The tiger of Esnapur (1938)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The tiger of Esnapur |
 | |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1938 |
| length | 94 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Richard Eichberg |
| script | Arthur Pohl , Hans Klaehr , Richard Eichberg |
| production | Richard Eichberg |
| music | Harald Boehmelt |
| camera | Ewald Daub , Hans Schneeberger , HO Schulze, W. Meyer-Bergelt |
| cut | Willy Zeyn junior |
| occupation | |
| |
The Tiger from Eschnapur is an adventure film by director Richard Eichberg, shot in 1937 in Udaipur and Mysore ( India ) and Woltersdorf (near Berlin) . The screenplay was written by Richard Eichberg, Arthur Pohl and Hans Klaehr based on a novel by Thea von Harbou . The first screening of the film took place on February 11, 1938 in Berlin's Ufa-Palast am Zoo .
action
In the first part of the two-part film adaptation of the novel “The Indian Tomb” by Thea von Harbou , three people are at the center of the action: Chandra, the Maharajah of Esnapur, his wife Sitha, the Maharani and former dancer, and Sitha's former lover Sascha Demidoff. The adventurers Sascha Demidoff and the brothers Fjedor and Mischa Borodin live in a hut in the Indian jungle and need money for a return trip to Europe. While the Borodin brothers are planning to ambush Sitha, Demidoff's former lover, who became the rich Maharani after this affair, an argument ensues between the men in which Misha is shot by Sascha. This flees from the brothers in the jungle. During a tiger hunt, the Maharajah's hunting party finds an injured European who pretends to be a Russian count, but who is actually Sascha Demidoff. Before Sascha can get to Sitha to warn her about the Borodin brothers and to revive his passion for her, Prince Ramigani, the younger and ambitious brother of Chandra, already suspects that something is wrong with the Russian count. In the meantime, the architect Emil Sperling arrives at the palace of Eschnapur to convey the plans of his chief Fürbringer for the construction of a dam to the Maharajah and thus win the tender for himself. Despite many attempts, Emil Sperling does not manage to get close to the maharajah or the prince to talk about the building project. Emil Sperling travels back to Berlin without having achieved anything.
Sascha and Sitha are introduced to each other as part of a festival for successful tiger hunting. Although Sascha doesn’t show anything, Sitha visibly pale at the sight of him and withdraws from the celebration earlier. During the course of the festival, through Prince Ramigani’s mediation, the Borodin brothers appear in the palace, who expose the false Russian count as a con man and accuse him of robbing them. In the scuffle that follows, Sascha Demidoff escapes and breaks into Sitha's apartment to persuade her to flee together. While Sitha begs her former lover to flee without her, Ramigani, Chandra and the palace guard suddenly break into Sitha's rooms and discover both of them in a supposedly unambiguous embrace. After a short fight, Sascha Demidoff is able to escape. Sitha falls out of favor with Chandra in the presence of a strange man with whom she shares a common past. Prince Ramigani uses the situation to persuade Chandra to cast off Sitha because he is in love with Sitha himself and wants to own her. Sitha's servant Myrrha is later used by the escaped Sascha as a message broker and enables Sitha to escape from the palace with her lover.
The Maharajah of Esnapur and Prince Ramigani immediately track the two lovers and chase the couple around the world until they arrive in Berlin . The architect Fürbringer also lives in Berlin, and his fiancée Irene Traven is determined to win the contract to build the dam for her future husband. Irene resolutely sneaks into the Maharaja's hotel suite and pretends to be a journalist. During the conversation, Irene reveals her real intentions. The maharajah is impressed by their commitment and agrees to attend a party at the Fürbringer house that evening to get to know the architect. At the same time the Maharaja's men search all of Berlin for Sitha and Sascha. When Chandra and Ramigani appear at the evening party at the Fürbringer house and get to know the architect as well as Emil Sperling and his wife Lotte, he spontaneously decides to give him the building contract and also mentions that this decision is solely due to his fiancée Irene owed. Obviously surprised and offended, because he did not know anything about Irene going it alone, Fürbringer turns away from the Maharajah and makes a scene to Irene. At that moment, Chandra learns from Ramigani that Sitha has been scouted out and that she knows that she will have a dance performance in the Winter Palace tomorrow. Both men hastily say goodbye to society.
The following evening Sitha performs as an Indian temple dancer in the Winter Palace. In the hands of an oversized Indian goddess rope, Sitha seems to come to life and dance for the fascinated European audience. The Maharajah invited Irene Traven, her fiancé Fürbringer, Emil Sperling and his wife Lotte to the gala. Only Fürbringer refuses to take part out of hurt vanity, since it is not thanks to his sole achievement that he was able to win the contract, and stays at home. The audience in the Winter Palace is visibly impressed by the strange dance and the great equipment of the Indian dancer. When Sitha leaves the stage, the Maharaja's men are waiting for them in their cloakroom and ask them to get into the waiting car to be taken back to India. Sascha watches the scene and tries to intervene, but can only overpower one of the men and bumps into a scuffle against a candle, which immediately sets the curtain in flames behind the stage. While the news that his escaped wife has finally been captured reaches the Maharajah, the stage of the Winter Palace begins to burn. The fire spreads quickly and soon the entire house is on fire. Due to the panic of the guests, Irene loses consciousness and threatens to burn. Although Chandra is already in front of the burning house and safe, he runs into the flames again to save Irene Traven. At the same time, Fürbringer learns from Sperling's phone call that the palace is on fire and drives off immediately to see whether Irene has been saved. When he finds out on site that Irene is still in the burning theater, he too runs into the burning palace. During this time, the Maharajah finds the unconscious Irene and carries her in his arms to the exit, where he hands over the unconscious woman without a word. At this point Sascha Demidoff managed to free his lover Sitha from her kidnappers. So both the flight from the vengeance of the Maharajah begins anew. While the maharajah heard in front of the burning palace that the abduction of Sitha had failed, he sealed the award of the contract to Fürbringer again, this time with the addition that a huge tomb had to be erected before the dam was built, as a memorial to a great love.
Production and theatrical release
Both films were produced by Richard Eichberg (Richard-Eichberg-Film GmbH, Berlin), under the production management of Georg Wittuhn .
The entire film crew traveled to India for both films and it was shot on location under the personal auspices of the Maharajah of Udaipur. The famous Indian Menaka ballet was hired for some dance scenes.
According to Bandmann, two water bulkheads had to be opened in a dam during the further filming of both films. The film team was in mortal danger because the water masses were stronger than calculated. Cameras, footage and equipment were destroyed. Fever, diarrhea and the unfamiliar heat caused the actors to feel weak and lose weight rapidly, so that some scenes later had to be re-shot in the studio in Germany after the actors were able to recover and gain weight again. Leading actor Sepp Rist , who initially played Sascha Demidoff, choked when jumping into the water, allegedly because he had to avoid a shell turtle at the last moment, and contracted an intestinal infection so that he had to be replaced by Gustav Diessl . For the scenes that were re-shot in Germany, an Indian fairytale world with palaces and temples had been recreated on the film grounds in Berlin-Johannisthal .
The films “The Tiger of Eschnapur” and “The Indian Tomb” were recombined under the title “Indian Revenge” and shown in German cinemas after the end of the war .
Under the title Le Tigre du Bengale - also under the direction of Eichberg - a French version was produced in parallel. The main roles were mostly occupied by French actors. It played u. a .: Alice Field (Sitha), Roger Karl (Prince Ramigani), Pola Illéry (Myrrha). The Munich-born editor, actor and later director Max Michel embodied Prince Chandra.
background
The author Thea von Harbou only worked on the script for the film " The Indian Tomb ". All previous film adaptations of the novel, which bears the title "The Indian Tomb", are based only on the novel. Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou wrote the screenplay for the first film adaptation from 1921 ( The Indian Tomb) . Although Fritz Lang was already being discussed as a director in 1921, Joe May (then producer and director) took the project on on the grounds that Lang was too young and inexperienced for such an expensive and monumental film project. In the film version from 1959, Fritz Lang, who had returned from the USA, took over the direction.
The success of Richard Eichberg's “Indian films” cemented La Jana's fame as an exotic dancer.
“After the end of the Second World War, in 1958, the director Fritz Lang, who emigrated to the USA after taking power, tried to remake both films with Debra Paget and Paul Hubschmid . Although both films showed all of India's splendor in color, they didn't catch on with audiences. The beautiful Debra Paget was not up to the erotic, gentle attraction of La Jana. "
Reviews
- “Exotic locations and adventures, intrigue and betrayal, romance and vengeance: From these ingredients of tried and tested American role models and traditional trivial romance of German popular literature, this monumental adventure film mixed an audience-effective cocktail in two parts. The border to kitsch is more than touched on in this spectacle, which is one of the most elaborate German productions of the thirties, but that is one of the characteristics of the genre. The dancer La Jana is enchantingly elegant as a proud, passionate Maharani. "
- Christa Bandmann describes in her book Es shine the stars, From the heyday of German film , how successfully both films were received in Germany: The director Roland Eichberg knew what he had to offer his audience. La Jana's costumes were breathtakingly beautiful and the audience should be amazed by their exotic feminine charms. Nothing was too expensive or too opulent to recreate the fairytale wealth of the Indian royal palaces in the film. The famous Indian Menaka ballet was hired for various dance scenes. La Jana's cloakroom was accordingly spectacular: glittering tendrils barely covered her bosom, head and shoulders and only a golden sash loops around her narrow hips when she wakes up in a scene as a temple dancer on the hands of an imposing Indian deity. This revue scene is probably one of the most beautiful and impressive that can be seen in the film "The Tiger of Esnapur".
- “Against the director of the second Indian tomb, Richard Eichberg, Joe May was pure iron stone . Since the middle of the decade he had been constantly releasing films, Eichberg was the king of the Berlin snout and had an almost voluptuous speculative lack of concern, and "his actor guard had to be able to move between frivolity and lasciviousness" (Werner Holba: Geschichte des Deutschen Tonfilms). In its version of the Indian films, the bombastic kitsch climbs heavenly heights (this version is the best known thanks to incessant re-performances in the cinema and television). Like May, Eichberg also put his wife, Kitty Jantzen, in a female lead. The best thing about the film is of course the beautiful La Jana (“the perfect nakedness”, Alfred Polgar), as she glides through the film with her beautiful limbs as the high priestess of a cult who doesn't even think about celebrating the cold statues of Shiva because he finds his hot satisfaction in himself. “ Christa Bandmann / Joe Hembus: Classics of German sound films 1930–1960, Munich 1980, page 111
meaning
The Tiger of Eschnapur is an opulent adventure film which, with many shots of Indian palaces and landscapes, magnificent exotic costumes and dances, and fairy-tale interiors and backdrops, was supposed to take the viewer into a strange world and entertain (including an elephant fight that was filmed in India , seen in the film). This makes it atypical for German cinema productions in the years just before the Second World War. The dramaturgical concept with two full-length films building on each other corresponded more to previous films such as B. in The Spiders , Dr. Mabuse, the player or The Nibelungs . The buildings and costumes were made by Willi A. Herrmann and Alfred Bütow (complete equipment).
See also
literature
- Thea von Harbou : The Indian tomb. Novel. Ullstein, Berlin 1918 ( Ullstein's 3 M.-Romane 54), ( novel version of the script).
- Thea von Harbou: The Indian tomb. Unipart, Erftstadt 2005, ISBN 3-89996-640-6 .
- Christa Bandmann: The stars shine. From the heyday of German film . Heyne, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-453-01128-7 .
- Christa Bandmann, Joe Hembus : Classics of the German sound film 1930–1960. Goldmann, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-442-10207-3 , pp. 108-111 ( Ein Goldmann-Taschenbuch. Goldmann Magnum. Citadel-Filmbücher 10207).
- Thomas Kramer (ed.): Lexicon of German films. Book Guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-7632-4425-5 , p. 157 ff.
Individual evidence
- ^ Certificate of release for The Tiger of Eschnapur . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2015 (PDF; test number: 24 V V).
- ^ Volksschauspieler.de - La Jana. Retrieved January 4, 2020 .
- ↑ a b c Comp. Christa Bandmann: The stars shine. From the heyday of German film , Heyne Verlag (December 1984), ISBN 3-453-01128-7 , p. 83 ff.
- ↑ cf. Thomas Kramer (Ed.): Lexikon des Deutschen Films , Büchergilde Gutenberg, ISBN 3-7632-4425-5 , p. 157 ff.
Web links
- The Tiger of Eschnapur in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- "The tiger from Eschnapur at filmportal.de
- French version of The Tiger of Eschnapur in the Internet Movie Database (English)