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406: Letty Lynton Restored

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Letty Lyndon (1932) screened at American Legion Hollywood

Uploaded 21 August 2026

**Robert Montgomery, Joan Crawford in *Letty Lynton* (1932, Clarence Brown)**

On 25 July 2026, the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles and Hollywood Heritage presented a matinee screening of Clarence Brown’s Letty Lynton (1932), a film starring Joan Crawford, Robert Montgomery, and Nils Asther, which had not been available for public performance for ninety years. Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, when Crawford had reached A-list status, after her huge success in Grand Hotel (1932), next to Greta Garbo no less, Letty Lynton saw Crawford switching from hard-working-class social climbers to upper-crust women of privilege. The film was a monster success, but was eventually pulled from circulation by Loew’s Inc., due to a lawsuit brought by the authors of a successful 1930 Broadway play, “Dishonored Lady;” the playwrights claiming the film had violated their copyright.

The film opens on a disreputable street in Montevideo, where socialite Letty Lynton (Crawford) is dancing the night away with a slimy gigolo Emile Renaul (Asther), but apparently is ready to end the three-month affair. He refuses to accept her decision, so she hops on a steamer to New York with her maid, Miranda (Louise Closser Hale), meeting and falling in love on board with Jerry Darrow, a wealthy American heir; they become engaged. To her horror, Renaul is on the dock waiting to take her back to South America, and later turns up at her mother’s Park Ave address, attempting to blackmail her with her love letters and forcing her to meet him at his hotel that evening, even though she is to leave for Upstate to meet Darrow’s parents. Letty is eventually accused of murder, but the D.A. (Lewis Stone) cannot prosecute because Darrow, Letty’s mother, and the maid are ready to testify that Letty was with Darrow at the time of the murder.

MGM’s balance sheets noted that Letty Lynton pulled in $754,000 domestically (including Canada) and $418,000 in foreign markets, with estimated profits of $390,000 ($9,508,200 in 2026). The film was ostensibly based on a 1931 novel, Letty Lynton, by Marie Belloc Lowndes, which in turn fictionalized the historical case of Madeleine Hamilton Smith, a Scottish woman who in 1857 was accused of murdering her lover with arsenic, after he threatened to expose her love letters; she was acquitted of one count, the jury returning a second verdict of “not proven.”

However, authors Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes based their play “Dishonored Lady” on the same historical case. To make matters worse, MGM had attempted to acquire the play, but refused to pay the $30,000 price tag, purchasing Lowndes’ novel for a mere $3,000. Another problem was that the Hays Office refused to approve the play, given they considered the story to be about a “nymphomaniac.” In the subsequent lawsuit, the authors sued for copyright infringement and plagiarism. In July 1939, the Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, awarding them one-fifth of Letty Lynton’s profits. In 1947, Hedy Lamarr’s production company produced Dishonored Lady, which is credited to the Sheldon/Barnes play, but only resembles it very loosely.

**Lewis Stone, Crawford, May Robson, Montgomery in D.A.’s Office**

The underlying copyright did not expire until 2025, at which time Crawford’s grandson, Casey LaLonde, contacted Warner Brothers, stating it was legally safe to screen the film, and that the company which owns rights to all pre-1986 MGM films, only had a limited window to release the film, before Letty Lynton would itself fall into the public domain in 2027. As in the case of a number of other pre-Code Joan Crawford films, MGM had made 35mm preservation masters in the 1960s, which became the basis for Warner Brothers’ subsequent 4 K restoration, thanks to George Feltenstein, Warner-Discovery library historian, who advocated for the film. The new premiere took place earlier this year at the TCM Film Festival in Hollywood and was released on Blu-ray on 30 June; it has done so well that Warners released it on DVD on 14 July. The new version looks immaculate, highlighting the art deco sets and Crawford’s stark black and white outfits.

Before the screening at the American Legion, there was much discussion about costume designer Adrian’s dresses for Joan Crawford, in particular a white cotton organdy dress with puffy sleeves at the shoulder, which MGM had licensed to Macy’s, subsequently earning another fortune. However, the published story that the dress sold 50,000 copies appears to be apocryphal. Audience members who wore puffy-sleeved dresses to the screening were subsequently brought on stage for a photograph. The almost sold-out crowd seemingly enjoyed the pre-show and Joan Crawford in this pre-Code classic.

**Female audience members in puffy-sleeved dresses.**

While the film manages to make Lynton both guilty and not guilty of murder, thus satisfying possible objections from the Code Office, at least before the new Hays Office under Joseph Breen would most certainly have shut the film down, Crawford and the rest of the cast give very believable performances. It is also a very modern story, echoing today’s “Me Too” movement, especially when the villain beats up Letty for denying him sex and essentially keeping her in sexual bondage. Unfortunately, I also kept seeing Charlie Chan behind Asther’s villain.

405: Voskovec & Werich 2

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The World Belongs to Us (1937)

Uploaded 7 August 2026

**Bohuš Záhorský** as Drexler in *Svět patří nám* **(1937, Martin Frič)**

In my last blog, I discussed the films of the Czech comedy team, Jiří Voskovec & Jan Werich, available on a 4-disc-set, produced by the Czech National Film Archive, now apparently out of print. I wanted to spend more time discussing the last film, Svět patří nám /The World Belongs to Us (1937, Martin Frič), because it is one of the few overtly anti-Fascist (covertly anti-Nazi) films, produced in Europe or the United States before World War II. Indeed, before the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, only one anti-Nazi film had been produced in Europe, Borzy/Kämpfer (1935, Gustav von Wangenheim), produced by German exiles in the Soviet Union. That film portrays the struggle against Hitler’s Fascism, above all the resistance of the Communists, the Reichstag fire, the subsequent show trial of Georgi Dimitroff, and the establishment of concentration camps, bringing suffering and death. In America, an independently produced docudrama, Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934, Michael Mindlin), had a very limited release before being banned by several State Censorship Boards.

***Borzy/Kämpfer*** **(1935, Gustav von Wangenheim)**

*Hitler’s Reign of Terror* (1934, Michael Mindlin)

The World is Ours was adapted from a Voskovec and Werich play, “Rub a líc” (The Flip Side), which had premiered at their Prague theatre, Osvobozený divadlo. only six months before the release of the film in August 1937. In 1939, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March, the Nazis had all the negatives and copies of the film burned. In 1947, the film was re-released in cinemas, recreated from an incomplete print and other fragments. However, even the 1937 release had been subject to censorship by the Czech Film Advisory Board, requiring the changing of character names, which too closely resembled the names of Nazi leaders, as well as turning the SS uniforms of the Fascist gangs into American gangster outfits.

Over the opening credits with Jaroslav Ježek’s march is heard, relating the story of David and Golaith, while Ježek’s other songs pepper the rest of the film. The first scenes are in Drexler’s “Panopticum,” a fairground side show that is destroyed by an irate crowd angry at the fake exhibits, foreshadowing the lies of fascists. The partners in the Panopticum, Drexler and Foreman, later meet and become enemies, Drexler becoming the head of a paramilitary force of the capitalist factory owner, Noel, Foreman leading a strike of the factory workers. A woman is killed by Drexler’s gangsters, the strike is lost, and Foreman and other strike leaders are fired. Meanwhile, the country’s democratic government is threatened, when Drexler prepares a coup for the right wing Bernard Lion with a hidden cache of weapons. Two news boys (Voskovec and Werich), caught up in the strike, find the weapons by accident in the Noel factory basement. Not knowing that they are handling hand grenades (manufactured by Alfred Krupp in the Third Reich), they cause an explosion and a battle with Drexler’s goons ensues. Meanwhile, Forman, alerts the Governor, and the police arrive to arrest the putschists.

**Gangsters as Fascist Goons in Svět patří nám**

**Alfred Krupp hand granade with Voscovec & Werich**

Unlike the previous Voskovec and Werich films, here the pair’s comedy skits are better integrated into an overall narrative. In their first appearance after carrying out news of the strike, they unwittingly paint slogans on a factory fence for Bernard Lion, but then paint “Long Live Forman.” In a long factory scene, Werich gets his head caught in metal bars and Voskovec tries to cut him free, while the factory machines have a mind of their own, a scene strongly reminiscent of Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). According to Werich later, they shot the scene in two days, then went to see Chaplin’s film, realizing their idea was right there on screen: “Of course, no one ever believed us that we hadn’t stupidly stolen it. We tried to cut the whole scene out of the film — but the machines cost so much money that the producer (Miloš Havel, Vaclav’s father) wouldn’t let us.” Later they get trapped in the apartment of a fascist conspirator and then go looking for food in the basement of a factory, leading to a Keystone Cop like shoot out with the Fascist gangsters (we see no blood or corpses, just hear lots of noise). The gangsters are defeated when V&W cut off their gas mask hoses, a scene filled with Freudian castration imagery.

In keeping with the comedy duo’s leftist politics, The World Belongs to Us propagates a leftist theory of Fascism, namely that big capital finances and is aligned with authoritarian elements to upend the power the working classes and destroy democracies. The Fascist candidate Lion is never seen, nor the factory owner Noel, but it is evident that Drexler and his gangsters take their orders and are paid by them. According to one source, the fire in the Panopticum early in he film is a reference to the Reichstags fire. In one overtly political scene, Foreman (Vladimír Šmeral) goes to the Governor who tells him that the democratic rights of free speech must be maintained, even for the Fascists, if democracy is to survive. Thanks to the bumbling activity of V&W, the people are ultimately victorious, and it is they who are highlighted in the film’s climax.

**Victorious workers leaving the Noel factory**

In one of the final shots of the film, we see two newsreel cameramen filming the pro-Democracy demonstration: Martin Frič, the film’s director, and Otto Heller, the cameraman. As a Jew, Heller would soon go into exile in England, as would the assistant director Walter Schorsch, while the Austrian production manager, Josef Stein, who had a very long career in Germany before fleeing the Nazis in 1933, would die in June 1937 in exile in Prague, while The World Belongs to Us was being prepared for release.

**Democracy** **is victorious in ***Svět patří nám*** (1937)**

404: Czech Avant-Garde

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Voskovec & Werich

Uploaded 24 July 2026

My Dad grew up in Prague in the 1930s, a teenager. He later raved to me about Voskovec and Werich, who he had seen both on stage at the Liberated Theatre, and in the cinema. I thought about him when I recently pulled out of my shelf a 4 DVD box set of four Voskovec and Werich films, produced by the Czech National Film Archive (2010). Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, both born 1905, were comedians who managed to be both avant-garde and popular. Although I had a vague memory of seeing Hej rup! / Heave Ho! (1934), I was not prepared for the comic madness visible in that film and the others: Pudr a Benzin / Powder and Gas (1931), Peníze nebo život / Your Money or Your Life (1932), and Svět patří nám / The World is Ours (1937). Both emigrated to America before the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia in March 1939, where Jiři becomes George Voskovec in Hollywood, most prominently in Twelve Angry Men (both Studio One, 1954,and Siney Lumet theatrical feature, 1957), while Werich returned to (Communist) Czechoslovakia.

**Adolf Hoffmeister’s “The Bride” at Liberated Theatre (1927)**

Jiří Voskovec, originally Jiří Wachsmann and Jewish, and Jan Werich, from Prague-Smichov, a working-class district, met in high school in Prague’s New Town, then joined the Osvobozené divaldo /Liberated Theatre, founded in 1925 by the Czech avant-garde group, Devětsil. Under the leadership of the art theorist Karel Teige and his Dadaist Manifesto, Devětsil’s nearly 100 members included poets, architects, painters, photographers, film and theatre directors. Prominent among the were poet Vítěslav Nezval, literary theorist, Roman Jakobsen, journalist, translator, and Kafka’s lover, Milena Jesenská, and the art photographer, Jaroslav Rössler. Like the Russian Constructivists and the Italian Futurists, Devětsil called for work that was close to life, but eschewed realism, giving preference to popular culture, poetry in everyday objects, skyscrapers, airplanes, mime and graphic design. Voskovec and Werich had their first theatrical hit in 1927 at the Liberated Theatre with “The Vest Pocket Revue,” which amalgamated comedy homages to Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and other American silent film comedians. The same year they took control of the directorship of the Liberated Theatre, where they performed in ever more stringent anti-fascist plays until it was closed down in 1938.

***Powder and Gas* (1931, **Jindřich Honzl****)

**Voskovec & Werrich bust in** ***Powder and Gas***

While Voskovec had appeared in a few Czech silent films under the pseudonym Petr Dolan, Voskovec and Werich’s first film together was Powder and Gas (1931, Jindřich Honzl). The film opens with a trick: A view of Prague’s Hradčin castle is revealed to be on a plate in a tourist shop, the following scenes satirizing the city’s tourist agency, Čedok. The title itself refers to cocaine and petrol, since the somewhat episodic plot mixes gangster film conventions (a cocaine ring) with a backstage musical, the two most popular American cinema genres in 1930. The cabaret numbers are staged by Voskovec and Werich, who are seen as a taxi driver and policeman, a boxer, and as amateur actors. The comedy routines, like the opening traffic accident, a picnic with their mutual love interest, a boxing match, and their songs, ”Aesop and the Puppet” and “Life is just a coincidence,” originated in their stage revues. The plot revolves around two male friends pursuing a girl, the actress Marta (Ela Šárkova), who actually is in love with the musical play’s author, while the actress’s brother has been dealing coke and is trying to escape his gangster suppliers. It’s all a bit discombobulated as classical narrative cinema, but Voskovec and Werich were clearly applying Dada principles of comedic collage, assembly, and juxtapositions of popular culture.

***Your Money or Your Life*** (**1932,** **Jindřich Honzl)**

Voskovec and Werich’s second sound film, Your Money and Your Life (1932) opens with a more than ten-minute montage sequence that visualizes without dialogue the path of a stolen necklace from its owner through dozens of hands to Tonda (Werich) who accidentally comes into possession of the stolen goods. In a park he meets his childhood friend, Pepic (Voskovec), who is attempting to hang himself, due to his wife’s infidelity, and together they look for the necklace’s owner, pursued by the gang of thieves, and a desperate fake German count who hopes to pay his debts with it. An endless chase, with a less than coherent plot, involving Pepic’s new unfaithfu bride, the film is filled with absurdist elements, individual scenes turning into skits and dialogue jokes, pure slapstick and physical comedy in homage to silent American comedians, including a hilarious boating scene.

**Helena Bošova, Werich, Voskovec in *Workers, Let’s Go* (1934, Martin Frič)**

Worker’s, Let’s Go is a Dadaist fantasy of Karl Marx’s proletarian paradise where the workers seize the means of production and outsmart the capitalists, simultaneously exposing the plight of the unemployed in the midst of the world-wide Depression. The film opens when Mr. Worst (Josef Skrivan), the owner of the canned milk trust decides to destroy Simonides (Werich), the owner of the milk cannery-trust by keeping him drunk. Worst is a nasty old man in a wheelchair (the actor died in 1942 in Auschwitz), while Simonides figures out he got screwed by unscrupulous bankers, and joins forces with the unemployed worker, Filip (Voskovec). After spending a night in a homeless shelter, Filip and Simonides (and many unemployed workers) finish a building on a piece of real estate the former capitalist still owns, then create a worker-owned milk cooperative that eventually defeats Worst. Numerous scenes are played for comedy, e.g. when Simonides presses his pants with a steam roller, which runs amok, the fast-motion construction of the building to the tune of the song “Heave, Ho!”, or when Worst’s police attempt to keep the workers from attending a stockholder’s meeting, leading to a Keystone Cop-like chase. When Filip meets a young woman (Helena Bošova), they discuss their love of cinema, in particular, Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Mozhukhin.

Given that Svět patří nám / The World is Ours (1937) is an overtly anti-Fascist film, one of the few anti-Nazi flms produced in Europe in the 1930s, it deserves more than a few lines; I will discuss it in my next blog.

403: Ellen Richter

Archival Spaces 403:

Weimar Germany’s Most Popular Unknown Film Star

Uploaded 10 July 2026

**Ellen Richter in *Moral* (1928, Willi Wolff)**

Despite having starred in ca. 70 films, despite having been one of the most popular actresses in Weimar Germany, and despite operating her own production company throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Ellen Richter is invisible in the canons of classic German film histories of Siegfried Kracauer, Lotte Eisner, Heinrich Fraenkel, Enno Patalas, and Thomas Elsaesser. Such a lapse is the result of an implicit bias for art cinema and against popular film genres, and a blinndspot for women filmmakers (and actresses) who could be agents of their own fate. It also didn’t help that her career came to a crashing halt with the rise of the Nazis, and that she (like Mary Pickford) was functioning more as a film producer than a film star, once sound films entered the picture. Not until the third decade of the 21st century with the publication of Philipp Stiasny and Oliver Hanley’s Ellen Richter. Die große Unbekannte des Weimarer Kinos (Vienna: Synema, 2026), which translates as Ellen Richter. The Great Unknown of Weimar Cinema, has that glaring omission been rectified.

**Elle Richter**, **Lupu Pick, Rudolf & Joseph Schildkraut, Kaethe Oswald in *Schlemiehl* (1915, Richard Oswald)**, **Photo Filmmuseum Duesseldorf.**

**Werner Kraus, Ellen Richter in *Das Bacchanal dees Todes* (1917, RichardEichberg) Photo Eye Museum, Amsterdam**

Born in Vienna in July 1891 as Käthe Weiß, the daughter of a Jewish tailor and his wife, who had emigrated to the capital from Hungary, she took the name Ellen Richter with her theatrical debut at the Brno City Theater in 1908. After residencies in Vienna, Munich, and Berlin, she forsakes the theater in 1915 for a career in the new medium of film, where she almost immediately lands starring roles, e.g. in Richard Oswald’s Schlemiehl (1915) and Richard Eichberg’s Life for a Life (1916); her star image is already apparent in the latter film: young, slender, her dark hair and eyes marking her as “southern European,” a code for the emotional and sexual. Between 1915 and 1918, she will star for Eichberg in 13 melodramas, often with crime and action elements, opulent sets, and stirring mass scenes, making them both stars. Meanwhile, she is also featured in melodramas, adventure films and war propaganda films. For the 1918-19 season, she is the star of her own film series, directed by Rudolf Meiner, produced by the Frankfurter Film Co., and written by Dr. Willi Wolf whom she will marry, and who will soon become her exclusive producer-director.

**Ellen Richter, Karl Geppert in *Lola Montez, die Taenzerin des Koenigs* (1922, Willi Wolff) Photo Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt**

**Leonard Haskel, Ellen Richter in *Lola Montez* (1922) Screen Shot Philipp Stiasny**

The Ellen Richter-Film GmbH is founded in 1920 by Richter and Wolff, their films distributed through the UFA, specializing in then popular historical subjects, beginning with Mary Tudor (1920). She follows up with Madame Sans-Gêne (1921) and Lola Montez, the Dancer of the Queen (1922), in both films playing independent, modern women who defy patriarchal conventions. Lola Montez, which Max Ophüls will remake more than 30 years later, becomes Richter’s favorite role, playing an actress, as in so many of her earlier and later films. When the historical cycle, which had started with Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919), runs its course, Richter and Wolf switch to furiously paced travel/adventure films, often released in multiple parts. In The Mystery of the Sphinx (1921), The Adventuress of Monte Carlo (1921), The Woman with Millions (1923), and Flight Around the Globe (1925), the couple offer German audiences visual pleasure through exotic, real locations (few studio sets) in Southern Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia, and thrilling action; the implausibility of the plots, which one contemporary critic calls “lovable nonsense” (p. 145), hardly matters.

**Eduard von Winterstein, E. Richter, Leonhard Haskel in *Die Frau mit den Millionen (1923,, Willi Wolff)* Photo Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin**

**Ellen Richter, Anton Pointner in *Der Flug um den Erdball* (1925, Willi Wolff) Photo Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin**

In the mid-1920s, Richter returns to comedies (and light operettas), genres she had excelled at in her theatre career but only seldom turned to after her early film success, A Great Idea (1916). With Heads Up, Charley! (1927), The Imaginary Baron (1927), Saucy Suzy (1928), and Morality (1928), Ellen Richter epitomizes the modern woman, cross-dressing, changing identities and costumes, her short cropped “Bubikopf” hair signaling her status as a 1920s flapper. The first two films also featured a young Marlene Dietrich in her first starring roles. Despite being based on a 1906 play, Moral, brutally lampooned middle class philistinism, servility, and censorship in what was thought to be libertarian Weimar Germany. The film’s burghers would soon become staunch Nazis.

**Ellen Richter, Ralph Arthur Roberts in *Moral* (1928, Willi Wolff) Photo** **Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna**

**Ellen Richter in *Unmoral. Die sieben Abenteuer der Frau Venus* (1928, Willi Wolff) Photo Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna**

With the coming of sound, Ellen Richter continues producing films for her company, but only stars in one film, The Adventuress of Tunis (1931), – a throwback to her most popular adventure/travel films – and appears in a supporting role in three others; her first two produced sound films, Only You (1930) and Madame Pompadour (1930) are musicals needing a star with a stronger singing voice; she does not appear. Critics notice Richter’s strong Viennese accent in Tunis, but it is probably her age, she is now 40, more than anything else that forces her into supporting roles. Even after the Nazis blacklist both Richter and her Jewish husband, the Ellen Richter Film Co. is allowed to produce two more films, not that the couple can profit from their success. The Richter and Wolff emigrate first to Austria in 1935, then to Paris in 1938, to Hollywood in 1940, after Wolff escapes from a French internment camp. When their foray to Hollywood fails, they move to New York, where Wolff takes up his former profession as a dentist, as he had done in Vienna and Paris.

**Hilde Hildebrand, Alfred Abel, Ivan Petrovich, Ellen Richter in *Manolescu* (1933, Willi Wolff) Foto Deusche Kinemathek, Berlin**

Willi Wolff dies in 1947 in Nice, while Ellen Richter spends the rest of her life until her death in Düsseldorf in 1969, unsuccessfully fighting the German government to recover her wealth and film assets, stolen by the Nazis and their West German successors. Anyone who has seen The Woman in Gold (2015) knows the story. For the authors, Philipp Stiasny and Oliver Hanley, who have done an amazing job working in film archives, researching Richter’s surviving film prints and her history, the actress won them over, thanks to her “self-deprecating irony, her humor, her incredible camera presence, her cross-dressing, and her many multifaceted characters, whether femme fatales or world-traveling adventuresses.”(p. 12, my translation)

This book also proves to me that well-made popular cinema was not just the purview of American cinema, but also existed in Berlin; maybe that is why so many German-Jewish émigrés were successful in Hollywood.