Archival Spaces

288: William Thiele in Hollywood

Archival Spaces 288:

William Thiele’s Downward Slide in Hollywood

Uploaded 4 February 2022

**Barbara and William Thiele, Bel Air, CA., June 1975**

While my recent blog discussed the USC/Academy Museum’s symposium “Vienna in Hollywood,” here is an abridged version of my talk on the Austro-Jewish film director William Thiele, who will be the subject of a book I’m editing with Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert: Enchanted by Cinema: William Thiele Between Vienna, Berlin and Hollywood. Given that I interviewed William Thiele for an AFI Oral History in June 1975 – at the very beginning of my research into German-Jewish refugees to Hollywood, – my career is coming full circle.

*Drei von der Tankstelle* (1930 with Ruehmann, Karlweiss, Fritsch

In the 1920s and early 30s, Wilhelm Thiele became the UFA’s director of choice for light entertainment, his Drei von der Tankstelle (1930) establishing a new genre of sound film operettas, until 1933 when he was blacklisted by the Nazis for being a Jew. By 1934, Thiele was in Hollywood at Fox, and then Paramount, where he had a worldwide hit with Dorothy Lamour’s soon-to-be-famous sarong in The Jungle Princess (1936), before slipping into B-film production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he made a series of delightful, family-oriented comedies with low budgets and modest but respectable yields. When Thiele’s contract was not renewed in early 1940, his career pretty much fell off a cliff. Although he had experienced periods of unemployment in Hollywood, nothing would match the ensuing eight years of unemployment, interrupted by merely three directed films for ever-lower budget producers.

*Bad Little Angel* (1939) with Virginia Weidler

Thiele’s frustration is palatable in his correspondence with the Austro-German agent Paul Kohner. Thiele had originally been signed by Stanley Bergerman who had opened a talent agency in 1936. In a letter to Kohner dated February 1939 while he was still at MGM, Thiele apologized for re-upping with Bergerman, instead of moving to Kohner who had recently opened his own agency, because he had a big family to support, including relatives still in Europe. In August 1943, Thiele made the move to Kohner, having already been unemployed for all but six weeks in 1942 and 1943, when he worked on two Tarzan films. In November 1943, Thiele writes to Kohner: “I’ve been waiting all month and not a single interview with a producer. I MUST FIND WORK RIGHT AWAY AND MUST EARN SOME MONEY.” Seven months later he writes to Kohner: “It’s ridiculous I can’t find work.” A Part of the problem may have been that even though both Tarzan films for Sol Lesser were financial successes, especially Tarzan Triumphs (1943), Thiele was fired by Sol Lesser after the second film.

*Tarzan Triumphs* (1943) with Johnny Sheffield, Stanley Ridges, Sig Rumann, Johnnie Weissmuller

*The Madonna’s Secret* (1946) with Francis Lederer, Gail Patrick

Kohner tried for a year to negotiate a deal for Thiele before the director gave up on Kohner in late 1944. The agent had negotiated with a Mexican film producer, Gen. Juan Francisco Azcárate, setting up a three-picture deal that would have sent Thiele and his family to Mexico City in March 1944. The deal however fell through because the first script offered to Thiele was not a film he wanted to make. As Thiele wrote: “The story lends itself much more to a risqué farce than to the kind of musical with charm and feeling which I used to make and which proved to be so successful.” Furthermore, as Kohner noted to the producer, the story was anti-American. Azcárate did purchase a script Thiele had written with the Hungarian writer László Görög with whom he formed a writing partnership. The team sold several more scripts, including She Wouldn’t Say Yes (1945) with Rosalind Russell.

Thiele reportedly signed a long-term contract at Republic in June 1945 to make The Madonna’s Secret, starring Francis Lederer and based on a script by Thiele and Bradbury Foote. The film was an attempt by Republic to make a more serious, higher-budget product, and Thiele was congratulated for leading the effort. The film got very good reviews, nevertheless, it remained a one-off for Thiele at Republic. Thiele apparently just couldn’t catch a break.

Needing desperately to support a family, Thiele was saved by producer Jack Chertok who assigned Thiele to direct industrials and public service educationals, then transitioning to commercial television. For years, Chertok had produced short films at MGM, before forming his own company, Apex Film Corporation, in April 1945 to produce shorts, industrials, and advertising films. Thiele is listed as Apex’s staff director in the 1946 Film Daily Yearbook and remained with the company for at least ten years as a salaried employee. One early client of Apex was the National Association of Manufacturers for which Thiele directed and co-wrote the public service short, The Price of Freedom (1948). The short film follows a young newspaper reporter to Germany, where he learns that freedom of the press should not be taken for granted. The Freedoms Foundation Award winner was not only anti-Nazi but an explicit defense of free speech in the wake of the House Un-American Activities growing anti-Communist hysteria. For the U.S. Department of State Thiele directed University of California at Los Angeles (1948), for the U.S. Department of Education Junior College for Technical Trades (1950), for the Southern California Dental Association, It’s Your Health (1949), and for the National Tuberculosis Association, A Fair Chance (1954).

*The Price of Freedom* (1948) with Arthur Franz, Michael Checkov

Thiele’s most productive association was with Apex client, I.E. Du Pont de Nemours Company of Wilmington, Delaware, for which Thiele wrote and directed three industrials about Dupont’s nylon production. Thiele was then hired to produce a feature-length, color docudrama on the history of the Dupont Company for its 85,000 employees, The Dupont Story (1950), which was ultimately also exhibited non-theatrically. Budgeted at $250,000 ($2,869,180/2021), the film presented a history of the family-owned company, featuring more than fifty Hollywood actors.

DuPont also sponsored the Apex production of the television series, Cavalcade of America (1952-1957), based on the Dupont radio show on-air since 1935 to improve their public relations image. Each episode of the half-hour show illustrated a moment in American history. Until May 1955, Thiele would go on to direct no less than thirty-five episodes, including shows about John Peter Zenger, William Penn, Benedict Arnold, Ben Franklin, John Marshall, Wyatt Earp, Horace Greely, and many lesser or unknown figures, including women Dr. Alice Walker and Elisabeth Blackwell.

*TheLone Ranger* (1954) with Clayton Moore, Jay Silverheels

Jack Chertok also contracted with General Mills to produce The Lone Ranger television series in September 1949, after Apex director Sammy Lee directed the industrial, Assignment General Mills (1949). Thiele, however, did not work on The Lone Ranger until its fourth season in 1954. He completed 25 episodes until September 1955 when the last b&w season ended and Apex lost the contract. Thiele remained unemployed for much of 1956-1958, accepting a three-picture contract with Deutsche Film Hansa and completing two films in Germany, before returning to Los Angeles and retirement at age 70 in 1961.

Surprisingly, when I interviewed Thiele so many years ago, he not only expressed no bitterness or regrets for failing to reach the heights of his European career in Hollywood but actually expressed gratitude for the good life America had given him.

*Adieu, Mascotte* (1929, Wilhelm Thiele)

287: Susan Delson on Soundies

Archival Spaces 287:

Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans

Uploaded 21 January 2022

Several years ago in a piece on “Preserving Race Films” (2016, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack) I noted that much African-American film history from the 1930s and 40s had only survived in 16mm copies, which were often treated by archives as reference copies, rather than master material. Among the primary collections I discussed were the “Soundies” from the 1940s that only existed in 16mm, even though they were originally shot in 35mm. Produced for visual jukebox machines, these three-minute MTV-like clips of famous bands and singers were very popular in the World War II era and featured large numbers of African-American acts from the Count Basie and Duke Ellington big bands to Cab Calloway, Dorothy Dandridge, Mable Lee, and the Mills Brothers. Now Susan Delson has published a new book on Soundies, Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen. One Dime at a Time (2021, Indiana University Press), which fills in the little-known history of this short-lived film genre.

**Your Feet’s Too Big (1941< Warren Murray) with Fats Waller**

As Susan Delson notes in her introduction, African-Americans participated in over 300 of the ca.1880 Soundies produced between 1940 and 1946, making them the first mass entertainment media in which they were not marginalized or relegated to racist stereotyping. Not that Soundies didn’t also sometimes feature racist images, which were still the norm in Hollywood’s film production and the society at large, but their extremely low budgets ironically gave both filmmakers and performers the freedom to express real emotions to their own community, as well as to the white majority. Furthermore, the weekly release of reels with six to eight Soundies, including at least one black-themed film, featured a wide variety of musical styles and acts and thus now constitute important documents of Black cultural history.

*Got a Penny, Benny* (1946, William Forest Crouch) with Nat King Cole

While the 3000 to 4500 Panoram movie jukebox machines were manufactured by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago, the Soundies films were produced by affiliated subsidiaries, like RCM Productions in Hollywood and Minoco Productions in New York, and distributed by the Soundies Distributing Corporation of America, another subsidiary of Mills Novelty. Placed in bars, restaurants, defense plant lunch rooms, bus and train stations, and other public spaces, the Panoram machines allowed viewers to see a film for a dime, in the order they appeared on the reel, a limited market – given the number of machines in circulation – that forced producers to turn out Soundies quickly and extremely cheaply. Nevertheless, the whole financial structure of the operation remained shaky at best, until finally, it collapsed in the immediate post-World War II years.

*Flamingo* (1942, Josef Berne) with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra

The 17” by 22” Soundies screens were large enough to allow a dozen or more viewers to see the films, but small enough to call for a performance and visual aesthetic that anticipated television rather than follow big screen norms. While the quality of the productions varied greatly, depending on the producer, many of the black-cast Soundies allowed for experimentation and performative self-expression, giving urban African-American audiences non-racist images of themselves for the first time ever. In subsequent chapters, Delson not only introduces many of the filmmakers and performers populating these films but also their vision of black culture and life.

Given the war years, it’s surprising that only a “sliver of the hundreds of Soundies that feature Black performers” (p. 89) reference the War itself, possibly because African-Americans were initially ambivalent about the war, due to the rigid segregation of the Armed Services. While news of racial tensions, especially the riots of 1943, were excluded from Soundies, films, like When Johnny Comes Marching Home and We Are Americans Too, emphasized Black patriotism and sacrifice, their impact exceeding their numbers.

*When Johnny Comes Marching Home* (1943, William Forest Crouch) with the Four Ginger Snaps

Many Soundies featured black urban spaces, city streets and living rooms, dance, and culture, as well as expressions of heterosexual romance, when Hollywood was still neutering African-American men and women, thus presenting images of black modernity to the community and white audiences. Then, as now with rap music, urban cool became a model for black and white teenagers. While Soundies situated in Southern rural locations were more apt to follow racist stereotyping, many were also imbued with a modern urban sensibility ”that flatly contradicts the good-bad, country-city binaries of many Black-cast Hollywood films…” (p. 116)

*Give Me Some Skin* (1946, unknown) with the Delta Rhythm Boys

*Cow Cow Boogie* (1942, Josef Berne) with Dorothy Dandridge

But the emphasis in most Black cast Soundies was on a joyful and playful heterosexual romance and sexuality, which was still invisible in mainstream media. Expressed primarily through dance and movement, sexuality was often slyly communicated through direct address to the audience, breaking down Hollywood’s fourth wall with a wink or a flash of leg. And while Black-cast Soundies were more heavily censored by local censorship boards than comparable white cast films, in particular when light and dark-skinned performers raised the specter of miscegenation, many films demonstrated both female agency and intimate onscreen pairings that must have delighted black audiences, especially those featuring Dorothy Dandridge who would cross-over to Hollywood stardom a decade later.

*Cats Can’t Dance* (1945, William Forest Crouch)

Integration, on the other hand, remained elusive in Soundies, “more often achieved in the editing room than on the film set…” (p. 193). Integration in fact only became visible when mixed black white bands appeared, e.g. Gene Krupa’s big band included African-American trumpeter Roy Eldridge, while Phil Moore’s post-war Soundies featured white guitarist Chuck Wayne. Delson closes her excellent book with several appendixes, detailing every Black-cast Soundie produced, as well as the performers and filmmakers involved in their production. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of African-American popular culture.

Today, many Soundies are still available on YouTube. Soundies Susan Delson discusses are available on her website: https://www.susandelson.com/video/#videos. There has also been a vigorous trade in the 16mm film collectors market of soundies, which are easily identified by the fact that the image is reversed on the film, allowing for the original back-projection through mirrors.

***She’s Crazy With the Heat (1946, Ray Sandiford) with Anna Mae Winburn and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm***

286: The Village Detective (2021)

Archival Spaces 286

The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (2021)

Uploaded 7 January 2022

A couple of years ago I contributed to an anthology on the filmmaker Bill Morrison, The Films of Bill Morrison (2017), edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, and I have been a big fan of Bill’s since he first showedDecasia (2002), his feature-length avant-garde meditation on nitrate decomposition. So I was particularly excited when at the Orphans Film Symposium in May 2020 (Archival Spaces 244, https://archivalspaces.com/blog-feed/page/5/), Morrison showed a sneak preview of his film, The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (2021). Like Decasia, it is a film that revels in the beauty of decomposed, in this case, water-damaged film, and the abstract patterns of light and shadow it creates, all of it accompanied by a beautiful accordion-based score by David Lang.

**Mikhail Zharov as Aniskin, the village cop**

However, the film begins with film clips of the Soviet Russian actor Mikhail Zharov (1899-1981) being interviewed by himself, utilizing clips from his many films. Only then do we see a green underwater shot, looking up at the play of light on the surface, while the filmmaker relates receiving an email in 2016 from Iceland about the recovery of four reels of film from the ocean floor. As the shot continues, a metal barrel is dropped into the ocean and sinks slowly to the bottom, while the opening credits appear. In the interviews and clips that follow, the audience learns that the four reels discovered by an Icelandic trawler, Fróði, are from a 1969 Soviet film, The Village Detective, a film that is neither lost nor even important, according to Russian film historian Peter Bagrov. Indeed, a restored print of the film (which exists in Gosfilmofond, the Moscow film archive) would probably bore people out of their minds.

Bill Morrison’s strategy is different, namely to show very long clips of the damaged film, but only those sections that advance the main plot, concerning a Soviet police officer in a small village attempting to find a stolen accordion. While the image appears and disappears as water damage dissolves up to 90% of the film emulsion, and the Russian language track is sometimes heard, but mostly only seen in subtitles, the eye is fascinated by the abstract patterns and ghostly figures moving in and out of the frame. Intercut with this damaged footage, are intact scenes of Mikhail Zharov from the many films in which he appeared over a 60+ year career, many including songs the actor performed.

*The White Eagle* (1928, Yakov Protozanov)

Zharov, who was an extremely popular actor and even had a Russian stamp printed with his likeness in 2001, began his career as an extra in 1915. He made his official film debut in 1924 in Yakov Protazanhov’s science fiction masterpiece, Aelita, and was then seen regularly in films of the Mezhrabpom-Rus, including Nikolai Ekk’s Road to Life (1931), the Soviet Union’s first talking picture, which made the actor a star. From that point, Zharov became a fixture in the socialist realist cinema of Stalin’s Soviet Union, appearing in more than fifty films, mostly as a character actor. According to Bagrov, His acting was only good when he had a strong hand to guide him, like Sergei Eisenstein in Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946-58), where he played Czar Ivan’s guard.

*The Return of Maxim* (1937, Grigoriy Kozinstev, Leonid Trauberg)

*Ivan the Terrible, Part II* (1946/1958, Sergei Eisenstein)

Morrison juxtaposes film clips of Zharov in Outskirts (1933), Thunderstorm (1935), Comrades (1936), The Return of Maxim (1937), Peter I (1937), The Bear (1938), New Horizons (1939), Engineer Kochin’s Error (1939), Fortress on the Volga (1942), in which he often appeared as a thief or other shady, i.e. bourgeois, character or as a singer with a guitar or accordion. Never a hero of the revolution or a good comrade, Zharov is identified as the Soviet Union’s “most beloved iconoclast actor.” He was even blacklisted for a period in the early 1950s because his wife was the daughter to a physician implicated in the infamous “doctors’ trials” of 1949. In other words, the film is neither about a great actor nor a great lost film.

So what makes the film so fascinating? Both at the beginning and the end of The Village Detective Zharov mentions that he is interested in how life gets woven into art and how art reflects life. Morrison is fascinated how four reels of a no-name Russian film reappear from the bottom of the ocean – he cites a second film, Lenin is Alive (1958) was dredged up from the ocean by a Danish trawler in 1976 – creating a massively damaged, but also visually beautiful film artifact, life creating art; much of the time we only see abstract patterns in brown and sepia with ghost-like images peeking through, but also the perforations and remains of the optical track; as with broken Greek pottery, our mind’s eye fills in the images, but we also remain ever cognizant of the materiality of film. Finally, Morrison is also interested in a forgotten film career from a now-discredited era of film history, produced in a now archaic medium of celluloid, his compiled films reflecting the reality of life under a communist dictatorship, yet always a bit contrary and off. In his final role as Aniskin as the wise old village cop, Mikhail Zharov does get to play a hero; accordingly, the scene of him finding the accordion is taken from the restored print.

285: Vienna in Hollywood Symposium

Archival Spaces 285

Vienna in Hollywood Symposium

Uploaded 24 December 2021

Two weeks ago I attended and was a speaker at the Symposium, “Vienna in Hollywood. The Influence and Impact of Austrians on the Hollywood Film Industry 1920s – 2020s.” The event was hosted by the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, USC Libraries, USC’s Max Kade Institute, and the Austrian Consulate General of Los Angeles and was the first event of its kind staged by the new Museum. Friday, 10 December was hosted by the Doheny Memorial Library at USC, while Saturday 11 December took place in the Museum’s beautiful new downstairs screening room. Unfortunately, due to COVID, a number of the speakers coming from Europe could not attend in person and presented their work via Zoom, including the first speaker.

*Man braucht kein Geld* (1931, Carl Boese)

After the usual opening addresses by the organizers, the morning sessions began with Katherine Prager (Vienna City Library) who discussed “The Vienna Circles in Hollywood.” Beginning with the circle around the critic Karl Kraus and theatre/film director Bertold Viertel, she not only elaborated on the many intellectual circles of Vienna, none of which survived intact in America, but also described the Vienna Library’s extensive holdings of estate collections and correspondence. Next, Paul Lerner (USC) introduced the audience to the psychoanalyst (and possible charlatan) Fred Hacker, whose Topeka Menninger Clinic hosted numerous Freudian psychiatrists from Vienna en route to Los Angeles. Lerner also delved into the influence of psychiatry on Hollywood, e.g. that Marilyn Monroe on the advice of her psychiatrist turned down the role of Anna Freud in John Huston’s Freud (1962) or that producer Joseph Mankiewicz’s whole family was in analysis. The morning session ended with Frank Stern (U. Vienna) discussing the early German films of Hedy Kiesler, aka Hedy Lamarr, who apparently caused a mini-scandal with her film Man braucht kein Geld (1931,) before her worldwide scandal with Extase / Ecstasy (1933).

*The Emperor Waltz* (1948, Billy Wilder)

*The Spring Parade* (1940, Henry Koster)

Two philological papers followed after lunch. Jacqueline Vansant (U. Michigan) discussed the image of Kaiser Franz Joseph in Hollywood films of the 1930s/40s, while Lisa Silverman (U. Wisconsin) looked at Billy Wilder’s Heimatfilm, The Emperor Waltz (1948), both papers noting Hollywood’s benevolent view of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, despite Austria’s complicity in the Holocaust. In the same vein, Anjeana Hans (Wellesley) analyzed via Zoom American studio remakes of Franziska Gaal’s independent Austrian films, including Koster’s Spring Parade (1940). While Robert Dassanowsky (U. Colorado) made a case for a failed Hollywood-Vienna film agreement in 1936, Regina Range read letters by Vicki Baum, Salka Viertel, and Gina Kaus concerning their impressions of Los Angeles, and, finally, Donna Rifkind recreated the atmosphere in the house of Salka Viertel and her famous Santa Monica Salon.

***Dishonored (1931, Joseph von Sternberg)***

Day two at the Academy began with Noah Isenberg’s keynote, in which he explicated the Austro-German origins of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), as well as its naughty phallocentric jokes, punctuated by numerous film clips. Next, Todd Herzog’s (U. Cincinnati) gave a close reading of Joseph von Sternberg’s Austrian war/spy melodrama starring Marlene Dietrich, Dishonored (1931), while Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert (UCLA) and I reviewed the Hollywood career of film director William Thiele.

**Tilly Losch in *The Garden of Allah* (1936, Richard Boleslawski)**

After lunch, Patricia Allmer (U. Edinburgh) introduced the work of Hollywood specialty dancer Tilly Losch, who had memorable scenes in The Garden of Allah (1936) and Duel in the Sun (1945), but few other Hollywood roles, pursuing instead a career in painting. The next panel was dedicated to composers: Steven C. Smith on Max Steiner, Nobuko Nakamura (U. Vienna) via Zoom on Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Heather Moore (USC) on Hanns Eisler. Steiner was of course one of the most prolific and successful Viennese composers in Hollywood, while Korngold despite Hollywood success regretted that his serious music was not acknowledged by American music critics. Co-Curator of the event, Doris Berger concluded the day with a panel of Austrians working in Hollywood today.

**Max Steiner score** **for *King Kong* (1933, Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack)**

A nitrate film screening of Casablanca (1942), brought the symposium to its conclusion, adding an artistic dimension to the proceedings, just as had Isa Rosenberger’s MTV short, “Café Vienne: Dedicated to Gina Kaus,” and Christine Wieder and Klaudija Sabo’s documentary RoughCut: Vienna Exile Below the Line.

Everyone was in agreement that the symposium was very well-organized and featured excellent hospitality. As is always the case with such symposia, the presentations were a mixed bag, both methodologically and qualitatively, some announcing one topic, then discussing another, some stringently academic others anecdotal; one speaker managed to misspell the names of all three directors whose documentary films they were discussing. Nevertheless, this was an excellent start to the Academy Museum’s extracurricular programming and one hopes they will be encouraged to host other symposia in future.