The death ride on the ferris wheel
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The death ride on the ferris wheel |
| Country of production | Austria-Hungary |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1914 |
| length | about 60 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Fritz friend |
| production |
Erich Pommer for Viennese auteur film |
| camera |
Ottmar Ostermayr Franz Planner |
| occupation | |
| |
The Death Ride on the Ferris Wheel is an Austro-Hungarian sensational, crime and circus drama from 1914.
action
In a residential area in elegant Baden near Vienna. There in the early hours of the morning an unknown man climbs down from a high window, jumps over the garden fence and disappears into a vehicle waiting in front of the property. At the wheel sits a woman who drives the car out of the city in the direction of Vienna. It soon becomes clear that this is a burglar couple. Last night's robbery earned the perpetrators a valuable necklace. When the crime scene is inspected, the detective present immediately realizes that this can only be the handwriting of the sought-after master burglar, Fred Dolan. Dolan has also become a darling of upper society thanks to his polished manners. Smart and attractive Ellen, his wife, is always at his side. The detective wants to put Dolan under pressure, so he has him written out for a manhunt and posters his likeness all over town. Time for Dolan and his wife to go into hiding, and so the master burglar undergoes a masquerade. In his new costume as an Indian, Fred tries to get a job with the Circus Romani, which is currently visiting Vienna, and offers himself as a fakir number with his wife as his assistant.
The Romani Circus is currently in a considerable financial bottleneck, for which the ringmaster is largely complicit. But the charming Ellen Dolan makes him look good, and he lets himself be softened again to take on the fakir team. The artist Solange Romani, his wife, is much more skeptical, she doesn't trust the two newcomers. Solange's husband wax is quickly in the hands of the young thief assistant, who knows how to take full advantage of this. So the money from the performance income that Solange would like to see used for the debt relief and payment of various debts goes straight from Romani's hands to Ellen's. She, in turn, has some trouble with her own husband, who senselessly gambled away his money in the circus artists' meeting place. A little light soon dawned on the ringmaster too, because he believed he recognized the wanted Fred Dolan behind the masking of the supposedly Indian fakir. Together with Solange he tries to get to the bottom of things. Solange Romani makes contact with the investigating detective and hires him as a groom so that he can check out the ominous fakir and his alleged "assistant".
The pair of crooks in the circus is one problem of the rational Solange, but the financially precarious situation is the other and ultimately much more important. One day Solange reads a report in the newspaper: a crazy millionaire is offering $ 10,000 in a bet to anyone who dares to climb the roof of a passenger gondola of the rotating Ferris wheel on a horse. The plan matures in her to quickly eliminate all her financial worries in this way. And so Solange Romani intervenes at the last moment when her husband wants to sell the horse Marschall out of financial difficulties the next morning. She inaugurates the ringmaster, who initially thinks his wife is crazy, but then realizes that she only does this out of pure love for him and the small, circus company. Suddenly he sees his Solange in a different light and suddenly loses his recently intensely inflamed interest in the manipulative Ellen.
The announcement of a circus sensation, the "death ride on the ferris wheel", soon attracts the masses in droves. Ellen is in the audience too, but for a completely different reason. She wants to sabotage Solange's appearance. Ellen does not forgive the circus performer for winning back Romani, whom Ellen intended to strip down to her shirt. Meanwhile, the detective has not been idle either. He has got into Dolan's cloakroom and wants to arrest him there. But as much as he searches, he cannot find the stolen jewelry from Dolan's last loot tour. How can he know that clever Ellen has deposited him somewhere else in the meantime, namely in the lion's cage with the wild beasts, where nobody can get there so quickly. The detective arrests them, too, and not a second too late. Because Ellen is currently in the control house of the ferris wheel, from which she is planning an attack on Solange's life. She pushes the controller aside and stops the rotating Ferris wheel at the moment when Solange and his horse are on a wagon roof at the highest possible height. Your plan seems to be working. Solange Romani and her horse Marschall become extremely nervous. But after Ellen can no longer block the journey, the wagon slowly lowers again. The cheering crowd rages with enthusiasm and flows from now on into the upcoming performances. The circus is renovated.
Production notes
The death ride on the Ferris wheel was made in the Eclair film studio in Vienna up to and including May 1914 . The decisive scene with the artist and horse rider Solange d'Atalide, who gave the film its title, was shot in the Prater in Vienna at the end of April 1914 . The world premiere took place on October 21, 1914 in Berlin's Marble House . The Vienna premiere of the three-act play with a length of about 1100 meters was on March 5, 1915 in the Kaiser-Kino.
The 20-year-old Franz Planer made his debut here as a cameraman at the side of chief photographer Ottmar Ostermayr . Both of them also had to perform artistic performances from time to time: so they had to take a seat on the axis of the ferris wheel with their equipment for the decisive death ride.
The circus used for filming was called the Kludsky traveling circus.
The French leading actress Solange d'Atalide, who was erroneously spelled with a two “t” in all Austrian film advertisers, was a French equestrian, artist and circus director. For the difficult experiment of the "death ride" on the Ferris wheel, she made it a condition that the horse should first complete four laps on the wagon roof of the rotating Ferris wheel, which is fenced in with a grid, so that it could get used to this situation. Only for the film recording, for which the bars were removed, did Madame sit on the horse, which was lashed to the roof of the passenger gondola for further security.
Reviews
“... for today it should only be mentioned that an extraordinarily clever plot, a detective story, was chosen as an introduction to this great film sensation, which takes place in a setting that is peculiar and interesting. (...) Miss Kamilla Gerzhofer as an adventurous circus artist does an excellent job, as does Georg Kundert as circus director. Solange d'Attalide, the heroine of the great attraction, also shows herself to be a good film actress ... (...) The really excellent direction, for which Messrs Fritz Freund and Ostermeyer have made a great contribution, must not be overlooked. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ according to contemporary sources. More recent sources name Anton Pointner
- ↑ According to a report from “Dasinteresting Blatt” dated May 7, 1914, p. 13, illustrated with pictures of the event in question. Walter Fritz made a different statement in his work “The Austrian Feature Films of the Silent Film Era (1907-1930)”, Vienna 1967 , No. 154. Its date “20. September 1914 ”appears at first sight more than doubtful considering the fact that Austria-Hungary had already been at war with France for more than five weeks and Solange d'Atalide was French.
- ↑ Solange d'Atalide on damensattel.org