You skin en bas

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title You skin en bas
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1933
length 76 minutes
Rod
Director GW Pabst
script Anna Gmeyner
production Georges Root for the Société des Films sonores Tobis, Paris-Berlin
music Marcel Lattès
camera Eugen Schüfftan
cut Jean Oser
occupation

Du haut en bas - in German: "From top to bottom" - is a French everyday comedy by GW Pabst from 1933 based on a play by Ladislaus Bus-Fekete , with Jean Gabin and Michel Simon at the beginning of their careers.

action

The story takes place in a tenement house and tells in a partly comedic, partly melodramatic way of the everyday worries and needs of several women in a male-dominated world. At the center of the action is, among others, the successful soccer player Charles Boulla, who has just returned to the apartment building from a won match that the residents of the house had watched on the radio. The young roommate Paula raves about him, but Boula has other things on her mind and definitely no women’s stories. A second important figure is the impoverished and rather shabby lawyer Maximilian Podeletz, to whom the fat cook Ms. Poldi is fond and who occasionally sends him something to eat. The dilapidated lawyer no longer dares to go out of the house, fearing that his landlady, Madame Binder, will not let him in because he owes two months' rent. Milly, the maid of the house owners Monsieur and Madame Binder, secretly takes her boyfriend to the Binders' luxurious apartment while they are away from the opera and feeds him. Madame Kreuzbein, on the other hand, the seamstress in the tenants' community, hangs on the radio day and night while she works at the sewing machine, sometimes to listen to a soccer game, then to a boxing match broadcast from New York. In the meantime, Monsieur Podeletz has to sell his clothes in order to get something edible, because he no longer has credit.

One day, the young Marie de Ferstel appears, whom Monsieur Berger, another tenant of the apartment building, knows through her recently deceased mother and her father, a doctor who once treated him. The pretty blonde immediately attracts the attention of Boulas, who is cleaning his shoes in the courtyard. Since Milly had hid her guy in the Binders' bed the night before, she was fired immediately. There is now a vacancy at the Binders. It's good that Marie is urgently looking for a job that Berger, who is on the phone with Madame Binder, can arrange immediately. The young history teacher, who was unpaid (and thus unemployed) for five months during the holidays, is completely exhausted and has no roof over her head. In order to help her, Monsieur Berger issues her a fake certificate for a certain Marie Kruschina, Miss Ferstel's name as the new “pearl” in the Binder's household when she started work. When Milly moves out, the new chambermaid Marie “Kruschina” moves in on the fly. Madame Binder turns out to be a dragon who has “consumed” a number of husbands. No. 4 is currently on it. It was evening. Boula has sat down with them to entertain the Binders and a friend of Madame's and delights them with his stories from the full life of footballers. Meanwhile, a ragged beggar walks through the apartment building and asks for alms, knocking on every door. The seamstress Madame Kreuzbein has mercy on him and sews his tattered trouser legs back together. But this "prettification" is not at all right for the beggar, it even messes up his "business". So without further ado he takes the tailor's scissors and cuts deep cuts into his jacket, which was still intact, so that he can continue to beg in a credible manner.

As soon as Marie has settled in in the Binder's household, Monsieur tries in a very intrusive way to hook up with her. Meanwhile, Paula tries again to get the soccer player's attention, but he immediately turns away from her and turns to Marie when she comes by to take the Binder's dog for a walk, as she is told to do three times a day. But Boula, an uneducated and uncouth chunk, has bad manners and harasses Marie so much that she yells at him to let go of her. The fat cook tied up with Monsieur Podeletz, who she provided, to whom the house owner Madame Binder finally announced that she would be kicked out of the apartment. Despite his gruffness, Marie feels drawn to Charles Bola, and one evening when Monsieur Binder is going out, she sneaks up to the footballer. There is a lively conversation when Binder returns earlier than expected. He sees Marie talking to Boula and is immediately jealous. He says she should come back to the house to take care of the dog, but the truth is that he wants her to "take care of" him - more than is proper between domination and servants. He scratches the door of her room like a lovesick fool and promises her all sorts of things if she only wants to answer him. When Podeletz receives the deportation order and has to leave his apartment, Poldi, the cook, is of course in a state of excitement. With a trick, Podeletz opened up a secure future that Poldi made possible for him in the country.

Meanwhile, Boula goes to the buffalo because he wants to please Marie and it obviously starts to bother him himself to be so uneducated and unreadable. His table manners also begin to improve in the presence of the cultivated Marie. When the entire electricity in the apartment building suddenly goes out, the romance that is developing between Marie and Charles is suddenly gone, and the residents run like frightened chickens through the corridors and the yard. The first thing the next morning Boula repairs the dead power line. Meanwhile, Binder can't keep his hands off Marie, who is “saved” by a knock on Monsieur Berger's door. He found her a job as a teacher in Salzburg and would like to bring Marie this good news straight away. Boula is upset when Marie brings him the news because she will leave the apartment building today. Charles says he loves her and wants to get married, but she says it is impossible. Boula feels attacked, believing that her rejection was due to the fact that he was neither educated nor owned a home. But Marie shows herself to be very progressive: she says she can take care of herself, is only looking for a place in the sun for herself and does not need a man with a house who can stand her. Men with such thinking are in their eyes fossils. Now Boula is even more hurt. For understandable reasons, Binder does not want to let Marie go either, and his wife is only piqued about her departure because the lackeys nowadays take everything out of their hands, even want to determine their own resignation!

Soon there was a stink in the Binder house as Madame began to distrust her husband. Since she is wearing her pants at home and he is dodgy towards her, she quickly begins to open one of his letters. She is disappointed to find that her husband is succeeding other women, and so Madame Binder announces that she will soon end her fourth marriage. Then there is also the rumor that Marie was a convicted thief, which is soon to be talked about in the whole apartment building. Only Podeletz is happy, as the hacked attorney has for a long time finally sensed another case in which he could stand up for the disenfranchised, i.e. Marie. Marie would have to reveal Berger's “Kruschina” fraud if she wanted to exonerate herself. Since she does not want to stab her only helping hand in the back here, she withholds her true identity and risks her new beginning in Salzburg when she is handed over to the police. Again it is Berger who saves Marie and clarifies her true identity. Berger explains that he only committed this little swindle out of gratitude to Marie's father, since Dr. Ferstel once helped him to alleviate his rheumatic complaints. There is a reconciliation between Marie and Charles, who has worked manfully for the honor of his dream woman, and Marie makes it clear to him that, if he could wait, there could be a future between them. Only the issue of emancipation has not yet been fully understood by Charles. Outside in the courtyard he asks his manager: “Miro, what is emancipation?” He replies: “Why? Did you get yourself one? " Boula agrees with Miro's suggestion to go on a football tour ... but only if the next game takes place in Salzburg. A little later, the newspaper reads that Charles Boula and Marie de Ferstl announced their engagement.

Production notes and trivia

For Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who has been France's resident since 1932, Du haut en bas was his first purely French-language film since the Nazis came to power at home in Berlin. For this cheerful production, he brought some artists who had fled Germany before the Nazis from Berlin to Paris, including the actors Peter Lorre and Wladimir Sokoloff , the cameraman Eugen Schüfftan , the film architect Ernő Metzner and the costume designer Max Pretzfelder . Herbert Rappaport assisted director Pabst.

Du haut en bas was premiered on December 7, 1933. Although produced by the French branch of the German production company Tobis, the film is to be regarded as a purely French production in view of the fact that the participation of numerous Jews in this film would hardly have been approved from Berlin. However, the French-language original has German subtitles. However, the film was never shown in Germany. Although the name is never mentioned, the story is set in Vienna, which is indicated by both the origin of the original piece and most of the German-sounding names of those involved. In addition, the song “Wiener Blut” is on the radio with the Binders.

criticism

“In contrast to the strongly dramatic impact of his earlier films, this one takes an emphatically cheerful side for the female gender and takes on the weaknesses of the supposedly stronger. Jean Gabin and Michel Simon at the beginning of their great careers. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Du haut en bas ( Memento of the original from September 13, 2016 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. on filmarchiv.at, p. 16 (PDF 4.3 MB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / filmarchiv.at