Archival Spaces

398: Germany, 1 May 1951

Archival Spaces 398:

German Cinema’s Low Point

Uploaded 1 May 1951

**German cinema damaged by Allied bombing**, **1948**

Today is my birthday. I (and my twin brother, Michael) were born in a medieval town in Germany’s Rhineland, Bad Münstereifel, seven months preemies and weighing 3 lbs each. Since we were born in a convent, not a hospital, we were given an emergency baptism by the Cellitinnen Sisters, who told my mother we would be dead soon. We survived and emigrated to America in December 1951.

Had my parents gone to one of the cinemas that year that survived the Allied bombing in the war, they would have been treated to an almost unending stream of commercial films of inferior quality. While the Allied government had, in the first years after World War II, pursued a denazification policy for the film industry, by 1951, after the establishment of the Federal Republic in May 1949, most former Nazi filmmakers, even the worst criminals, like Veit Harlan – the director of the anti-Semitic Jew Süß (1940) – were back in the saddle, producing films. Of the ca. fifty films released in the Federal Republic that year, all but three were retreads and remakes of Nazi films, melodramas, historical films, comedies, crime dramas, Heimat films, produced by directors, writers, and actors who had willingly submitted to Dr. Joseph Goebbels Propaganda Ministry, thereby morally supporting Adolf Hitler’s genocidal war.

For example, the two biggest box office successes of 1951 were So grün ist die Heide / Green is the Hearth (1951, Hans Deppe) and Dr. Höll (1951, Rolf Hansen), the first giving birth to hundreds of Heimatfilms, the second to another particularly German postwar genre, the Ärztefilm, doctors’ films; both directors had produced Nazi propaganda films. These film melodramas, however, contributed to German amnesia about the Holocaust – Heide was situated in the North German moors, not a bombed-out building in sight, an amalgamation of every Heimatfilm trope of the previous 20 years, but in color. Höll presented German doctors as noble and self-sacrificing, even relinquishing their personal happiness, rather than as willing participants in the euthanasia of tens of thousands of Germans, as “unworthy of life.” Modern film scholarship hasn’t necessarily rehabilitated these films, but it has sought to read between the lines, discovering repressed social tensions.

The three films that rose above the abject mediocrity of West German film production were Die Sünderin/The Sinner (released in February), Der Verlorene/The Lost One (released in September), and Das Haus in Montevideo / The House in Montevideo (released in December).

Hildegarrd Knef, Willi Forst in *Die Sünderin* **(1951)**

The biggest film scandal of the new West German Republic propelled Die Sünderin to one of the year’s most popular films, drawing more than 2 million viewers in its first three weeks of release. The Catholic Bishops advocated a total ban, as did the national censorship office. When that failed, they organized riots and stink bombs in theatres. Hildegard Knef, as a call girl who falls in love with a mortally ill and suicidal painter, convinces him to try a risky brain operation, which is successful, at least temporarily. Restored to life, his paintings of her bring him fame, but the brain tumor that is blinding him returns; she assists him in his suicide, then follows him to the grave. Knef, very briefly seen in the nude, was initially the casus belli, but it was the double suicide that sent Papist tempers ablaze. Fifteen years later, my German landlady would still scream “whore” at the TV every time Ms. Knef appeared on screen. Yes, it was pure melodrama, but consistently presented through the female protagonist’s voice, in voice-over in complex flashbacks, and visually through her camera p.o.v. and other distancing devices. Director Willi Forst conceived Die Sünderin as a morality play, asking whether a prostitute could be considered moral if she sacrificed everything for a doomed man.

**The Doppelgänager motif of film noir in Peter Lorre’s *Der Verlorene* (1951)**

Directed by and starring Peter Lorre, Der Verlorene follows Dr. Rothe as a serial killer who murders his fiancée for stealing his medical research, then murders other women. His counterpart is his assistant, Hoesch, who works for German counterintelligence, slept with Rothe’s fiancé, and sweeps murder under the table. Later, Hoesch arrests and kills a group of anti-Nazi officers and government officials, referencing the July ’44 conspiracy. After the war, both are on the run, hiding in a Displaced Persons Camp. Unlike the opportunistic Hoesch, who is completely amoral – as were most Nazis – Rothe feels guilty and wants to die, eventually after a long night of drinking, killing Hoesch, then throwing himself in front of a train. Dr. Rothe allegorizes the role of the German people in Nazi Germany, without ever displaying a Swastika, a self-image postwar German audiences did not want to see: the film disappeared from cinemas less than two weeks after opening, while Lorre kept the film out of the American market, fearing reprisals from the McCarthyites. Nazi-trained film journalists resented the fact that Lorre, a German-Jewish refugee from Hitler, who had “led a good life under palm trees,” while they suffered through bombing raids, had lectured them on Nazi Germany. A film maudit, Der Verlorene, remains an important modernist analysis of postwar Germany, its gaps and fissures, and film noir lighting reflecting the moral chaos of a country searching for a new identity.

Curt Goetz, Albert Florath, Valerie van Martens in *Das Haus in Montevideo*

Curt Goetz was a Swiss-Jewish comedian/playwright who was able to perform and write screenplays (Glückskinder, 1936) in Nazi Germany, before “being stranded on tour in America” at the beginning of World War II. He and his wife, Valerie van Martens, returned to Switzerland in 1945 and started touring Germany with his new play, “Das Haus in Montvideo,” which he adapted to film in 1951. Goetz plays an uncompromisingly authoritarian and pedantic German professor who prefers corporal punishment for his twelve children and requires them to thank him for the beating. He inherits a fortune from a long-lost sister, whom he threw out of the house because she had a child out of wedlock. Yet, when he learns the terms of will, he is willing to compromise his moral principles and his own daughter, who is required to have a baby out of wedlock, but the happy end reveals that his own marriage was illegal, making him the father of twelve bastard children. Nowhere is the recent Nazi past visible, even if Goetz lampoons the very bourgeoisie that supported Hitler. The film was a monster hit, maybe because authoritarian school teachers had long been a target for humor in German cinema, even during the Third Reich, with films like The Punch Bowl (1944).

Interestingly, then, all three films deal with moral dilemmas at a time when Germans were still reeling from the moral abyss of fascism.

Hilkdegard Knef as
Call Girl, Artist’s model/lover, murderess

397: German Film Exile in Argentina

Archival Spaces 397:

Eternal Mask’s Art Director

Uploaded 17 April 2026

**Mathias Wiemann, Peter Petersen in *Die ewige Maske* (1935, Werner Hochbaum)**

I have been catching up on the films of Werner Hochbaum on YouTube, a filmmaker best known for his leftist feature, Brothers (1929), about a dock strike in Hamburg. Politically in danger after 1933, Hochbaum moved to Austria, where he directed several films, including what Robert Dassanowsky calls a masterpiece of Austrian cinema, Die ewige Maske (1935) / The Eternal Mask. With its narrative focused on medical ethics and malpractice, it is indeed a film that could not have been produced in Nazi-Germany, although its “Aryan” cast and crew would have been acceptable to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. The exception is the German-Jewish art director Hans Jacoby, who, after a long career in Berlin, stopped briefly in Austria before emigrating to Argentina, where he was active in the emerging film industry.

***Königin*** *Luise* (1928, Karl Grune)

*Land des Lächelns* (1930, Max Reichmann)

Born in Berlin in 1898, Hans Jacoby made his debut in Fritz Lang’s Four Around a Woman (1920), working as an assistant to Ernst Meiwers and Erich Czernowski on The Black Panther (1921). By 1923, Jacoby was receiving sole credit as art director, working with well-known foreign directors, like Benjamin Christensen, A.W. Sandberg, Jaap Speyer, Georg Asagaroff, and Gennnaro Righelli, as well as second-string Germans, like Fritz Wendhausen, Lothar Mendes, and Gerhard Lamprecht, all of them producing commercial melodramas and comedies. His career really takes off in the late 1920s, when he art directs six films in 1928 and five in 1929, including the big-budget costume film, Queen Luise (1928). With the coming of sound, Jacoby forms a partnership with director Max Reichmann, producing the Richard Tauber musicals, The Alluring Goal (1930) and Land of Smiles (1930), among others. His last productions in the Weimar Republic are Ellen Richter’s Manolescu, Prince of Thieves (1933) and Franz Osten’s The Judas of Tyrol (1933), both produced independently. Although co-produced in Berlin, the Heimat film The Lost Valley (1934) was shot in Switzerland.

*Die ewige Maske* (1935, Werner Hochbaum)

With The Eternal Mask, shot in Vienna, Jacoby reaches new aesthetic heights. The film opens in a busy hospital, the camera moving from a close-up of a cross inside a medical cabinet, then dolling back and following various nurses and doctors down an endless hospital corridor. A meningitis epidemic has broken out, and a young doctor, against his superior’s orders, injects a patient with an experimental serum, leading to the patient’s death; suffering from extreme guilt, the young doctor falls into a psychosis. In contrast to the sterile, realistic hospital setting, Hochbaum stages the psychosis in long expressionist dream images of light and shadow, which bleed into the hospital sets in the film’s final scenes. The juxtaposition between reality and psychotic perception is underscored by Jacoby’s striking art direction, which creates a 30-meter-wide waterway, an entire hospital block, and a dark labyrinth of corridors, reminiscent in its flatness and chiaroscuro lighting of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

*Así es el tango* (1937, **Eduardo Morera)**

Despite winning an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1935, the film was predictably banned in Germany; Hans Jacoby was expelled from the Reich’s Film Chamber in 1938, which begs the question: how did he get in? His identity as Jewish is not confirmed. Nevertheless, by that time, Jacoby had already emigrated to Buenos Aires, where in 1936 he was responsible for the art direction on the musical comedy, Así es el tango (1937). He is credited as Juan Jacoby Renard. However, finding work in Argentina was not so easy. It would be two years before Jacoby worked again, this time as a director on an independently produced film that utilized mostly amateur actors: Sombras en el río (1930) / Shadows of the River. It is a working-class story of the romance between an employee in a meatpacking plant and a fisherman. Argentine critics, however, panned the film of the novice director because its often beautiful images were marred by amateurish acting.

*Apasionadamente* (1944, **Luis César Amadori)**

It would be five long years before Jacoby worked again, but in 1944, he became general manager of the country’s largest film production company, Argentina Sono Film. His second art direction for the company, Luis César Amadori’s Apasionadamente (1944), was a major success. According to Variety, the producers sought favor with the government by shooting in the Argentine lake district, which they were promoting for tourism: “The melodrama centered on a taciturn painter whose care for a paralytic daughter keeps him from the arms of a supposedly rich and certainly frivolous socialite.” For his next film, 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman (1944), Jacoby worked with the Hollywood-trained director, Carlos F. Borocosque. The fact that the story was based on Stefan Zweig’s short story and was a remake of a 1931 German film may have gotten Jacoby the job. It is the story of a wealthy widow whose monotonous life changes when she meets a gambler in a Monte Carlo casino. A Buenos film critic wrote of the film: “Juan J. Renard’s sets, including the magnificent reconstruction of the Monte Carlo casino and its surroundings, as well as a vast gaming room with hundreds of extras, were adorned with great visual beauty.”

***Madame Sans-Gêne*** **(1944, Luis César Amadori)**

Jacoby’s next big production was an adaptation of an often-filmed Victorien Sardou play from 1893, Madame Sans-Gêne, directed again by Luis César Amadori. The story of a laundress snubbed by the aristocrats in the court of Napoleon, who becomes a Duchess, was a parody of Sardou’s play. The film’s star, Niní Marshall, one of Argentina’s most famous actresses, also acted in Mexican films. According to Variety, “Its chief claim to distinction is the lavishness of period settings and costuming and the scope of its action, unusual for an Argentine director.”

***La Hostería Del Caballito Blanco*** **(1948, Benito Perojo)**

Hans Jacoby’s last two film productions before retiring or leaving the film industry were La Hosteria Del Caballito Blanco (1949), directed by Benito Perojo, and Cita en las estrellas (1949). The former was a loose adaptation of the Ralph Benatzky – Robert Stolz operetta, Im weißen Rößl /The White Horse Inn, which Erik Charell had staged so successfully in Berlin in 1930. Jacoby, who had designed several Heimat films, was more than qualified to create the Bavarian atmosphere of the plot. Premiering in Buenos Aires in June 1948, the film ran for five weeks in first run, grossing as much as the most star-studded Hollywood feature, and breaking a record for Argentine productions. Production costs at $250,000 were unusually high for a Buenos Aires studio, visible in prodigally lavish décor, original costumes, and crowd scenes with hordes of extras. In Cita en las estrellas, two lovers separate and marry other partners. When the former lover dies, his former partner becomes delirious, believing she can find him in heaven. According to an Argentine film critic, the film displayed elements of surrealism, which informed Jacoby’s depiction of heaven.

We don’t know why Hans Jacoby retired from the film industry, barely over 50. His life after that point remains hidden, although he apparently sent out feelers after 1949 for employment in Germany and Hollywood through Paul Kohner’s Agency. He died on 19 December 1967 in Buenos Aires. He was, as far as I know, the only German Jewish film refugee to gain a foothold in the Argentine film industry.

***Cita en las estrellas*** **(1949, Benito Perojo)**

396: Austrians in Hollywood

Archival Spaces 396

Bernhard Frankfurter’s On the Road to Hollywood (1982)

Uploaded 3 April 2026

**Paul Henreid, Bernhard Frankfurter (back). Photo: © Gerhard P. Winter**

In April 1980, I began working as a researcher for Bernhard Frankfurter’s Austrian TV film, On the Road to Hollywood (1982), travelling to Vienna to meet the film crew and give them some of my exile research. Later that year, I flew to New York for my own film exile research, as well as film research for Bernhard. Friedrich Kahlenberg, the director of the Federal German Film Archive, had recommended me while I was a graduate student in Münster. I thought about my experience meeting and working with Bernhard after recently reading an excellent article in Filmblatt, a German-language film history journal, about the making of On the Road to Hollywood, authored by Brigitta Mayr and Michael Omasta. I had actually never seen the film, even though I had done background research for eight months – it was, after all, the topic of my dissertation – and found documentary and newsreel footage for the project. So I asked the editors whether I could get access to the film, and was able to see it, more than forty years after its completion.

**Prof. Dr. Friedrich Kahlenberg** in: *On the Road to Hollywood*

BTW, the footage I found at Sherman-Greenberg in New York was ultimately not used for aesthetic reasons. Bernhard chose to exclude any historical film footage – much as Claude Lanzmann did in Shoah around the same time – in his subjective quest to retrace the path of Austrian Jewish film artists from Berlin and Vienna to Hollywood, merely inserting photos, but perceived as objects of documentation. It was an approach that filtered the experiences of his subjects – survivors of the Holocaust, who had made it to the safety of America through the director’s subjectivity. Seeing the film forty years late, I was extremely moved, not only because I could hear myself in the narrative through a few details I contributed, but also because I had met several of the émigrés seen in the film. I was tickled pink, especially, to see Kahlenberg, a longtime mentor, lecturing to the camera about UFA’s shameful firing of their Jewish employees in 1933, while pacing around his archive office. Meanwhile, Bernhard Frankfurter, stationary, counters with his own expertise in matters of film exile.

Frankfurter, Paul Falkenberg, *On the Road to Hollywood*

When I met Bernhard Frankfurter in Vienna in 1980, he was in his thirties, already balding, but completely committed to his film project. Born in 1946 in Graz, Austria, Bernhard Frankfurter founded the left-liberal student party “Aktion,” which he also led during his studies in Vienna. I always assumed, but never asked him, whether his parents were Holocaust survivors. In 1970, Frankfurter was one of the first editors of Profil, an Austrian weekly news magazine. Two years later, he began working at the Austrian Broadcasting Corp. (ORF). Beginning in 1974, Frankfurter participated in numerous documentary film projects as a director and screenwriter. He was a co-founder of the Syndicate of Austrian Filmmakers, established in 1977, and served as chairman of the Association of Austrian Film Directors from 1979 to 1983. From 1976 onwards, he immersed himself in film exile research and the Austrian-Jewish emigration around the Anschluss. Brigitte Mayr and Michael Omasta, who rereleased the DVD of On the Road to Hollywood recently, and are the keepers of his estate, described him as a “vital spirit of resistance” who addressed forgotten and repressed topics of contemporary history. He was also an advocate for state film funding. I remember mourning for him. In February 1999, I was at Universal when I heard he had died at only 53 years of age.

Walter Reisch in *On the Road to Hollywood*

Ruydoph Cartier *On the Road to Hollywood*

On the Road to Hollywood opens with Bernard climbing a metal circular staircase, visually the proverbial hermeneutic spiral, while reading from his journal about researching the topic of film exile. This first scene keys us into Frankfurter’s aesthetic: This is a personal journal of discovery. First to be interviewed is Walter Reisch in Hollywood and then in Vienna, the great scriptwriter of Willi Forst’s Maskerade (1934) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), among countless others. I met Reisch twice, once when I interviewed him in summer 1975 for my AFI Oral History and once at the Venice Biennale symposium on German film émigrés in November 1981; he was a great raconteur, sometimes exaggerating, e.g., when he claimed that 25% of Hollywood in the 1930s came from Europe. I also interviewed Walter Kohner and Paul Falkenberg, who appear later in the film.

Next, Frankfurter interviews the former director of Filmarchiv Austria, Ludwig Gesek, about the institution of anti-Semitic laws in Austria, before travelling to London, where he looks through Fred Zinnemann’s clipping files, but doesn’t interview Zinnemann. Again and again, we see Frankfurter in the act of researching, at the Bundesarchiv, at the Berlin Document Center, trying “to find the stories of exile behind the stereotypical images.” He subsequently interviews, among others, Rudolph Cartier, Martha Feuchtwanger, Paul Henried, Johanna Hofer-Kortner, Fred Spielmann, Lotte Stein, and Curt Trepke, both the famous and not-so-famous. Surprisingly, Frankfurter also speaks with the notorious Nazi director of The Eternal Jew (1939), Fritz Hippler, who justifies the expulsion of German Jews from the film industry “because they represented a danger to German film culture.” Frankfurter trusts viewers will recognize anti-Semitism here, but I’m not so sure. He also travels to Terezín, where he interviews two surviving (non-Jewish) cameramen on Theresienstadt (1944), formerly known as Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt, directed by the famous German comedian Kurt Gerron, who was then deported to Auschwitz.

Between the interviews, Frankfurter cuts away to real locations: Vienna’s film district around the Neubaugasse, a long sequence in the Jewish ghetto of Prague, New York streets, and London’s Victoria Station. Bernhard Frankfurter takes the viewer on a journey through space and time, but also creates a monument to the hundreds of Austro-German filmmakers forced to flee anti-Semitic persecution, some of whom actually made it to Hollywood, where they had a profound influence, at least for a while.

395: Far From the Revolution

Archival Spaces 395

White Russians in Hollywood

Uploaded 20 March 2026

**Emil Jannings, William Powell in *The Last Command* (1928, Joseph von Sternberg)**

A still photograph from Joseph von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) perfectly captures the mixture of reality and fantasy, of historical truth and aesthetic expression that is so much a part of Hollywood cinema and its White Russian colony: Standing in a World War I trench, Emil Jannings in costume as a Tsarist general looks intensely off screen, his sable drawn, the movie extra’s degradation already marking his face, his actions frozen in his own fantasy. He is seen almost incidentally at the bottom Left side of the image, while somewhat incongruously, the greater part of the image shows “Russian” soldiers standing relaxed on the set below a barbed-wire cordon, as William Powell, playing the movie director and former victim of the general, chats with them from his director’s chair above. It is the ironic pathos of defeat and degradation which captures our imagination in this story of royal blood in exile in Hollywood, of fabulous wealth and power lost, of a fall from grace to the ordinariness of everyday life: Grand Duke Sergius Alexander of the Imperial Russian Army forced to work as a Hollywood extra in films about the very Revolution to which he had fallen victim. Almost a true story.

**Marlene Dietrich in *The Scarlet Empress* (1934, Joseph von Sternberg)**

After the Russian Revolution and the anti-Communist Palmer Raids in America, Hollywood fell in love with Russia before the Revolution, paying homage to the autocratic regime of the Romanovs, the same way it adored the ante-Bellum, racist South. Russian movies were in, and Russian exiles were happy to oblige. One of the minor characters in The Last Command is played by Sam Savitsky, formerly General Viacheslav Savitsky, above in uniform with Czar Nicholas II. Exiled to the Hollywood backlot, the ex-officer continued to play “bit parts” for over twenty years in films, like The Scarlet Empress (1932), Song of Russia (1944), and Northwest Outpost (1947). Sternberg himself reports that “I had fortified my image of the Russian Revolution by including in my cast of extra players an assortment of Russian ex-Admirals and generals, a dozen Cossacks, and two former members of the Duma…and an expert on borscht by the name of Kobyliansky.” Nicholas Kobyliansky, who received a screen credit on The Last Command as a technical advisor, was also hired in the same capacity for Lubitsch’s The Patriot (1928). Through intermediaries, he hired almost 600 Russians from Boyle Heights, an L.A. suburb, where the exiles congregated, only to nearly cause a riot when only half that many were needed for the film. Several White Army generals supplied local color when a Russian landscape was required: Major General Alexander Ikonnikoff, Gen. Theodore Lodijenski, Maj. Gen. Michael N. Pleschnikov, Maj. Gen. Bogomoletz, Lieutenants George Blagoi and Gene Walski were seen in films such as The Eagle (1925), Into Her Kingdom (1926), Midnight Sun (1926), The Cossacks (1928), or Rasputin and the Empress (1932).

**Raymond Keane, Michael Vivitch, *The Midnight Sun* (1926)**

Another true story: Like the tragic hero Duke Sergius in The Last Command, Valentina Zimina escaped from Russia via Vladivostok to become a promising young actress in such films as La Boheme (1928), Woman on the Trail (1927), and Scarlet Lady (1928). Having survived the notorious “Battalion of Death,” an anti-Bolshevik woman’s brigade in which she fought as a teenager, brutal Russian winters, and a Siberian prison, Zimina died of the flu at the age of 29 in her own luxurious bed in Hollywood.

Pola Negri in *The Woman From Moscow* **(1928, Ludwig Berger)**

In contrast to the Austro-German-Jewish refugees who arrived en masse after 1933, the White Russian exile community remained relatively small and at the periphery of film studio life. Several thousand souls, who held on to their language and customs, and their past in a city where history is forgotten immediately, where your own value is measured no further back than your last film. They formed their own club, the Russian-American Art Club, on Harold Way in Los Angeles. Local anecdotes invariably revolved around the Russian émigrés’ boundless capacity for self-pity. Since the movie tsars often came from Jewish villages in the Pale, where they had been subjected to Cossack pogroms, they had few sympathies for the White Russians, who often never rose higher than the proverbial movie extra. Various Russian Cossack troupes toured the country, presenting dances and horsemanship at circuses and dinner clubs. Indeed, Russian exiles populated the ranks of restaranteurs and workers in Los Angeles’ burgeoning service industry: chauffeurs, masseurs, confidence men. The sometime actor, “Prince Michael Romanoff,” known to actually be a Lithuanian Jew, told stories about old Russia “at your table,” at one of Hollywood’s most fashionable restaurants on North Rodeo Drive. The Mdivani royal family married to maintain their lifestyles, Prince Serge marrying Pola Negri, Prince David wedding Mae Murray. Many created fictitious biographies of Imperial Russian origin, and only a handful had ever worked in the pre-revolutionary Russian film industry.

**Yvgeni Petrov-Krayevsky in Stenka Razin (1908)**

Few of the most famous personalities from the pre-revolutionary period failed to make any impression in Hollywood. The greatest, Yevgeni Bauer, died in 1917, before the Revolution. Alexander Drankov, the pioneering Russian producer of Stenka Razin (1908), Crime and Punishment (1913), and He Who Gets Slapped (1916), went to Hollywood, but, like so many others, could only find work as a movie extra, according to a report by Victor Tourjannsky who visited him in 1928. He later opened a cafe in Santa Monica and lived out his days as a photographer in San Francisco.

**Ivan Mosjoukine *Feu Mathias Pascal* (1925)**

**Ivan Mosjoukine, Mary Philbin in *Surrender* (1927)**

The greatest actor of Russian cinema before 1918, Ivan Mosjoukine, worked steadily in France for the White Russian-owned Albatross Film Co., Paris, in such films as Le braiser ardent (1923) and Feu Mathias Pascal (1924), but was also briefly lured to Hollywood by Universal in 1926. He made one film, Surrender (1927), based on an old play “Lea Lyon,” playing a Cossack prince who falls in love with a Jewish girl in the Shtetl after raping her. Variety gave it only a lukewarm review, and the film failed to ignite the box office. Mosjoukine stayed on at Universal, even subjecting himself to a nose job and a name change to Moskine, ordered by Universal’s producers (who couldn’t pronounce his name), but when no more film offers came, he fled back to Paris. According to Mosjoukine, he was not willing to blindly obey the “cinema kings” and play in any script given to him, no matter how bad.