The great mandarin

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Movie
Original title The great mandarin
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1949
length 105 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Karl Heinz Stroux
script Karl Heinz Stroux
production Georg Fiebiger
for Nova-Film, Wiesbaden
music Hans-Otto Borgmann
camera Werner Krien
cut Erwin Niecke
occupation

as well as Rudolf Reiff , Friedrich Siemers , Clemens Hasse , Karl Hellmer , Hans Stiebner , Herbert Weißbach , Karl Hannemann , Gustav Püttjer , Annemarie Hase , Steffie Spira , Margarete Schön , Michael Günther , Erich Dunskus , Franz Weber

The great Mandarin is a contemporary satirical German feature film from 1948 by Karl Heinz Stroux . Paul Wegener can be seen in the title role in his last film.

action

The film plays on several levels of place, time and action and occasionally experiments formally with the means of interactive theater art. At the center of the action is the clever, old Mandarin with the core statement that the economic and social or historical German problems (shortage, black market, dictatorship and corruption) in contemporary " Trizonesia " can be solved with the means of Far Eastern philosophy and wisdom.

The story: It mainly revolves around seven little pigs that were kept (and hidden) by seven farmers a long time ago in ancient, imperial China, although the Mandarin has expressly forbidden this under threat of death. At the same time, a master butcher aiming for a political career tries to pair his daughter with the chief officer, who could help him with his ambitions. An important election is imminent, and this chief officer, an unscrupulous, scheming, ambitious man with high goals and low convictions, is doing his own political soup. The butcher's daughter is anything but enthusiastic about her father's idea of ​​one day marrying the evil director. Rather, she loves the trainee in her father's slaughterhouse.

With a watchful eye and omniscient wisdom, the great mandarin follows the goings-on of the protagonists. He sees through the perfidious power games of the poor character of the office director, who arrests all his critics and opponents as a precaution and proves to be a veritable dictator even before the election. The Mandarin has a remedy for the cumulative inability of men: he encourages two women seeking advice to become politically active themselves and to develop alternatives to the morally depraved male rule. And so the butcher's wife soon founds the women's party. The children of the small town are also mobilized to vote.

In fact, it is not the head of office but the butcher's wife who is elected as the new head of the country. As one of her first official acts, she should punish the seven farmers with their seven black pigs. And her husband, the butcher who slaughters illegally, should by no means get away with it. According to the law, someone should die for every black pig. The women, now in power, do not see that. But they too remain conceptual in their policy-making and the development of ideas. The upcoming trial ends in a great tumult, but here, too, the Chinese sage ultimately turns out to be a peacemaker. The great Mandarin gives everyone the following words as their last message on their journey through life: "You should only be peaceful, because life on this earth, people, is short."

Production notes

The great Mandarin is one of a series of contemporary satirical material that had a boom in the three German western zones at the time of shooting in the shortage year 1948, immediately before the introduction of the DM : Berlin Ballad , The Apple Is Abandoned and The Lord From Another Star . Of these productions, only Stemmle's Berlin Ballad was a success - both with critics and audiences.

For Paul Wegener, The Great Mandarin was not only his last feature film, but also his only post-war film. He is said to have provided the inspiration for this material. Wegener was considered an actor devoted to Chinese philosophy and art. He was already ailing while filming in 1948, and he never saw the premiere of the film on February 18, 1949 in Wiesbaden and the great failure that went with it.

Curt Riess wrote about this in his memento volume 'There's only one time':

“The exotic films after WWII are very bad; this must also be said of the last film by the great actor Paul Wegener - "The Great Mandarin". The story alone is a chapter in itself. Nobody understands exactly what it is about. That may be very "exotic", but in the long run it is tiring. What is the movie about? Even this question is not easy to answer. [...] That is very confused, although - under the guise of exoticism - it is about very topical issues of the day, about famine, black market trade, corruption, dictatorship. "

- Curt Riess: There's only one. The Book of German Films after 1945, Hamburg 1958. p. 203

Herta Boehm designed the scenic theatrical decorations, and Paul Markwitz designed the film structures . Theo Nischwitz was responsible for the special effects . Editor Erwin Niecke also worked as an assistant director to Karl Heinz Stroux.

Reviews

The film left numerous contemporary critics with confusion and helplessness and was received mostly indifferent to ambivalent or even negative.

In its February 26, 1949 issue, Der Spiegel wrote: “Stroux makes film in film. He lets decoration, studio and financial needs play along, with a tip against the film financiers. He lets the actors talk and speak on the screen in a filmed auditorium and films the reaction of an acting audience. The viewer cannot always avoid the impression of the imaginative and sophisticatedly complicated. Strong scenes flash into discussed still photos. The threefold change of space and time handicaps a cinematic orderly tension and the overall impression. "

Curt Riess judged: “[T] he highly talented director Karl Heinz Stroux, around this time already one of the first theater men in Germany, has come up with a few things that cannot, or at least not yet, be performed in film. He probably intends to make a surrealist film. In any case, you never know whether the actors are playing their roles or speaking to the audience. You do both. You have just played a tragic scene; suddenly they jump out of the screen into the parquet, so to speak, and talk to us. "

Heinrich Fraenkel wrote in Immortal Film that the film was "a somewhat strange comedy that oscillates in the small-town milieu between ancient China and modern times."

The lexicon of international films reads: “Formally, the film wanted to give German post-war production new impulses, but it is primarily interesting because of its intellectual content. He draws hope for the solution of time problems from the wisdom of a Far Eastern humanism. "

The Protestant film observer came to a positive assessment : “With a legendary story from ancient China, this film wanted to uncover and help heal the political and social wounds of the first post-war period in Germany. The film is a parable and, formally, an experiment that works with alienation. Selfishness, ambition, and all sorts of other human shortcomings are outshone by the serene wisdom and goodness of an old man. This 'great Mandarin' is Paul Wegener's last role. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The great Mandarin in spiegel.de
  2. ↑ That's only available once, p. 203
  3. ↑ Immortal Film. The big chronicle from the first note to the colored wide screen. Munich 1957, p. 421
  4. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexikon des Internationale Films, Volume 3, S. 1425. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987.
  5. ↑ Evangelical Press Association, Munich, Review No. 55/1949

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