The cure

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Movie
German title The cure
alternative title:
The healing spring
Original title The Cure
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1917
length 2 rolls, 559 meters, corresponds to 24 minutes at 20 frames per second
Rod
Director Charlie Chaplin
script Vincent Bryan ,
Maverick Terrell ,
Charlie Chaplin
production Henry P. Caulfield
camera William C. Foster ,
Roland Totheroh
cut Charlie Chaplin
occupation

The cure (also: The Cure) is the German title of the American silent film "The Cure," the Charlie Chaplin in 1917 in its screenplay (along with Vincent Bryan and Maverick Terrel) for the Mutual Co. realized. The cure was Chaplin's tenth film for the Mutual . It was released in US cinemas on April 16, 1917.

action

Charlie Chaplin plays an alcoholic who goes to a spa to sober up. He doesn't seem to take his plan very seriously, however, because he brings a large suitcase full of spirits. On the way he molested a fat gout patient. He repeatedly steps on his bandaged foot until he attacks him angrily. He escapes and meets a girl who encourages him to give up drinking. But when the spa director notices that his employees are getting drunk from Charlie's souvenirs, he orders them to throw the spirits out of the window.

They do that too, but they hit the healing spring directly, which is contaminated with alcohol. The unsuspecting spa guests are unintentionally disinhibited, get into a good mood and begin to dance. Even Charlie, urged to abstain by his new flame, drinks from it and gets a high in which he even becomes intrusive, so that she leaves him in anger. Charlie staggers back to the door, where he meets the fat man with gout again, whom he tips from his wheelchair straight into the healing spring.

The next morning there are plenty of hangover victims except for Charlie, who stayed sober. He gets up and finds the young woman again, who forgives him after she learns what happened. They both set off and Charlie steps into the alcoholic mineral spring as if by chance.

background

The film was made in three months at the Lone Star Studio - 1751 Glendale Boulevard, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA. The cameramen were William C. Foster and Roland Totheroh , assisted by George C. Zalibra . The prop master George Cleethorpe and his assistant Dan Allen took care of the set . Edward Brewer was the technical director .

The film premiered in the United States on April 16, 1917. It has also been performed in Europe, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. In Germany, where it was only shown in cinemas after the First World War, it was also called Die Heilquelle .

A set to music with music and noises, produced by Van Beuren Studios, had its world premiere on August 19, 1932. It was awarded by RKO Radio Pictures . Chaplin could not take legal action against it. Amedee van Beuren bought Chaplin's mutual comedies for $ 10,000.

Alcohol addiction was a serious problem in the United States around 1917, particularly among the lower classes. Aware of this, Chaplin changed the figure of the alcoholic from the usual tramp to a fashionably dressed “rich idler”, about whom one could laugh “with a clear conscience”. Gout was widely considered to be a disease of the wealthy, represented in the film as the voluminous Eric Campbell.

Chaplin drew inspiration for Die Kur from the Fred Karno one-act play The Hydro , which is set in a cold-water sanatorium, but also from the Athletic Club in Los Angeles, where he lived at the time. The wrestling matches in the club's gym sparked his imagination. They inspired the famous scene in which he gets involved in a wrestling match with the masseur who wants to treat him.

In his pursuit of the highest perfection, Chaplin hesitated to complete his film further and further. As evidenced by trimmings, the film originally started differently: Chaplin wanted to play a sanatorium servant first, then a healing assistant, before finally choosing the role of the health-giving alcoholic.

Chaplin's use of dance scenes in Die Kur is reminiscent of the "Living Images" that appeared in many music hall programs. In the locker room, when the curtain is opened, Charlie takes various poses in a bathing suit before dancing to the swimming pool. A few of them are similar to those captured by wrestler Eugen Sandow on May 18, 1894 in front of Thomas Alva Edison's camera.

reception

The Kur was the first Chaplin film that essayist Kurt Pinthus saw in Germany; He wrote after going to the cinema: “I had the will to sit there with the sharpest, most ruthlessly critical glasses, but in the 20 minutes this film skipped by, I laughed so much that my glasses were soon smeared with laughter and tears was so fogged up that I had to take it off and exchange it for the glasses of love. "

In the course of its reception history, the film has repeatedly been processed together with other mutual comedies into anthologies and loaned out. An early example is that of the German distribution company Humboldt-Film GmbH from Berlin, where the film, edited by Willy Seiboldt together with Behind the Screen , The Roller Skating Rink and The Fireman , came to cinemas in 1929 under the title “Charlie's Career”.

Re-performances

The cure was first shown on German television in 1973, where the film was named Die drunkenen Kurgäste and was broadcast in the ZDF early evening series “Fun with Charlie”. A speaker, the cabaret artist Hanns Dieter Hüsch , commented on the off- screen film, which was underlaid with music and noises . In order to get the desired airtime, the film was stretched through randomly obtained cutting material.

In 1989 Atlas-Filmverleih Duisburg released Die Kur as the “uncut original version” of the “world premiere with German introductory and subtitles in a new music version”.

In January 1994 the cultural channel Arte showed Die Kur as a German version of a US American reconstruction that David Shepherd arranged in 1984 and for which Michael D. Mortilla wrote and recorded new music in 1984. The German editing was limited to the translation of the subtitles.

On September 4, 2013 a previously missing part of the ending was found and should be added to a new edition on DVD. A restored version of Die Kur was presented at the Silent Film Festival in San Francisco on January 11, 2014.

The cure was broadcast again by the Arte cultural channel on Tuesday, December 24, 2013 on German television. Stephen Horne provided the musical accompaniment.

Several publishers have now brought the film onto DVD.

Web links

Commons : The cure  collection of images, videos and audio files

Items:

Illustrations:

literature

  • Kurt Pinthus . In: Rolf Aurich, Wolfgang Jacobsen (Hrsg.): Film & Schrift . tape 8 . Richard Boorberg, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-88377-945-4 .
  • Heinrich Fraenkel: Immortal Film. The great chronicle. From the magic lantern to the sound film . Kindler, Munich 1956, p. 176–177, 393 (part of the picture by Wilhelm Winckel).
  • Dan Kamin: The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin. Artistry in Motion . Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland / USA 2008, p. 15 .
  • Andrea Melcher: From a writer to a language writer? Alfred Döblin's concern with film and radio, 1909–1932 . In: European University Writings. Row 1, German Language and Literature . tape 1553 . Peter Lang, 1996, ISBN 978-3-631-49153-9 , ISSN  0721-3301 , p. 62 .
  • James L. Neibaur: Early Charlie Chaplin. The Artist as Apprentice at Keystone Studios . Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland / USA 2012, ISBN 978-0-8108-8242-3 , pp. 77, 212, 226 .
  • Guido Marc Pruys: The rhetoric of film synchronization - how foreign feature films are censored, changed and viewed in Germany . Gunter Narr, Tübingen 1997, p. 179-189, 219 .
  • Johannes Schmitt: Charlie Chaplin. A dramaturgical study . Lit, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-8258-9317-0 , pp. 48 .
  • Friedrich von Zglinicki: The way of the film. History of cinematography and its predecessors . Rembrandt, Berlin 1956, p. 518-520 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ so Pruys p. 179
  2. ↑ cf. Zglinicki p. 519
  3. ↑ cf. WaverBoy, entry # 285, 29 May 2007 Archive link ( Memento of the original from January 13, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.silentcomedians.com
  4. ↑ cf. rgkeenan October 17, 2013 at torontofilmsociety.org [1] : “Charlie interestingly abandons his normal tramp persona for this film. Although he felt rich drinkers were ripe targets for comedy, he felt that alcoholism in the working class was a serious problem which wasn't suitable for comedy. "
  5. ↑ cf. Vance 2014: “The Cure, the tenth film in the series, is perhaps the funniest of the Mutual-Chaplin Specials. The Fred Karno sketch, The Hydro, set in a hydrotherapy clinic, partly inspired its setting. Chaplin drew further inspiration from the Los Angeles Athletic Club where he was living at the time and where the idea of ​​a health spa first occurred to him. The wrestling bouts in the gymnasium of the Athletic Club captured Chaplin's imagination and inspired the famous scene in which Charlie wrestles the masseur. "
  6. ↑ cf. Vance 2014: “Chaplin delayed the completion of the film because of his quest for perfection. Outtakes survive showing that the film began quite differently, with Chaplin intending to play a bellman and later a spa attendant in a health resort before settling on the inebriate character taking the water cure. Chaplin further delayed production when he caught a chill after filming some of the water scenes. "
  7. ↑ so-called tableaux vivants , not in the cinematographic sense, but representations of often naked people, who by the 1890s at the latest became the attraction of urban vaudeville shows, and thus a cultural dimension of urban modernity. Due to the ambivalence between the living body and the still image, the tableaux vivants seem to be a kind of counter-draft to film, which, conversely, gives images the appearance of living by setting non-living bodies in motion (Schweinitz 2012)
  8. ↑ cf. Vance 2014: "Chaplin's use of dance in The Cure recalls the tableaux vivants, a popular feature of many British music-hall programs. In the changing room, Charlie assumes several poses in his swimsuit as the curtains open and close before he dances to the pool"
  9. ↑ cf. Edison movies at kinolorber.com Archive link ( Memento of the original from December 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , the short film “Sandow” can be viewed on youtube [2] @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kinolorber.com
  10. ^ Aurich / Jacobsen (eds.): Kurt Pinthus , 2008.
  11. ↑ Showcase photos of this company have been preserved; she had u. a. also Richard Oswald's »Outlawed. The tragedy of a homosexual ”and his documentary with the play“ Laws of Love ”in the program, cf. filmportal.de [3]
  12. ↑ The film came under the censorship no. B 23 625 with a length of 6 acts = 2042 meters on November 26, 1929 in Berlin in the Ufa pavilion for the first performance; Hans J. Salter wrote a music for the cinema that was conducted by Victor Baer. See Gandert, 1929, p. 789.
  13. ↑ cf. Pruys p. 182
  14. ↑ so Atlas Film, cf. Pruys pp. 180-181
  15. ↑ cf. Pruys p. 182, who describes Mortilla's piano music as 'nerve-sawing' (p. 189)
  16. ↑ cf. Arte.tv archive link ( Memento of the original from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv
  17. ↑ cf. stephenhorne.co.uk [4]
  18. ↑ cf. Dr. Achim Lewandowski, DVD Recommendation No. 7 - Films with Charlie Chaplin [5]