A Robinson

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Movie
Original title A Robinson
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1940
length 81 minutes
Rod
Director Arnold Fanck
script Arnold Fanck,
Rolf Meyer
production Carl W. Tetting ,
Oskar Marion ,
Wilhelm Sperber for Bavaria-Filmkunst GmbH
music Werner Bochmann
camera Albert Benitz ,
Hans Ertl ,
Sepp Allgeier
cut Johannes Lüdke ,
Arnold Fanck
occupation

A Robinson is a German feature film from 1940. Directed by Arnold Fanck .

action

First World War. After the German East Asia Squadron was defeated by the British near the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, only one German ship, the cruiser Dresden , managed to escape the enemy. Pursued by British warships, the Dresden reached safe and neutral Chilean waters. There the crew believes they can carry out the necessary repairs. But the English disregard Chile's neutrality and attack the ship. In order not to let it fall into the hands of the enemy, the Germans sink their own ship.

The crew fled to the nearby island of Juan Fernández , which was once (1700) famous as the island of the real Robinson Crusoe , Alexander Selkirk . But unlike the literary Robinson, the shipwrecked will soon be saved in the form of the German Albert Pagels , who lives in Chile and who provides them with an old schooner for the journey home. After 168 days of voyage, the Dresden sailors arrive at their home port of Kiel after five years of absence . But there is civil war there and the sailors mutiny.

Chief seaman Carl Ohlsen learns that his bride has given birth to a son in the meantime. To prevent the little one from growing up fatherless, however, she had decided to marry another man. Bitterly disappointed by Antje and his homeland, which has become alien to him, Ohlsen decides to return to Robinson Island. He hires out his passage as a stoker. He crosses over to the island he has grown dearly in a small boat. Since he doesn't properly trust it, the boat drifts out to sea one day, and so Ohlsen is all alone on his island with only a parrot as a conversation partner.

Like Robinson, Ohlsen now has to start from scratch. He makes his own tools and builds a hut, keeps animals and plants vegetables to ensure his nutrition. In fact, his old friend Pagels tracks him down there, but Ohlsen's self-chosen isolation has long since become dear to him. After eleven years on the island, Ohlsen learns from the radio Pagels once brought with him that his old Dresden comrades are desperately looking for him. One day a new Dresden docks near its coast, but Ohlsen does not go there, instead flees from the island in a self-built boat until he ends up on the barren coast of Patagonia .

Survival is even more difficult there than on Juan Fernández. Ohlsen is getting emaciated, but his comrades won't let him down. One day they track him down and take Ohlsen on board. There, after many years, he meets his biological son, Pieter, who has joined the old Dresdenians' search expedition . Carl Ohlsen is now certain that he wants to go to sea again - side by side with his old war comrades and his son.

Production notes

A Robinson was the last feature film production by Arnold Fanck . The film, released for young people, premiered on April 25, 1940 in Berlin .

The story was based on real events from the First World War. After the German cruiser Dresden was landed in the South Pacific by three British armored cruisers on March 14, 1915, it escaped into neutral Chilean waters. There, off the island of Juan Fernández, the ship was blown up on the orders of the captain.

On September 30, 1938, the ten-man film crew, consisting of Fanck, his 19 years younger wife Elisabeth "Lisa", Fanck's sons Arnold Ernst (1919–1994), who worked as a photographer and camera assistant, and Hans-Joachim (* 1935) as well the cameramen Albert Benitz and Arndt von Rautenfeld , the production managers Wilhelm Sperber and Oskar Marion , the main actor Herbert AE Böhme and the screenwriter Rolf Meyer , on the trip to the south of South America . The return trip from Punta Arenas took place on March 1, 1939 with the Bremen via New York City (March 29, 1939) to Germany, where the film crew arrived on April 4, 1939.

The outdoor shots were made between the end of September 1938 and February 1939 in Chile, the historic Robinson Crusoe island of Juan Fernández, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and on the Danish island of Bornholm . From mid-July 1939 to the end of August, further photos were taken on the open-air site in Geiselgasteig and in the studio.

The production costs amounted to around 935,000 Reichsmarks, the income was 1,313,000 RM by January 1941.

A Robinson was the last film by Marieluise Claudius . It received the rating "culturally valuable".

The film structures were created by Hans Sohnle and Kurt Dürnhöfer .

The showing of the film in Germany was banned by the Allied military authorities in 1945.

Reviews

Bogusław Drewniaks The German Film 1938–1945 , when it premiered in 1940, focused on the recent topicality of the crisis situation described in Ein Robinson - “The“ pirate methods ”of the English (which“ are also used in our day ”, the press occasionally remarked when viewing the film ) were heavily pilloried. Of course, the film was also geared towards the day in other details. ”- and also called the film“ a song of praise for the German navy ”.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Hänschen Fanck named in the cast is none other than Arnold Fanck's four-year-old son Hans-Joachim
  2. ↑ Data according to the Kay Less film archive (ship passage documents)
  3. ↑ Ulrich J. Klaus: Deutsche Tonfilme, Volume 11 1940/41, p. 123, Berlin 2000
  4. ^ Deutsche Tonfilme, p. 123 f., Berlin 2000
  5. ^ The German Film 1938–1945. A complete overview. P. 334, Düsseldorf 1987
  6. ↑ Der deutsche Film, p. 316