The Doppelganger (1934)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The lookalike |
 | |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1934 |
| length | 85 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | EW Emo |
| script |
Curt J. Braun Peter Ort |
| production |
Carl Lamac Arthur Hohenberg |
| music | Leo Leux |
| camera | Hugo von Kaweczynski |
| cut | Ella Ensink |
| occupation | |
| |
The double is a German crime comedy based on the novel of the same name (original title: Double Dan ) by Edgar Wallace . The film was produced from December 1933 to January 1934 by the Berlin- based Ondra-Lamac-Film GmbH and directed by the Austrian director EW Emo . The first performance took place on February 14, 1934 in the atrium in Berlin. This film is the sixth Edgar Wallace film with German participation.
action
Mr. Miller, who lives in Australia, believes his money manager and distant relative Harry Salsbury made his money in London. He decides to travel to Europe with his niece Jenny to confront Harry. Jenny, who has just come of age, has already fallen in love with the picture of her cousin Harry in Australia. Using a trick in Naples, she succeeds in sending her uncle to Paris and secretly flying to London herself. There she stays with Harry without further ado and turns his life upside down. This can prove that Jenny's uncle's fortune is well invested in stocks and shares. But he has to put an end to his supposedly bad lifestyle under Jenny's supervision. Jenny forces him to do sports and denies him his favorite foods.
Harry is friends with the married painter Germaine de Roche. Because her rabid husband becomes suspicious, he lets the detective Superbus shadow her. To avoid this, Germaine persuades Harry to go to Ostend together. Harry, who under no circumstances wants to tell Jenny anything about this trip, pretends to be spending a few days in Scotland. His servant is supposed to send letters to Jenny from there. After Harry's departure, the detective Superbus turns up at Jenny. He reports on the mysterious doppelganger who commits his crimes in the masks of respected London businessmen. Its accomplice has the task of luring the victims out of London so that they can work there undisturbed. When Jenny drives to the train station to warn Harry, Harry has already left.
Little Jenny has no idea that Harry has meanwhile returned to his villa because he feared a scandal. To his surprise, Harry meets Germaine there, who pretends to have fled from her angry husband. Jenny, who is also back in the meantime, thinks Harry and Germaine are the crooks and locks them up without further ado. Eerie things go on in the villa at night. After a break-in and a shootout, the real doppelganger can be exposed. The misunderstandings between Mr. Miller, Jenny and Harry are resolved. And in the end, Jenny and Harry are a couple.
background
Ondra-Lamac-Film GmbH already produced the Edgar Wallace film adaptations Der Zinker (1931) and Der Hexer (1932). The interior photos were taken in the Efa studios in Berlin-Halensee .
The film testing agency approved the film on February 1, 1934. The film was occasionally shown on television after the war and was first released on DVD in April 2011.
It was not until 1959, more than 25 years after this film was shown, that the film The Frog with the Mask was another German Edgar Wallace adaptation for the cinema.
Reviews
“ Based on the novel of the same name by Edgar Wallace , this does not mean that swords come out of the dark and knives whiz through the air. Firing is only done with rusted army revolvers and always next to them. Fortunately, the same cannot be said of the joke of the two screenwriters Curt Braun and Peter Ort. They often hit the bull's eye, it's just a shame that almost half an hour passed before they found the disc . But once the mustache of the honorable Mister Selsbury has fallen through a mistake by the hairdresser, then nothing stands in the way of funny entanglements. His biological cousin considers him a felon in a doppelganger mask, he becomes a prisoner in his own home and finally has to break into himself in order to save the threatened pounds from the grip of the real crook. A criminal grotesque, then, with harmless mockery of all those props that tickle the nerves in real sensational films. And it should have been played accordingly. But only Theo Lingen's role was completely in tune with the tone of the caricatured environment. As a detective Superbus, he combined the flair of a dromedary with the courage of the rabbit and developed such great skills in disguise that one had to laugh again and again. His teammates were consistently at a pleasant level, but sometimes they were too normal-middle-class . Even the director Emo, who let the plot drag on at the beginning and occasionally brought it up with repetitions, should have made more conscious decisions about the style of a pastiflage. The audience liked to have their diaphragm shaken, and at the end they gave friendly applause. "
Another film adaptation
- Not good enough to (The Double) (United Kingdom 1963) - Directed by Lionel Harris (with Jeanette Sterke , Alan Crampton )
literature
- Edgar Wallace: The door with the seven locks / The bands of horrors / The double . Three novels in one volume. German translation. Goldmann Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-442-55506-2 .
- Joachim Kramp , Jürgen Wehnert: The Edgar Wallace Lexicon. Life, work, films. It is impossible not to be captivated by Edgar Wallace! Verlag Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89602-508-2 .
See also
Web links
- The Double in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The double ( memento from December 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) at deutscher-tonfilm.de
- The doppelganger at Filmportal.de
