on 12/14/2024, 3:35 pm
Our friends at Lincoln Center clearly have not gotten the memos about Robert Siodmak, either from us or from Eddie M. Their series currently underway at Lincoln Center (starting today: earlier screenings took place at a smaller theater up the street) is a nice partial summary of Siodmak's career, focused on his time in Hollywood.
The curators have provided a subset of Siodmak's pre-Hollywood films, most notably PEOPLE ON SUNDAy (1930) and INQUEST (1931), the latter being right on the cusp of film noir (and a film that gets mentioned in my just-published book). They've also included the "Oedipal melodrama" THE BURNING SECRET (1933), the film that forced Siodmak to leave Germany after the film was denounced by none other than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Sorry, that should have read Josef Goebbels...)
So far, so good--but the problem is that the curators then jump nine years and resume with Siodmak's FLy-By-NIGHT (1942), a screwball mystery that the "noir cognoscenti" have claimed as a precursor to his later work. It's a good film, but it's a real stretch to tie it in with the noirs that kick in with PHANTOM LADy and THE SUSPECT.
But the problem doesn't end with the mis-classification of FLy-By-NIGHT--there's that gaping hole of nine years that the curators fail to explain. Where was Siodmak if he was forced to leave Germany and wasn't making films in Hollywood?
Why, in France, of course--the actual place where film noir was invented, with Siodmak's help. That begins with TUMULTES (1932), a fully-blown noir featuring Charles Boyer as the first psychotic villain in noir. (We screened it in October as part of THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT '24--one of the 32 films in our "grand finale." Some of you in the Bay Area saw it; some others, including some noir luminaries, missed it.)
Siodmak made four more noirs in France, the last one (PIEGES, 1939) being somewhat known because it was remade in the USA eight years later as LURED. We didn't screen that at FHANFI (acronym alert!) because of that, since our mission was to go for the ultra-obscurities. We couldn't fit in MR. FLOW (1936) or CARGAISON BLANCHE (1937), which are somewhat lesser works, but we did screen MOLLENARD (1938), which features the great Harry Baur in a truly double-barreled performance. (Marc Svetov did not seem too impressed with this film, betraying what definitely seems to be a Germanic bias, but other critics and audiences were quite impressed with it despite its somewhat uncharacteristic nature).
All of those films would seem to rate some exposure to the Lincoln Center audience, particularly in favor of such trifles as SON OF DRACULA (1943) and COBRA WOMAN (1944). The LINC folks are all in pushing these as cross-generical masterstrokes, screening them twice (thus giving them equal exposure with Siodmak's noirs).
Several other Siodmak works from this period (TIME OUT OF MIND, THE GREAT SINNER--his troubled Dostoevsky adaptation for MGM--and DEPORTED) are bypassed in favor of THE CRIMSON PIRATE (dubious) and THE WHISTLE AT EATON FALLS (most justifiable). Of those three, DEPORTED (screened by Eddie at a long-ago NC) and TIME OUT OF MIND definitely deserved a slot.
But then again, so do the films that Siodmak made when he returned to Germany in the 1950s. Of course THE DEVIL STRIKES AT NIGHT will be familiar to NC attendees--it has been relatively well-known for years, and Eddie included that in his 2020 international show. Certainly this one should have been included, and one can argue strongly for his first re-entry into German film, DIE RATTEN (1955), with a standout performance from Maria Schell. A case can also be made for Siodmak's two films with Nadja Tiller, THE ROUGH AND THE SMOOTH (1960) and THE NINA B. AFFAIR (1961). And, since the LINC folks were so eager to cross genres, one can also recommend MEIN SCHULFREUND (1960), a dark comedy about a man whose salvation from a death sentence in the Nazi era plaques his ability to resume a normal life after the war.
While 4K restorations of Siodmak's noirs are welcome (they'll wind up as blu-ray releases at some point), a series of this type really should go further than it did. Perhaps the curators tried to do so--that info isn't currently available. But there are only a few chances to do such things, and missing out on all of the pre-WWII French films and post-WWII German films is hard to excuse. Siodmak deserves better...
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