Archival Spaces

367: Santa’s Restoration

Archival Spaces 367

The First Mexican Sound Film Restored

Uploaded 21 February 2025

Considered Mexico’s first “national” production in the sound film era, Santa (1932) was based on the eponymous Mexican novel (1903) by Federico Gamboa, which is as much a modernist portrait of Mexico City, as it is of the fate of its heroine. Santa, a beautiful country girl, is seduced and abandoned by an Army officer. She goes to the city, where she becomes a well-known courtesan of the wealthy, before descending into poverty and death. The film was featured in “Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960,” a major retrospective I co-curated in 2017 at UCLA, however, we were only able to show an unrestored print from Mexico’s UNAM. In Hollywood Goes Latin. Spanish-Language Filmmaking in Los Angeles, I also discussed the importance of Santa’s Los Angeles premiere in establishing a major beachhead for the Mexican sound film industry in America: throughout the 1930s and 1940s, virtually every Mexican film screened in L.A.’s first-run cinemas. Now, Viviana García Besné, the force behind Permanencia Voluntaria, has nearly completed a new restoration, which vastly improves the soundtrack and adds footage previously unseen in any surviving prints. Viviana’s great uncles, Rafael and José and Rafael Calderón (Azteca Films) financed Santa.

On May 20, 1932, the Teatro California in Los Angeles premiered Santa, directed by Antonio Moreno and starring Lupita Tovar, both of whom had substantial careers in Hollywood. According to L.A.’s Spanish language daily newspaper, La Opinión, Santa was coproduced by the Calderóns, who financed the premiere, and which drew an A-list of Hollywood personalities, including Tovar, José Mojica, Mona Maris, Laurel and Hardy, Ramón Pereda, Juan Torena, and Carlos Villarías. Critics praised the film for its realism and its melodrama; it was enormously successful with audiences in the U.S., with theatrical runs held over in many cities.

After a worldwide search, Permanencia Voluntaria ascertained definitively that no original negative or master positive of Santa survived, while circulating prints evidenced poor image quality and missing sound. The original negatives for Santa likely burned in the 1982 fire at the Cineteca Nacional’s Churubusco Studios storage. The Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City, however, owned a 10 reel, 35mm, acetate, composite negative (4th generation internegative), with a variable density soundtrack, but image quality was marred by high contrast. Not until Viviana García Besné uncovered six unaccounted-for nitrate reels at the Filmoteca de la UNAM, one including a censored sequence missing from circulating prints, did a restoration seem feasible. Furthermore, Viviana’s team had already found the original Vitaphone 78 RPM sound disks (1932), donated by Paul Kohner (Lupita’s husband) to the Academy Film Archive, an audio source far superior in quality to any of the existing film elements, also running several minutes longer than previous releases. These were lovingly transferred by John Polito at Audio Mechanics.

**Nitrate damage on 35mm print of SANTA**

A VHS release from the 1980s also included some footage not found elsewhere. But where was the missing footage? After months and months of research, it was determined the material had come from a 16mm print at UNAM which had been destroyed years ago. Then, a 16mm print donated by Lupita Tovar, the film’s star, to UCLA proved to be virtually complete, with only a few seconds missing. Miraculously, Tovar’s personal print included a filmed introduction by Federico Gamboa, which had been excised from every circulating version.

Once a new version had been digitally assembled, the team began the complicated task of clean-up and image improvement. Given the severe physical damage, compromised by lossy splices, water damage, projection wear, and poor lab work, extensive hand painting was undertaken to minimize image distortion, followed by dust-busting and stabilization. Next, image grading was done to ameliorate the disparate quality of the source materials, compounded by decades of wear and generational loss. Achieving this, required countless hours of grading and testing, the color correction handled by Ross Lipman, and the digital restoration by Peter Conheim. Finally, the film-out process—transferring the restored digital image back onto 35mm film stock–initially fell short of expectations, because labs today seldom work with b & w materials, but after much experimentation at FOTOKEM the delicate tonal range achieved during digital grading was also visible in output 35mm prints. According to Viviana García Besné, “While a few seconds of Federico Gamboa’s spoken introduction remain missing, this restored version represents the most comprehensive and faithful iteration of the film available today.”

The budget for the restoration of Santa surpassed $100,000. With a matching grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Permanencia Voluntaria, has finished most of the work, but still needs $20,000 in completion funds, before the film can be made available for DVD release. Anyone wishing to make a donation to help complete the project can do so at https://pdnfoundation.org/give-to-a-fund/permanencia-voluntaria-film-fund.

366: German Musicals 3

Archival Spaces 366:

Marta Eggerth’s First Film

Uploaded 7 February 2025

**New Year’s Celeration on set of *Die Bräutigamswitwe*, Elstree Studios, London**

The independent film producer/director Richard Eichberg produced his films up to early 1928 at UFA’s Babelsberg Studios, then moved his base of operation to London’s Elstree Studios and British International Pictures, although he also continued to produce films in Berlin. In 1930, Eichberg hired the Hungarian coloratura soprano, Marta Eggerth, in her first sound film, Die Bräutigamswitwe/The Groom’s Widow (1931), after she had starred in a part-talkie in Budapest earlier that year. By that time, the 18-year-old had already sung on some of the major opera stages of Europe, including in Max Reinhardt’s 1929 staging of Die Fledermaus. Although identified in the credits as a “sound film farce,” The Groom’s Widow includes at least four musical numbers, while the film musical features anarchic comedy, a mixture of genres, and a discontinuous cabaret-style plot, similar to contemporary UFA musicals. Eggerth’s film career would take off in Berlin, which continued – even though she was Jewish – after Hitler’s rise, before emigrating to Hollywood with her singing partner, Jan Kiepura.

***Die Bräutigamswitwe*** **(1931, Richard Eichberg)**

Georg Alexander, Marta Eggerth in *Die Bräutigamswitwe*

After getting wildly drunk at his own bachelor party, rich playboy George Brown (George Alexander) wakes up with a hangover and a bride, Fay Miller (Marta Eggerth), – she’s a chorus girl – even though he is to be married that morning to his upper-class fiancé, Maud (Gertrude Kohlmann). To make matters worse, Fay’s burley fiancé, Bill Huber (Fritz Kampers) shows up to give George a thrashing. Both supposedly die in the tussle that follows. At the inquest, Fay and Maude then argue over who is really the groom’s widow. George and Bill turn up alive separately, each worried they have murdered the other, leading to a cat and mouse game, engineered by Fay who knows the truth, before all is resolved and George realizes he loves his little chorus girl. This is after all aimed at the American market, where the English Version, Let’s Love and Laugh, opened before playing in the U.K, where it was produced.

**Dueling widows at the inquest in** **Die Bräutigamswitwe**

Annoying in-laws in *Die Bräutigamswitwe*

All four musical numbers, written by Hans May with lyrics by Jean Gilbert, feature Eggerth’s operatic voice, in particular in Eggerth and Kohlmann’s dueling duet, “The Groom’s Widow,” where each claims to be the true heir. The film seemingly begins in a classroom, where the students sing “ABC, Love doesn’t hurt,” the number morphing into a cabaret stage when the students tear off their frocks to dance; a final chorus /curtain call reprises the opening Schlager, “My Heart is a Salon for Beautiful Women.” The film’s broad comedy involves not only a war between the romantic leads, but also the intrusion of Fay’s uncouth, petit bourgeois parents, who immediately move into George’s mansion, featuring a stiff and anal-retentive butler, and a police detective who solves crimes through séances, a parody of Dr. Mabuse. Mashed into the discontinuous action are other genres: George and Bill believe they are seeing ghosts, a parody of ghost/horror films; when George’s valuables are stolen from his safe because Fay gets distracted, Fay is falsely accused, the plot briefly turns into a Hitchcokian crime drama; not surprising, given that scriptwriter Walter Mycroft, wrote Hitchcock’s Murder (1930), and co-scriptwriter Frederick J. Jackson started his career at Lubin in 1915.

One of Eggerth’s favorite composers, Hans May, wrote songs for five Eggerth films before he and lyricist Jean Gilbert were forced into exile in 1933; cameraman Heinrich Gärtner and scriptwriter Károly Nóti also fled the Nazis. Despite the Propaganda Ministry’s ideological prohibitions against “Jewish” film operettas, Marta Eggert continued starring in no less than twelve musicals (not counting seven English, Italian, and French versions); surprisingly, but typical for crass Nazi opportunism, many of the films were financed by Jewish producers from Austria. They were distributed throughout the Reich, in the rest of Europe, and in South America. The actress’s blonde curls, her Hungarian star image, and the fact that the Reich needed the hard currency certainly impacted Goebbels’ decision to approve Eggerth’s films. Hungarian actresses, like Eggerth (and before 1933 Gitta Alpar), but also so-called “Aryans,” like Marika Rökk, Hilde von Stolz, and Käthe von Nagy, gave Nazi cinema an international flair, thus normalcy, when out in the street life was anything but normal for Jews and non-white people.

Operetta composer Franz Lehar’s work was also banned by Goebbels, however, the composer received special dispensation to write Eggerth’s Der Zarewitsch (1933, Viktor Jansen), The Whole World Revolves Around Love (1935, Viktor Tourjansky) and Where the Lark Sings (1936, Karel Lamac). Martha Eggerths subsequent films in the Third Reich (until she left in 1938) mixed musicals with other genres, including Douglas Sirk’s The Court Concert (1936.

**Kiepura and Eggerth on Paris train to Cherbourg** **in 1937**

It was on the set of My Heart is Calling You (1934, Carmine Gallone) that Eggerth met and fell in love with the Polish operatic tenor, Jan Kiepura. They married in 1936. When he received a contract to the New York Met, Eggerth moved to New York, where she continued her stage career. During the war she appeared in only two films, both Judy Garland musicals, which she personally hated, no longer the star. After the war, she and Kiepura starred in three European filmed operettas, including The Land of Smiles (1952), but maintained their New York residence until Marta died at 101 years in 2013.

365: Nicholas Baer’s Historical Turns

Archival Spaces 365:

Nicholas Baer: Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (2024)

Uploaded 24 January 2025

Nicholas Baer’s now-published dissertation, Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2024), attempts to read five canonical German films from the Weimar Republic in the light of the early 20th-century crisis in historicism, to demonstrate that these films not only reflected that crisis but through formal experimentation embodied it. The guiding light here is Siegfried Kracauer who had since the 1920s contributed to the historicism debate by pointing out the parallelism between the writing of history and photographic media, e.g. in his 1927 essay about photography and in his posthumously published History: The Last Things before the Last (1969). Walter Benjamin also published two essays in exile, which critiqued German historian Leopold von Ranke’s conception of historicism because it created a homogeneous and therefore false image of the past.

Employing hermeneutics, historians had since the middle of the 19^th century demanded a new kind of “objective” history, which gathered facts in the context of a precisely defined period and ordered them in a logical and chronological narrative; conclusions were only valid for the defined era. according to Baer, Kracauer and other contemporary philosophers questioned this methodology because they understood that historians could neither free themselves from their own subjectivity nor from influences of the time in which they lived. In the following chapter Baer describes Kracauer’s intellectual and methodological engagement with the cinema, beginning with his early film reviews in the 1920s for the Frankfurter Zeitung, in which he initially praised historical costume pictures, like Danton (1921, Dmitri Buchowetzki), but then found fault with subsequent films, like Peter the Great (1922, Dmitri Buchowetzki), due to their seemingly coherent portrayal of historical events. Baer then traces Kracauer’s development in his Marxist and social-psychologically influenced books from the late Weimar Republic to his exile, From Caligari to Hitler (1947)and Theory of Film (1960). In the last-named work historical costume films are decried as a betrayal of the cinema’s inherent realism.

Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover in *Cabinet of Dr. Caligarri*

Dedicated to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene), Chapter 3 illustrates the way different figures in the film – the somnambulist Cesare, Dr. Caligari, Francis, Alan – embody completely contradictory narratives of events, i.e. the film rejects realism in favor of a subjective, expressionistically formed relativism. Baer hypothesizes, then, that Caligari inserts itself directly into the debate on historicism: “Wiene’s film perpetually reveals epistemic insufficiency of external signs, featuring figures who deceive sensory perception, assume alternate names or identities, are driven by obsessive ideas, or are even unaware of their own actions.” (p. 81)

*Der muede Tod/Destiny* (1921, Fritz Lang)

Der müde Tod/Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921) is all about the inevitability of death, however, (hi)story is no longer tied to a specific spatial or historical moment, but evolves in a circular fashion through numerous countries and epochs, thus denying coherence or meaning to history itself, thereby again contradicting the tenants of historicism. About Hans Richter’s abstract animated film, Rhythmus 21 (1925), Baer notes that it is a radical, avant-garde repudiation of the cinema’s narrative function, and therefore of historicism, placing the viewer in the position of the “nonsimultaneousness of simultaneity/Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen” (p. 107), whereby the present is seen from the perspective of the future.

The mountain film, The Holy Mountain (1925, Dr. Arnold Fanck), draws its ambivalent position to historicism dialectically by deriving its concrete and seemingly authentic visualization of nature from an ahistorical myth of the eternally male and female: Paradoxically, “… the film suggests a disharmony with human consciousness and nature, with catastrophe and ruinous fragmentation in the place of classical balance and universal totality.” (S. 141) Baer reads Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in a final chapter designated as Epilogue as a critique of capitalism, viewing the crisis in historicism in the context of the “disunified incoherence of Weimar culture” (p. 149), but also as a trope for a vertical class structure, which reappears in such modern films as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019). However, this attempt at topicality seems forced, lacking details to be convincing.

Nicholas Baer’s Historical Turns thus significantly enlarges our understanding of Weimar art cinema through its contextualization of the crisis of historicism, framing the former as a modernist art that privileges fragmentation over unity, disjuncture over narrative coherence. Based on the book’s title, though, one may ask the question, can the discussed art films function pars pro toto as “Weimar Cinema” as a whole, or as German film studies have established over the past twenty years, art cinema is only one of a multitude of genres defining Weimar German cinema in the 1920s.

364: Mr. Moto

Archival Spaces 364

Peter Lorre’s Mr. Moto Detective Series

Uploaded 10 January 2025

*Think Fast, Mr. Moto* (1937, Norman Foster)

When Adolf Hitler ascended to power on 30 January 1933, Peter Lorre knew he would be at the top of Joseph Goebbels’ enemies list, having been the star of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), a film that called for sympathy for a mentally ill mass murderer. While it took the Nazis until July 1934 to ban M, Lorre had left for Paris in March 1933, where he joined fellow penniless, German Jewish refugees, like Billy Wilder, Franz Waxmann, and Friedrich Holländer at the Hotel Ansonia, an establishment that didn’t ask too closely about police permits. While in France, Lorre appeared in two French films by German émigrés, including Du haut en bas (1933, G.W. Pabst), in which Lorre had a cameo as a beggar, reflecting his actual real-life status. Lorre then moved on to London, where Ivor Montegue suggested the actor to Alfred Hitchcock, who cast him as the criminal mastermind in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1935), shot in Spring 1934, before Lorre and his wife, Celia Lovsky embarked in July for America and Hollywood. After starring roles in Mad Love (1935, Karl Freund), Crime and Punishment (1935, Joseph von Sternberg), and Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1936), Lorre accepted a contract at 20th Century-Fox to star in a new series, featuring the Japanese amateur detective, Mr. Moto.

Mr. Moto had been the subject of a series of extremely popular novels by John P. Marquand, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, beginning with No Hero (1935), which the writer consciously created as a successor to the Charlie Chan novels, whose creator Earl Derr Biggers had died in April 1933. Given that Japanese aggression in Manchuria (1931) and Shanghai (1932) was well-known, it is surprising that Marquand and Fox would choose a Japanese hero for their detective series, but then most Americans only slowly perceived a Japanese threat across the Pacific. It was however the third Marquand novel, Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937, Norman Foster) that became the basis for the first film adaptation, starring Peter Lorre.

**Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto in *Think Fast, Mr. Moto* (1937)**

In contrast to today’s prohibitions against “yellow face,” no one in Hollywood seems to have been bothered by an Austrian Jew playing an Asian detective, – except probably Asian actors – or the fact that his Japanese character sounded more like a German. Eschewing prosthetics, Lorre slipped convincingly into the role with a bit of eye make-up, round glasses, and black-dyed hair. Ever polite and speaking in soft measured tones, one can imagine that Lorre was initially drawn to the character because he was both a positive, intelligent figure and an action hero who could use judo to neutralize foes – a double handled the judo – unlike the typecast monsters and villains he had been playing. The film was a major box office hit, leading to the production of seven more Mr. Moto films until Lorre bowed out in 1939.

As Lorre soon realized, the Mr. Moto programmers, running barely more than an hour, were extremely formulaic, even silly, souring him on the character, even if Lorre could have fun slipping into numerous disguises. But within the narratives, the disguises also reveal Mr. Moto as a morally ambiguous character who the Caucasian hero and heroine often have trouble reading. Through the first half of Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937, Norman Foster) it is unclear where Moto’s sympathies lie, with the smugglers or the police. His face is often a tabula rasa, even with friends, thus conforming to “the mysterious Oriental” racist stereotype. White supremacy demanded vigilance, especially in Hollywood. In Thank You, Mr. Moto (1938, Norman Foster), the second in the series, there is likewise, a hint of moral ambiguity, given how Moto covers up his killing of one person, then kills several others. The white hero and heroine wonder repeatedly, whether they can trust the non-white Moto.

Situated in exotic locales in Asian jungles, the deserts of North Africa and Iraq, or Chinese cities/Chinatown, Moto appearing in the stories as a mild-mannered art dealer or archeologist, covertly tracking criminals, the leaders of whom are often revealed to be upper class and close friends of the male and female hero, who Moto is protecting. In Mysterious Mr. Moto (1938, Norman Foster), the action moves from the swamps of Devil’s Island to the streets of East London, an urban jungle of Cockneys where people of color like Moto are openly subjected to racist slurs. Mr. Moto’s Gamble (1938, James Tinling) features more comedy with Moto playing a professor of criminology, one of whose students is a kleptomaniac who nevertheless helps solve the case.

Ultimately, the Mr. Moto film series are fast-paced good fun within their low budget and wildly incongruous plots. Lorre would, of course, soon move to Warner Brothers, where he became a featured character actor in off-beat roles, like Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston) and Ugarte in Casablanca (1943, Mi8chael Curtiz). Lorre would return to Germany only once after World War II, directing and starring in The Lost One (1951), a film about a Nazi mass murderer hiding out in a displaced persons camp; the film flopped miserably because no one in Germany wanted to be reminded of their culpability for the Holocaust.