Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull (1957)

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Movie
Original title Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull
Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull Logo 001.svg
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1957
length 103 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Kurt Hoffmann
script Robert Thoeren ,
Erika Mann
production Film construction GmbH, Göttingen
( Hans Abich )
music Hans-Martin Majewski
camera Friedl Behn-Grund ,
Dieter Wedekind
cut Casper van den Berg
occupation

Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull is a film by Kurt Hoffmann from 1957. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Mann .

action

Felix Krull tells his memoirs off- screen . He was a Sunday child and always wanted to go high. He lets himself be taken out of service by the military after using his acting skills to play an epileptic to the medical officer . Thereupon his godfather , the painter Schimmelpreester, helps him to get a job in a hotel in Paris . On the way there, he steals from a stranger during customs control . Later he meets her again in the hotel - she is the wife of a Strasbourg foie gras manufacturer - and embarks on an adventure with her. In the end, when he confesses the theft , she asks him to steal more. With the money he started a double life, being a waiter in the hotel during the day and a bon vivant in fine Parisian nightclubs in the evening . There he met Zaza, who was already in a relationship with the Marquis de Venosta. When his parents threatened to be disinherited and sent the Marquis on a trip around the world, Krull took the place of the Marquis de Venosta, who prefers to stay with his lover Zaza, with a false identity . First he takes the train to Lisbon . In the dining car he meets the museum director Professor Kuckuck, who invites him to visit him in Lisbon. He wins the affection of Professor Kuckuck and his wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Zaza disappears and the real Marquis is suspected of murder . He returns home and the surprised parents who thought he was in Lisbon are appalled by the suspicion of murder. To save their son, they travel to Lisbon and confirm that Krull is their son, the Marquis. Krull is arrested and turns to Kuckuck to escape from prison. He hesitates because he doesn't want to do anything illegal as a civil servant, but when Krull confesses to him that he had affairs with both Kuckuck's wife and daughter at the time of the crime and doesn't want to reveal this to the police, Kuckuck and his assistant Hurtado help. Krull takes a drug , which induces a deathlike rigidity, is presumed dead, and the " corpse ", as in his will has, given to the professor for study purposes. After Krull has awakened from the rigidity, he resumes his world tour and meets Zaza again on the ship ...

Others

The film was shot from January 24th to March 4th 1957 in the Real-Film-Studio in Hamburg-Wandsbek. The outdoor shots were taken in Hamburg and Lisbon. The world premiere took place on April 25, 1957 in the Gloria Palast in Berlin.

Thomas Mann's daughter Erika was involved in the creation of the script, also acted as a consultant and had a significant influence on the shooting . The film partly deviates from the literary model, which remained a fragment and was never completed by Thomas Mann. The ending was reinvented. The film also deviates in places from the novel when it comes to drawing people. Felix's lover Madame Houpflé in the novel is the wife of a toilet bowl - in the film a foie gras manufacturer .

The end of the film is based on an idea by the screenwriter Robert Thoeren. The suspicion of murder, the arrest, the escape and the onward journey do not appear in the book. The novel, which was published as the "first part" but whose sequel was not written, ends with the love affair of Krull and Maria Pia Kuckuck.

Awards

Reviews

"Thanks to Erika Mann's involvement in the script and the careful cast, he has inspired moments, but overall does not rise above the level of a well-kept comedy film."

- Lexicon of international film

"Successful cinematic implementation of the unfinished novel by Thomas Mann, with which Kurt Hoffmann set a cheerfully ironic climax in the German film history of the 50s."

- Heyne Film Lexicon, 1996

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ CineGraph - Lexicon for German-language film - Kurt Hoffmann
  2. ^ Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used