mayor, Vienna began its transformation into a city of elegant gardens and parks. Artists, writers, musicians and other intellectuals met to discuss their views over coffee in Café Griensteidl, Café Central, or Café Museum. Prominent among these was a group known as Jung Wien [Young Vienna], whose members included the playwrights Arthur Schnitzler – then writing his controversial Reigen – and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Egon Schiele was about to spearhead the Wiener Secession art movement, ‘Waltz King’ Johann Strauss the Younger – composer of the Blue Danube waltz, Die Fledermaus and Der Zigeunerbaron [The Gypsy Baron] – lived in Igelgasse, Freud had just coined the term ‘psychoanalysis’, Gustav Mahler had recently been appointed Director of the State Opera House, and cinema was the newest addition to the arts in which the Wohlbrück family had been involved for centuries….”
The chapter then goes on to discuss AW’s ancestry and family background, his childhood in Vienna and Berlin, and the beginning of his acting career at the Deutsches Theater. Those who want to read more will have to wait for the book to come out, but in the meantime, here’s some of that wonderful footage of Vienna, here showing the busy pedestrian crossing on Ringstraße opposite the magnificent State Opera House, then known as the Wien Hofoper:
The cover of ‘Wohlbrück & Walbrook. Schauspieler, Gentleman, Emigrant.’ (Vienna: SYNEMA-Publikationen, 2020), the new 120-page book of essays edited by Frederik Lang, Brigitte Mayr & Michael Omasta that was published to accompany the retrospective season in Berlin
You know what they say about waiting for ages for a bus, only for two or three to arrive at once? Well, it looks like 2020 has turned out to be a bumper year for fans of AW, and for a year that has already provided enough misery and chaos to last a lifetime, it’s good to know that it will be marked down in the annals for at least something positive.
The manuscript of my biography was already with the publishers and had just about completed its review process when the news was announced that the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin would be holding a major retrospective season dedicated to AW, screening 26 films at the Zeughauskino – seven more than were shown at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna in 2014. The selection include rarely-screened early films such as Wüstenrausch (Von Bolvary, 1923), Salto Mortale (Dupont, 1931) and Die fünf verfluchten Gentlemen (Duvivier, 1932) as well as the documentary Der Schatten des Studenten (Ulrich, 1989).
If the timing of this major event was remarkable – given its coincidence with the publication of my biography, which has been over a decade in the making – it was also tragic, given its coincidence with the global covid-19 pandemic. UK travel restrictions and other factors meant that it was impossible to travel to Berlin to attend any of the screenings, and a number of other AW fans and film scholars told me of their disappointment that they would also have to miss out. It must have been a blow for the organisers too, as social distancing requirements meant that audience numbers had to be restricted. One might wonder if it could have been postponed, but there is much uncertainty about if, when, and how our routines will be returning to ‘normal’, and whether or not there will be further spikes of the virus over the winter months or in the near future. There is no guarantee that holding the screenings in a few months time would ensure it was clear from pandemic restrictions, and I think the organisers were right to go ahead and do what they could.
Certainly the German press seems to have regarded the season as a huge success, and there have been enthusiastic reviews in major newspapers such as Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Many of these articles have included extensive discussions about AW’s life and work, often referring to him as der schönste Mann des deutschen Films [‘the most beautiful man in German film’], which was the title of a 1997 exhibition held at the Schwules Museum in Berlin (January to March) and the Düsseldorf Film Museum (June to August), and which has since become an oft-quoted moniker for the actor himself.
This additional publicity and media buzz focused on AW should be an advantage when it comes to the publication of my biography, which is now in the final production process – paginated proofs should be ready for me to check in early/mid September. I can’t share details of the cover yet, but it’s going to look fantastic, and the editor believes ‘it’s going to make a gorgeous volume’ – quite appropriate, given that it’s dedicated to ‘the most beautiful man in German film’!
This is a letter written by AW to a young fan, Miss Beatrice Claire, in response to the script of a play she had sent him. It was written from the Aldwych Theatre on 6 October 1943, where AW had been playing the role of Kurt Müller in Lilian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine since the previous April. It would run until December 1943, although the role was taken over by Ferdy Mayne. The title of the play suggested by Miss Claire is unknown, but Walbrook thanked her for the kind thought, adding: ‘It is a fine play but does not interest me as an actor – or shall I say as a [?] Viennese?’
Although I have many signed items in my collection, and numerous copies of AW’s letters from the 1920s through to the 1960s, this is the only original handwritten letter that I possess and one that I treasure.
For previous posts in the series of ‘Anton Artefacts’, see here and here. More should follow very soon!
What could be more distressing than the sudden and
mysterious disappearance of a loved one or family member? Probably being
confronted with evidence that they never existed, and having both one’s memory
and sanity thrown into doubt. This has been the disturbing premise of a number
of films, which I began thinking about last weekend while watching the latest
addition to this series – Fractured (2019)– which had just been streamed on
Netflix. In this film, Ray Monroe (Jack Worthington) takes his daughter Perry to
hospital after they both fall on a building site, and sits in the waiting room
while Peri and her mother go off to get a scan. After some hours pass and they
do not reappear, his questions about their whereabouts are met with a mixture
of confusion, sympathy and increasingly belligerent impatience from different
staff members, as the sign-in register, CCTV footage and doctors’ statements
all indicate he arrived alone. Is his head injury to blame? Or is there
something more sinister going on?
Fractured is a well-executed and fairly enjoyable movie, although anyone attempting to push this scenario in a contemporary setting has to find a way around the ubiquity of mobile phones and surveillance cameras which can easily be produced to prove or disprove basic facts such as these. It is notable for a film apparently set in the present day that no-one is seen using a mobile phone, and the hospital is still using VHS tapes for their CCTV recording in the emergency waiting room. Barnsley Hospital in South Yorkshire, for example, has over 160 surveillance cameras monitoring almost every public area including car parks, entrances, corridors, treatment rooms, offices and wards, and you can be fairly certain that they’re not recording everything on tape! Such disappearance films are more likely to convince if they are either made or set in the past, which is largely true of those listed below:
Unheimliche Geschichten [Uncanny Tales]is a German silent film in which five short tales are linked together by a framing story set in an antiquarian bookshop at midnight, in which the figures of Death, the Devil and the Harlot emerge from paintings to tell the stories – similar to the devices used in the great portmanteau films made by Amicus in the 1970s. The first story is based on Anselma Heine’s novel Die Erscheinung [The Apparition], published in Berlin in 1912, which lays out the basic template for most of the films discussed below.
A young couple, played by two great Weimar figures – Conrad Veidt and Anita Berber – arrive at a hotel and check in for the night. He leaves her to spend the evening with friends, returning late – and drunk – to find his hotel room empty with bare walls, but puts this down to his drunken disorientation and sleeps elsewhere. In the morning, however, the woman is nowhere to be seen and his enquiries at the reception are meant with the firm insistence that he arrived alone: which is confirmed by the hotel register. The staff all deny having seen the woman. Who is telling the truth, and if they are lying, what could their reason be?
Conrad Veidt trying to get some answers from the hotel staff in Unheimliche Geschichte (1919)
Midnight Warning (Spencer Bennett, 1932)
A similar scenario forms the setting for this Pre-Code Hollywood film in which Bill Cornish (William Boyd) – a private investigator – arrives at a Chicago hotel, the Clarendon Arms, to see old friend Dr Walcott, who is mysteriously shot through the open window. The hotel management seem very cagey about discussing the matter – and why is there a human ear bone in the fireplace of Walcott’s room? The trail leads Cornish to the apartment of Erich and his fiancee Enid van Buren (Claudia Dell), who checked into the hotel with her brother Ralph two months earlier. The next morning Enid travelled to Salt Lake City to sign some papers relating to an estate she had inherited, but when she returned to the hotel the staff denied all knowledge of their stay, the hotel register is blank and the room is not as she remembers. Distressed and disorientated, Enid is taken to the ‘psychopathic ward’ of the local hospital – is she mad, or is there some truth in her story?
In comparison with the other films discussed below, Midnight Warning (aka Eyes of Mystery) is a very masculine tale, dominated by burly men standing around talking, and the casual misogyny of their attitudes is exemplified in the way that the unpleasant attempts at ‘gaslighting’ are brushed off at the end ‘for the greater good.’ Indeed, one feature that many of these films have in common is the ease with which a lone woman’s voice can be dismissed by powerful men as hysteria, over-imagination, a bump on the head or too many drinks. Sadly, this remains as true today as it did in the nineteenth century setting of the earlier films.
The story for Murder Mystery was written by Norman Battle but – like Unheimliche Geschichten above – it is based on the urban legend of ‘The Vanishing Lady’, also known as ‘The Vanishing Hotel Room’, which seems to have begun circulating in various forms in the late 19th century. It featured in Belloc Lowndes’ novel The End of Her Honeymoon (1913).
Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel The End of the Honeymoon was published the same year as her novel The Lodger, which Hitchcock made into a film in 1927. Hilaire Belloc was her brother.
The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
Probably the best known version of these stories is Hitchcock’s hugely popular mystery thriller, The Lady Vanishes, which won him an Oscar for Best Director. In this film Iris (Margaret Lockwood) tries to convince fellow traveller Gilbert (Michael Redgrave in his screen debut) of the existence of an elderly woman Miss Froy (May Whitty) who has vanished from the train as they journey through Nazi Germany. No-one believes her, and the only piece of evidence that she was ever there – the trace of her name on the coach window – mysteriously disappears as they pass through a tunnel before Iris can show it to Gilbert – a typical Hitchcockian touch, but one that was retained in the 1979 remake starring Cybil Shepherd and Elliot Gould, which turns the tale into more of a screwball comedy. The BBC 2013 adaptation is perhaps more faithful to the original source material, Ethel White’s novel The Wheel Spins (1936), on which all these versions are based.
So Long at the Fair ( Terence Fisher, 1950)
The plot of So Long at the Fair is rather similar, although the reasons for the disappearance and subsequent cover-up are different, hearking back to the template used in Lowndes’ novel. This film was adapted from Anthony Thorne’s 1947 novel of the same name – the screenplay was co-written by Hugh Mills and Anthony Thorne – and tells the story of Johnny (David Tomlinson) and his sister Vicky (Jean Simmons, above) who have travelled to Paris for the World Fair of 1889. Overnight, Johnny disappears without a trace – to the extent that even his hotel room number is erased. Again, no-one believes the distraught girl until artist George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde) is drawn into the mystery, and the two begin to investigate (falling in love as they do so.) Jean Simmons is as sweet and delightful as ever, and the film benefits from some wonderful period detail – just look at the costumes and hairstyles! – as well as a fine supporting cast that includes Felix Aylmer, Honor Blackman and Cathleen Nesbitt.
Brother and sister Vicky (Jean Simmons) and Johnny (David Tomlinson) enjoying a relaxed moment in Paris before Johnny’s disappearance: but was he ever really there?
Into Thin Air (Don Medford, 1955) – Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Diana (Pat HItchcock) looking for answers in a scene from Into Thin Air
Hitchcock returned to this theme again in 1955 for an early episode in the first run of the anthology series ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’. The script was written by Marian Cockerell, based on Thorne’s novel, although in this version British visitors to the 1889 Exposition Universelle Mrs. Winthrop (Mary Forbes) and her daughter Diana (played by Pat Hitchcock, the daughter of Alma and Alfred) check into a Paris hotel on their way home. After Mrs. Winthrop falls ill, hotel doctor (John Mylong) sends Diana to his home for medicine, but when she returns there is no trace of her mother and all the staff deny that she was ever there…. The only person who believes Diana is an Englishman from the embassy, Basil Farnham (played by the wonderful Geoffrey Toone).
Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965)
Uniquely among the films here, Bunny Lake is Missing is set in contemporary Britain, although it was based on Merriam Modell’s 1957 novel of the same name, which is set in New York. Preminger’s film moves the location to London, where American single mother Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) has recently settled after moving from New York. When she goes to collect her four year old daughter ‘Bunny’ from the local children’s nursery, the child is not there, and the supervisor has no recollection of seeing her. As the police begin to investigate, they discover that there is no ‘Bunny Lake’ on the register, no children’s clothes, photographs or toy at Ann’s house, and that ‘Bunny’ was the name of Ann’s childhood imaginary friend. Unsurprisingly, Ann’s claims seem hard to believe, and she finds herself – like several other distraught females in this post – sedated and taken away for psychiatric assessment.
Every mother’s nightmare… Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) in search of Bunny
But she is fortunate in having diligent detective Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) on the case, who persists in his investigations despite his scepticism about Ann’s story. Olivier is just one of numerous fine actors in the film, which is populated with an assortment of strange characters – an eccentric schoolmistress who claims to collect children’s nightmares (Martita Hunt) , a doll-repairer (Finlay Currie), Ann’s brother Steven (Keir Dullea) and her lasvicious landlord Horatio (Noel Coward), not to mention Anna Massey, Adrienne Corri and Lucie Mannheim.
The Forgotten (Joseph Ruben, 2004)
This film differs a little from the others in that it contains a strong science fiction element, but the same basic strands are all here – the lone woman whose insistence that her child has disappeared is denied by friends and colleagues, leading to her being treated by a psychiatrist: only for the ‘conspiracy’ to fall apart and for the victim to be vindicated – although the film offers further twists after this. It’s all rather far-fetched, but worth watching for Julianne Moore’s performance as Telly Paretta, who is convinced that her son died in a plane crash – despite the denials by her husband and best friend – and the absence of any physical evidence – that she ever had a son. While her psychiatrist continues to treat her for what he sees as an obsessive delusion, she finds support from another man (Dominic West) experiencing the same thing with regard to his daughter. What is going on?
Julianne Moore in The Forgotten
Flightplan (Schwentke, 2005)
Following the recent death of her husband David, an aviation engineer, Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is travelling on a plane from Berlin to New York with her daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) and David’s body in the hold. After she dozes off during the flight, she wakes to find that her daughter is no longer in her seat. Other passenger deny having seen her daughter – unsurprising perhaps, given the size of the plane and many of them sleeping during the night flight. But when the flight attendants try and persuade Kyle that she was travelling alone, the passenger manifest has no record of Julia, and a doctor in Berlin informs the captain that Kyle lost both her husband and daughter in an accident, the young widow begins to question her sanity….but could there be another explanation?
Following the same pattern as the earlier films mentioned above, with one explicit borrowing from The Lady Vanishes, Flightplan begins well as the suspense builds up and Jodie Foster – like Julianne Moore – puts in a convincing performance as a mother struggling to balance her maternal instincts and memories against the overwhelming weight of contradictory evidence. As the film progresses, however, the elaborate plot strains credibility somewhat, but the confined space of the plane makes Flightplan even more claustrophobic and tense than the hotel and train settings of other adaptations of the story.
Kyle (Jodie Foster) and Captain Rich (Sean Bean) mid-air in Flightplan
The Changeling (Eastwood, 2008)
Although the premise is slightly different, there is a case for at least mentioning Clint Eastwood’s film The Changeling (2008) which starred Angeline Jolie and John Malkovich. Following the disappearance in Los Angeles in 1928 of Walter, the nine year old son of single mother Christine Collins (Angeline Jolie), the LA police carry out an investigation and claim to have found him. At the public reunion laid on to generate much-needed positive publicity for the corrupt and inefficient police force, Collins realises that the boy being returned to her is not Walter. The more she protests, the more evidence is produced to disprove her claims, leading to doubts about her sanity and fitness to look after her son. Although she is incarcerated in a state hospital for assessment, her case is taken up by a pastor (John Malkovich) and gradually the truth is revealed. The film is based on real events that took place in California in 1928.
As mentioned at the start, various versions of this story were published in newspapers and journals towards the end of the nineteenth century and those interested in exploring these should read here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/09/14/vanishing-lady/
