Emil and the Detectives (1931)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Emil and the detectives |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1931 |
| length | 75 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 6 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Gerhard Lamprecht |
| script |
Billy Wilder (as Billie Wilder), Erich Kästner (anonymous), Emeric Pressburger (anonymous) |
| production | Günther Stapenhorst ( UFA ) |
| music | Allan Gray |
| camera | Werner Brandes |
| occupation | |
| |
Emil and the Detectives is a German fiction film by Gerhard Lamprecht from 1931. It is based on the novel of the same name by Erich Kästner . This early sound film is considered an important work in German film history and is still widely regarded by film critics as the best adaptation of Emil and the Detectives .
action
Emil Tischbein lives with his widowed mother in Neustadt, a fictional small town in Germany during the Weimar Republic . Emil is a good boy and tries not to give his mother a little grief, as their financial situation is also difficult. Nevertheless, as a "real" boy, Emil also does a few pranks. For example, he is redesigning a monument so that it looks amazingly similar to the local sergeant Jeschke. When Jeschke noticed this, he was not enthusiastic about this “desecration of the monument”. Fortunately, the sergeant did not find out that Emil was involved.
Emil is sent to his grandmother in Berlin for the holidays . He is supposed to take with him 140 Reichsmarks (at that time about the monthly salary of a hairdresser), which he additionally fastened with a pin in his jacket pocket as a precaution. On the train ride to Berlin, Emil is sitting in the compartment with a shady stranger who introduces himself as Mr. Grundis. When the stranger notices that Emil has a lot of money with him, he offers the boy sweets that contain a drug. While Emil is fantasizing, Grundis steals the money from him. Finally Emil floats intoxicated around the traffic tower on Potsdamer Platz .
Emil only comes to again at the Berlin Zoo station . He just barely sees ground ice disappearing from the platform. Emil immediately takes up the chase, which turns out to be very difficult in the strange city. Because of the old story with Sergeant Jeschke, he doesn't dare to ask the police for help. By chance he runs into "Gustav with the horn ". Gustav quickly agrees to help Emil. And since Gustav is the leader of a children's gang, many helpers quickly gathered to monitor Grundis.
Meanwhile, Emil's cousin Pony Hütchen and grandmother are waiting in vain for Emil to arrive at Friedrichstrasse station . So these are informed by the children's gang. The grandmother is terribly worried. Since Pony Hütchen accompanies the boys, she calms down a bit. In the evening, Emil, dressed as a bellhop, tries to get his money back from Mr Grundis' hotel room. Emil successfully steals his wallet, but it is empty: the thief had already put the money in his hat.
The next morning a whole hundred mobilized children follow the thief, so that he finally has to give up: When he tries to change a hundred-mark note in a bank, Emil exposes him because of the pinholes in the note. The bank employee triggers the alarm, the thief is arrested. At the police station it turns out that Grundis is the wanted bank robber Mitlinski, for whom 1,000 Reichsmark reward (at that time almost half of the average German annual income) is advertised. When Emil finally returned to Neustadt by plane (a Junkers F 13 ), he was received by the population like a folk hero at the airport, and a band played in his honor.
background
The film from 1931 is the first film adaptation of the Kästner novel. Filming began on July 6, 1931 in Berlin and on the UFA studio site in Neubabelsberg , the exterior shots of “Neustadt” were shot in Werder (Havel) . Due to the technical difficulties that existed with the early sound films , some external scenes were recorded in silence and subsequently accompanied by sound and music. Overall, the film was still very much overlooked by silent films in terms of its image design and black and white contrasts, which, however, favored the unusually realistic nature of the film with documentary recordings of Berlin at that time. The hallucination scene on the train, influenced by expressionism , became particularly well known , when Grundis gave Emil a drug-infused candy and he then fantasized. According to British film critic Philip French , even Alfred Hitchcock copied this in a scene from his film A Lady Disappears (1938).
A total of 2,500 boys are said to have registered for the roles, of which fifty were initially shortlisted for the role of Emil. Ultimately, the UFA decided in favor of Rolf Wenkhaus, who made his film debut here, but then only made two more films. Director Lamprecht wanted the children to act naturally and not in an artificial way. The majority of male child actors made their film debut here, but “Pony Hütchen” actress Inge Landgut had been in the film business since 1927 and thus already had four years of experience. Also in 1931, Landgut played the murdered child in M (1931). Many of the young leading actors died as soldiers a few years later in World War II, including Rolf Wenkhaus (Emil), Hans Schaufuss (Gustav with the horn) and Hans Albrecht Löhr (Little Tuesday). Hans Richter , who made his film debut here as the Flying Deer, survived the Second World War and was able to build a long acting career.
The author Erich Kästner can be seen reading the newspaper in a cameo on the tram that Emil gets on when he arrives in Berlin.
The screenplay for this film was created by Billy Wilder , who was still relatively unknown at the time and later became famous as a director in Hollywood . Before Wilder, Erich Kästner tried his hand at the script himself, but because of his inexperience with scripts, Emmerich Pressburger was hired as his co-author. The collaboration between Kästner and Pressburger failed in the early stages, however: “I read the Emil film manuscript by half past five in the morning ... The manuscript is disgusting ... The whole atmosphere of the book is devilish. And at the beginning of the week I will be very rough when I talk to Stapenhorst ; ”so Erich Kästner's comment, which was quite angry at the time. Kästner complained, among other things, that Emil was supposed to steal a man's bus ticket in Pressburger's script and steal a flowerpot from a house. After these arguments, Billy Wilder was hired as a screenwriter. Since Wilder dealt with the subject very sensitively and was essentially based on the novel, Kästner finally accepted Wilder's version.
Awards
In 2003, the Federal Agency for Civic Education, in collaboration with numerous filmmakers, created a film canon for work in schools and included this film version on this list.
reception
The world premiere of the film took place on December 2, 1931 in Berlin. Emil and the detectives brought unusually high box office profits. The film was even shown for a year in London and New York . The extraordinary success finally made it possible for the film to be shown in a Berlin cinema even at Christmas 1937 - when Kästner had long since been banned from writing by the Nazis and Wilder had emigrated to the USA . Only then was the film banned. To this day, Emil and the Detectives are considered to be an important work of early talkies and are often considered the best adaptation of Kästner's novel.
“Billy Wilder wrote the manuscript. A young author whose qualities have been debated a lot and who until now, always groping for new and original forms, may have moved a bit uncertainly here and there. He now scores a hit. Shows an overwhelming talent for certain substances and with this work moves into the ranks of the really great. He creates a downright fascinating pace for his film, leads his action with logical consistency on the line of the sensational drama from the beginning to the moment when the common thief turns out to be a bank robber. He sparked an enthusiasm for the material in his young actors that is unheard of ... "
“Ufa has another success. A huge success even. Adults and children alike cheered this new Stapenhorst film yesterday with great enthusiasm ... It was a happy idea to use Erich Kästner's magnificent novel for boys as material. This story of the determined brats who undertake it on their own to hunt down a boiled-out cheat is fresh and original, and above all offers cinematic possibilities. Which the manuscript writer Billy Wilder also knew how to use ... This film has atmosphere. There is a freshness emanating from him, a boyhood that carries you away. This is a world captured by the child's imagination and powers of illusion ... Gerhard Lamprecht, the director, deserves the very first credit for this. It goes without hesitation from the (cleverly silent) beginning to the brilliant end. This boys' adventure seems to have actually been experienced. A particularly interesting part of the film, by the way, is the dream vision in the train, which involuntarily gives the adult a faint chill ... The inventive musical illustration by Allan Greys, which in parts becomes the main carrier of the plot, contributed significantly to the success. The film was happily introduced by the musical performances of the student orchestra of the Treitschke School, which u. a. also very nicely performed the lovely children's symphony by Josef Haydn. "
“That was an excitement in yesterday's 5 o'clock performance, in which the youthful element represented a considerable minority. Such an intense experience of the processes on the screen has not been there for a long time in the cinema floor. There were loud or muffled shouts of delight throughout the film, and the relatives of the children struggled to keep those who had fidgeted with excitement quiet in their seats. Before discussing this film, it should be said: This is not just a film for children. Any adult who has not completely lost the joy of primitive joy must find this film delightful and worth seeing. You must be very ossified or very blasé if you don't forget your ten, thirty or fifty years of being an adult after the first two hundred meters on the screen and follow the worries and joys of children as a child ... Who Lamprecht an der Working with his children can gauge how much self-sacrificing love and patience there is in this exposed celluloid. He didn't make stars, no 'actors' out of his children, he didn't induce them to mime in close-ups: They should be and are natural children ... There was huge applause during the film and at the end when the 'stars' 'came on stage in original costumes. "
“It is regrettable that the audience who welcomed the German-language children's film Emil and the Detectives to the Ufa-Cosmopolitan yesterday afternoon did not get the chance to meet the young actors in person; just like it happened when this enjoyable film premiered at the Kurfürstendamm Theater in Berlin a few weeks ago. Because anyone would have really enjoyed seeing these clever boys, who are eloquent proof that Hollywood by no means has a monopoly on talented child actors. Those who may imagine that only American children have rights to games like robbers and gendarmes and the like will find that this is not the case and sit down to enjoy the interesting and rapid development of a story (...). There are many good scenes, the camera work and the sound recordings are excellent. "
“The literary figure of the detective is closely associated with democratic institutions. With its praise of young detective games, "Emil und die Detektiven" suggests a certain democratization of everyday German life. This conclusion is supported both by the boys' independence and self-discipline and by documentary camera work. Clean, unpretentious documentary recordings of Berlin street scenes portray the German capital as a city in which basic democratic rights flourish and flourish. The bright atmosphere that prevails in these passages contrasts with the darkness that inevitably prevails around Fritz Rasp as a thief. He wears a black coat and is every inch the villain from the children's fairy tale. "
“First film adaptation of the novel by Erich Kästner, which has hardly lost anything of its freshness and also makes values such as democracy and solidarity understandable to younger children. Captivating, adventurous entertainment, which in terms of its dramaturgy and image design is still completely rooted in silent films. "
"It's a lively, funny, exciting story about a country child working together with the smart city kids, and it makes an excellent illustration of the busy life in the capital of the Weimar Republic."
Other films
There are a total of eight film adaptations of the book Emil and the Detectives :
- (Germany, 1931) - Director: Gerhard Lamprecht
- (UK, 1935) - Director: Milton Rosmer
- (Argentina, 1950) - Director: Antonio Momplet
- (Germany, 1954) - Director: Robert Adolf Stemmle
- (Japan, 1956) - Director: Mitsuo Wakasugi
- (Brazil, 1958) - Director: Alberto Pieralisi
- (USA, 1964) - Director: Peter Tewksbury
- (Germany, 2001) - Director: Franziska Buch
A direct comparison of the three German films gives you some insights into the respective zeitgeist and the changes in Berlin. The new German version from 1954 used a large part of the Billy Wilder script again, so that many dialogues are the same. The British film version from 1935 went even further and is a direct remake of this film from 1931 down to the last detail : In addition to the dialogues, most of the camera positions and music are the same. Only the plot was moved from Berlin to London .
literature
- Helga Belach, Hans-Michael Bock (ed.): Emil and the detectives. Screenplay by Billy Wilder based on Erich Kästner for Gerhard Lamprecht's film from 1931. With an introductory essay by Helga Schütz and material on the film by Gabriele Jatho. edition text + kritik (FILMtext), Munich 1998, ISBN 3-88377-582-7 .
- Klaus-Dieter Felsmann: Emil and the detectives. In: Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Film genres. Children's and youth films. Reclam, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 25-29.
- Christiane Mückenberger: Emil and the detectives. In: Günther Dahlke, Günther Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginnings to 1933. A film guide. 2nd Edition. Henschel Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-89487-009-5 , p. 281 ff.
- Ingo Tornow: Erich Kästner and the film. dtv, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-423-12611-6 .
Web links
- Emil and the Detectives in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Emil and the detectives at filmportal.de
- Photos and literature
- Search for Emil and the Detectives (1931) in the German Digital Library
- Search for "Emil and the Detectives" in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c "Emil and the Detectives" at the Federal Agency for Civic Education
- ↑ a b Billy Wilder. A close up. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1992, updated and expanded new edition ibid. 2006, ISBN 3-455-09553-4 . look here
- ↑ a b c Children's film correspondence 1987
- ↑ cf. in the article average pay
- ↑ impdb.org: Emil and the detectives (1931)
- ^ A b Emil and the detectives at the Federal Agency for Civic Education
- ↑ a b "Emil and the Detectives" in the Guardian
- ^ Criticism in the cinematograph at the German film portal
- ^ Criticism of the light stage at the German Film Portal
- ^ Criticism in the Filmkurier at the German Film Portal
- ^ "Emil and the Detectives" in the New York Times
- ↑ "Emil and the Detectives" at two thousand and one
- ^ Emil and the Detectives (1935 film) , in the English Wikipedia