The man whose name was stolen
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The man whose name was stolen |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1996 |
| length | 78 (1996) minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Wolfgang Staudte |
| script |
Josef Maria Frank Wolfgang Staudte |
| production | Bernhard F. Schmidt |
| music | Herbert Trantow |
| camera | Eduard Hoesch |
| cut | Johanna Rosinski |
| occupation | |
| |
The man whose name was stolen is a 1944 German fiction film by Wolfgang Staudte with Axel von Ambesser in the title role.
action
In the "good old days": In the registry of an old German civil servant's office it is found that the police are looking for a certain Fridolin Biedermann for several offenses: for marriage fraud , forgery of documents , refusal of alimony , imposture and bigamy . All authorities, preferably registry offices, according to the senior official, should be informed. This is the starting point of the story, which is about the perfectly good Fridolin Biedermann, who is in the process of making preparations for the marriage with his fiancée Elvira Sauer. Biedermann is a really loyal German honest man: he runs a department store and even manages, with his own charm, to sell a coffee warmer with a fabric tap on top as the latest Parisian hat creation to a cranky middle-aged customer in the hat department. Fridolin's beloved Elvira is the boss' daughter, and he is very impressed by the idea that his daughter will marry his best employees. At the registry office, however, the future couple experienced a nasty surprise: According to the police records, the registrar rules the "libertine" Fridolin, he is said to have been married for seven years and have three legitimate and five illegitimate children. In order to clear up the mistake, Fridolin goes to the police without hesitation, but since everything is known to be fundamentally correct in German offices and documents are never wrong, one also believes the registry documents there rather than the innocent accused. Fridolin B. is arrested and taken away in striped clothes in a rickety prison carriage, with the wooden back wall falling out during the journey.
At the police station it quickly turns out that Biedermann is not identical to the crook he is looking for. Fridolin remembers: There was once a waiter, a certain Max Vieregg, who "accidentally" sprinkled him with red wine in a restaurant. He was helped out with salt, and then a somewhat wicked-looking lady named Hella joined them. Vieregg and Hella worked together to steal Biedermann's wallet and personal documents. Since then, Vieregg has committed numerous crimes as "Fridolin Biedermann". Since this process has been resolved, the criminal acts of the real honest man are cleared of the criminal acts by order of the police prefect, while the fake Fridolin enters into a bigamistic marriage again and is rewarded with a cashier's check from his new father-in-law. The real Fridolin, however, again fails in his wish to finally marry his Elvira because of the bureaucracy. Because, as the registrar announced to him, the previous marriages of the false Fridolin must first be "properly" dissolved, he must not be married beforehand. Then the registrar gives Biedermann some famous “good advice” on the way: He should find his name thief and get him to dissolve his marriages “properly” so that they can be “properly” deleted from the registry. Fridolin and Elvira leave the registry office annoyed and stunned.
Fridolin trustingly turns to the detective agency Röntgenblick with their strange boss Dr. Secretly. In a crooks' club, a wicked bar, he duped the urban crooks with a trick and with the help of Fridolin and thus found out the address where name thief and bigamist Vieregg is supposed to be. There Fridolin Vieregg meets crook bride Hella, who runs a marriage initiation institute and puts on a big show when Biedermann shows her that he has seen through her rascals. Together with Dr. Fridolin secretly visits the crook “Bar Kap Horn”, at whose entrance door people are asked to only use firearms with silencers so as not to disturb the artistic performances. While the singer Marlen Weber performs the noble schnulze “Mamatschi”, the tough guys on site are so moved that some of them give up their bad intentions after the song is over and never want to turn awkward things again. In the meantime, Vieregg's new accomplice Swea terminates the collaboration with him, whereupon Vieregg tries to shoot himself - but the pistol fails every time. Only when he puts the revolver on the table in exasperation does a shot go off ... and fatally hits Max Vieregg. "Fridolin Biedermann" can now be deleted from the criminal record. But with that he is officially dead, and thus, officially, the true honest man is no longer alive. Where there is no more honest man, marriage is not possible either. Fridolin cannot be trusted again!
Horrified, Biedermann runs to his government and asks the head of cabinet to instruct the bureaucracy to let him run again as, in official German, "proper access". So it happens, and Fridolin finally believes he has reached the goal of his dreams. But the registrar made it clear to him that as a quasi “newborn” he would have to wait 21 years. As a bureaucratic approach, it has only existed today, so it is only allowed to marry when you reach the age of majority - 21 years at the time. Wait a full 21 years? Fridolin's collar bursts and he yells in the presence of Elvira and the registrar that he doesn't feel like getting married anymore and that he would rather join the crooks in order to pursue a career as a criminal himself. Elvira then starts to howl and finally gives her long-time secret admirer Heini Bock a chance to land with her.
Biedermann now seriously thinks that it is time to turn his life upside down: He really wants to become a crook! So he goes back to the Kap Horn bar, where he meets the singer Marlen again. She was one of the marriage victims of the false honest man and is therefore, from a bureaucratic and formal legal point of view, the widow of the real, still living Fridolin. Marlen, who comes from a very good family, starts flirting with would-be crook Fridolin and pokes him when he announces that he finally wants to do a “real thing”. Marlen already has an idea: she knows an elegant house that belongs to a rich man, the salt almond king, Consul Weber. Little does Fridolin suspect that this is Marlen's father and that she just wants to raise him. The villa is broken into, and Fridolin wonders why the two watchdogs, two great danes, wagging their tails past Marlen, who of course came with them. Marlen makes long fingers and puts everything in a sack that is not nailed down. But then Fridolin's honesty seizes and he asks Marlen to put everything back in its place. During this prevented fishing trip, both realize that they feel something for each other, and Fridolin Marlen immediately proposes marriage. The Biedermann widow, however, replies truthfully: “Getting married is the only thing we both cannot do.” Then she confesses to him that she is the daughter of the consul and is actually already married to him, Fridolin Biedermann. Now that the bureaucracy has been satisfied, nothing stands in the way of a common “decent” life for both of them, also from a bureaucratic point of view.
Production notes
The man whose name was stolen was shot from April 24th to July 20th, 1944 and passed film censorship in March 1945. However, it was then demanded to remove the many tips on authorities and civil servants that "Wolfgang Staudte distributed with expressionistic stylistic devices from the Weimar period". Before the film could be changed again, the war ended.
As a result, the filmed footage was considered lost for many years. It was stored in various locations and later merged in the GDR State Film Archive . When the search for the remaining film material of Harry Piel's last staging of the Nazi era The Man in the Saddle was in the early 1990s, the GDR State Film Archive also came across 56 reels of picture and 23 reels of sound negatives for Der Mann, dem the name was stolen and it was painstakingly restored. The film historian Holger Theuerkauf sifted through the countless snippets of image, sound, positive and negative material and put them together to make an almost complete film. In the few places where only sound material was available, still images were inserted. The first performance took place on June 21, 1996 in the Zeughaus Kino - German Historical Museum. One of the leading actresses, Gretl Schörg, was present at the premiere, while it had been forgotten to invite the actors Ruth Lommel, Ruth Buchardt and Kurt Weitkamp, who were still alive at the time.
Herbert Trantow made his debut here as a film composer. The buildings were designed and implemented by Otto Hunte and Karl Vollbrecht , whose last collaboration was on a completed production. Hans Grimm was responsible for the sound. The film ballet, founded in 1943, danced.
Hans Meyer-Hanno , who can be seen here as a street policeman for several seconds, was arrested one or two days after filming was over in his Austrian vacation spot. The staunch communist was active in the anti-fascist underground and was also arrested as a result of the general wave of arrests following the attack on July 20 , the day the shooting closed. For Meyer-Hanno this was his last film role.
Gretl Schörg sang the song Mamatschi, give me a horse . Axel von Ambesser, Egon Brosig and Aribert Wäscher sang the song paragraphs, registers, forms .
In 1947 Staudte shot this material again, this time under the title The strange adventures of Mr. Fridolin B. Here, too, Ambesser took on the main role of Fridolin Biedermann. Ruth Lommel and Hubert von Meyerinck also returned to their old roles, while actors such as Paul Henckels and Egon Brosig played other roles in the remake. Only one scene in which the hero sings a chanson was taken from the original film.
Reception and analysis
"The film is a phenomenon: a biting satire on bureaucracy and narrow-minded authority, and therefore on the administration, and therefore on the government - and that in 1945. Axel von Ambesser, also a cabaret artist, plays the main role of Fridolin Biedermann with ironic charm, who wants to get married. Unfortunately, his official register is not clear - years ago an impostor stole his ID and committed various offenses such as marriage fraud, bigamy and fraud under his name. That now falls back on the innocent original honest man. The fact that the police recognize him as someone other than the wanted person does not help either - he is then considered innocent, but thanks to the twofold Biedermeier style, still married; Even a pardon from the head of the cabinet does not help - he is no longer considered married, but as a newcomer, means: as an infant who only has to wait 21 years to come of age to marry his bride. This series of absurd regulations and archival bureaucratic stupidity alone would be enough, especially since Staudte puts it all in a highly caricature-like manner: the registrars, the police officers, the fraudsters and even the government are completely exaggerated types, often filmed with a monstrously disfiguring camera - the officer's gaze through the glasses looks like frog eyes. But Staudte goes further. It creates an underground, extremely unstable ground, which is not only pulled away from under the feet of its honest man, no: which is more badly than right to support an already fragile world. Because there are breaks in this film, that characters suddenly turn their thinking and behavior inside out, that there are U-turns in the plot: It is not just designed to have a comic effect, it is program. Fridolin Biedermann does not fight against the official paragraph riding. He resigns, turns away: he decides to become a criminal, 'sub-human', as he once promised himself when he meant the underworld (also in this detail the mockery of the Nazis, no: of rule in general). "
Individual evidence
- ↑ The man whose name was stolen on prisma.de
- ^ Ulrich J. Klaus: German sound films 13th year 1944/45 . P. 190 (042.45), Berlin 2002
- ↑ The man whose name was stolen on prisma.de
- ↑ F.-B. Habel: Cut up films. Censorship in the cinema , Kiepenheuer, Leipzig 2003, pp. 65–66
- ↑ The man whose name was stolen on screenshot-online.blogspot.de
Web links
- The man you stole the name in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The man whose name was stolen from filmportal.de