Carter Henschel (1956)

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Movie
Original title Carter Henschel
Country of production Austria
original language German
Publishing year 1956
length 104 minutes
Age rating FSK 16 nf
Rod
Director Josef von Báky
script Franz Spencer-Schulz
production Sascha-Film , Vienna
( Herbert Gruber )
music Alois Melichar
camera Günther Anders
cut Rudolf Schaad
occupation

Fuhrmann Henschel is an Austrian film adaptation from 1956 directed by Josef von Báky . The main roles are occupied by Walter Richter , Nadja Tiller and Wolfgang Lukschy . The plot is based on Gerhart Hauptmann 's play of the same name .

action

Wilhelm Henschel, a good-natured fellow of a simple nature, never had it particularly easy in life. In addition to his carriage rides, he also has to take care of many things his wife Agnes did when she was still healthy. Ms. Henschel is now seriously ill and lies in bed most of the time. She had always wanted a child, but only suffered miscarriages or stillbirths. That was the main reason for their decline. Henschel is proud that his word is valid in the village in which he lives. His compassionate, friendly manner makes him popular with those around him. When the carter hired Hanne Schäl as the new maid, he had no idea that the very attractive woman was playing a wrong game. Hanne, whose job it is also to look after Mrs. Henschel, taunts the sick woman wherever she can and ultimately lets her die mercilessly by simply waiting, influenced by her lover, the waiter Georg, and first allowing a lot send late for the much needed doctor. She has her own eye on the carter, who is not incapable.

Agnes Henschel saw through the maid early on and made her husband promise never to make Hanne his wife. The no-nonsense man, however, is no match for the calculating, sophisticated woman, and so she manages to break his vow and make her his wife. After Hanne pulls herself together for some time after the marriage and Henschel is happy to have her by his side, she immediately shows her true colors and makes her husband's life more and more hell. She takes full advantage of her new position and hurts other people as well as Henschel. She has also taken all financial matters in hand and asserts herself over her husband, who has little to oppose her. When it happens that Henschel learns that Hanne has an illegitimate daughter, he jumps over his own shadow and brings little Berthel to him, believing that this will make his wife happy. However, Hanne reacts coldly and even blames him for why he brought the child with him. His haulage business is also increasingly troubling Henschel, as it is used less and less due to the increasing number of automobiles. When the carter also has to find out that his wife behind his back has had a relationship with the waiter Georg for a long time, he doesn't know what to do. And the talk about him and Hanne hurts him more than he wants to admit. When he also learns that Hanne deliberately failed to send for the doctor immediately, he is completely devastated.

Resigned, Henschel retires to his barn, where he hears his wife's warning voice. The carter already has a hard time struggling with his feelings of guilt and is bitterly reproaching himself for breaking the oath he took to his Agnes. He intensifies the idea that Hanne was sent to him by the devil as a punishment that God has imposed on him. Henschel no longer wants to think, just sleep, and so he lies down in the hay. When, after a short sleep, he is startled because he hears his wife's voice again, he knocks over the previously lit kerosene lamp. The kindled fire inexorably searches its way in the wooden barn. With presence of mind, Henschel drives his beloved horses out of the partitioned off part of the barn and then closes the door from the inside. The devil will take him for his perjury anyway, he mumbles guilty. When Hanne rushes out of the main house, the barn is already ablaze. To her screams that her husband must be taken out of there, the servant Hauffe replies that nothing more can be done. The fire has now spread to the main house and Hanne rushes back into the house to fetch her daughter. At dawn the young woman is sitting on a bench with her child wrapped in a blanket in her arms and for the first time shows a maternal emotion as she carefully covers up little Berthel, who has cuddled up to her.

production

Filming

The film was made in the Sievering studio of Wien-Film GmbH. The production company was Sascha-Film Produktions GmbH (Vienna). The producer Herbert Gruber had the overall management, the production management was with Walter Tjaden . Wolfgang Glück assisted the director. Werner Schlichting and Isabella Schlichting were responsible for the buildings in the film . The text of the song, which is sung by little Berthel, comes from Erich Meder . For Franz Spencer-Schulz it was his last script work for a movie and it was also the last time for Alois Melichar that he worked on a movie.

background

"High expectations were placed on the film Fuhrmann Henschel," says Sigfrid Hoefert's book Gerhart Hauptmann und der Film . The Bayern Kurier said that Hauptmann was experiencing a “cinematic resurrection” that was “unprecedented”, as four Hauptmann dramas had been filmed in just under two years. It was also certain that the Fuhrmann Henschel, staged by Josef von Báky, would not be the end of this chain that began with the filming of the rats . The interviewed director commented on the relocation of the drama to the present and from the Silesian mountains to an alpine valley in such a way that no changes had been made that Gerhart Hauptmann, had he lived today, would not have made. The role of the carter was cast by Walter Richter, who had played this character on stage more than a hundred times in Munich alone. When the film premiered in Munich in October 1956, however, the disappointment was great. Walter Richter played the carter again in a 1962 television film.

publication

The first distribution of the film took place through the Herzog Filmverleih GmbH (Munich). The film has a length of 2,829 m or 104 minutes. In the FSK examination, No. 13087, which took place on October 15, 1956, it was approved for ages 16 and over with the addition “not holiday-free”.

In the Federal Republic of Germany, the film premiered on October 26, 1956 in Munich in the Stachus cinema. It was also shown in theaters in Belgium, Poland and Portugal. Fuhrmann Henschel first ran on German television on January 3, 1966 on ZDF .

The film was released by Alive on October 14, 2016 as part of the "Jewels of Film History" series on DVD.

Differences between original and film

Hauptmann finished his work around 1897, and the premiere took place in November of the same year. The play takes place around 1860 in a Silesian seaside resort where Henschel lives with his wife in the inn "Zum Grauen Schwan". In the film, the plot is moved to the present from around 1956, when the film was made, and takes place in a Bavarian village. Mrs. Henschel dies before her ailing child, who shortly afterwards closes her eyes forever. The film tells of numerous miscarriages and the last child is stillborn. In the original, the carter is competing with a railway line, in the film it is automobiles. In the play as in the film, the internally torn carter cannot cope with the fact that he has broken the promise made to his dying wife. He believes that she will now persecute him forever because she cannot find rest. In Hauptmann's template, Henschel sees his adversary in God and is afraid of his punishment, in the film he believes that the devil wants to take him. In the film, the oath that Henschel gave his dying wife becomes the all-dominating explanation for his doom, thereby constructing a plausible guilt-atonement theory. In the play, on the other hand, a real tragedy occurs. In the play Henschel hangs himself, in the film he decides to stay in the burning barn even though he could still leave it.

Further films

criticism

The lexicon of international films read: “Gerhart Hauptmann's naturalistic character drama, created in 1899, loses its inner truthfulness in the time color of the 1950s; even the impressive Walter Richter in the title role cannot cover up the depths of the direction. "

Der Spiegel devoted a longer paragraph to the film and was of the opinion that the “quirky ambition of the film producers” was “hard” on the “chunk of Hauptmann's naturalism” that had been “posthumously promoted to screenwriter” Abfuhr "got. Josef von Báky had already "given up on the most elementary basic props of the piece, before the Bad Salzbrunn milieu and before the Lower Silesian dialect". It was criticized that the director "dodged Ganghofer and put the hacked plot in a blanket postcard landscape". It was mockingly noted that the “absurdly anachronistic film driver - Walter Richter as Urviech with a heart -” for “Agfacolor reasons” in the midst of “moped and jukebox culture” is looking for his “exit in a grotesque fire magic”. Nadja Tiller also had to take criticism, who was accused of posing as "pin-up maid Hanne on the stove bench" and of showing "motherly happiness" in the final picture. The résumé was then that it had finally been made clear that this was thelast film adaptation of the Hauptmann so farafter the rats and Before Sunset, "certainly the last".

Max Pahl from Der Zeit also disliked the fact that a “real tragedy” had been degraded to a “sentimental story” and “in the final tableau, instead of the noose around Henschel's neck, [a] barn fire in Agfacolor” was shown. To Pahl's astonishment, Benvenuto Hauptmann, Gerhart Hauptmann's son, recognized the "Fuhrmann-Henschel film". The rhetorical question was asked whether Hauptmann junior had no sense of quality. It was particularly criticized that the film renounced "the milieu and thus a main theme", "by relocating the plot to the era of the Volkswagen and the modern railroad". Although the film “hardly uses a sentence from Hauptmann, it uses two main motifs of the tragedy: Henschel's oath that he will never marry Hanne Schäl, the new maid, and the reason for the carter's suicide: the noose that destroys him put “. The achievement was praised by Walter Richter, Käthe Braun and Richard Romanowsky, who would have tried to save what their roles would still produce. Nadja Tiller and Wolfgang Lukschy were described as the wrong cast.

Kino.de saw the cast of the role of Hanne with Nadja Tiller completely different and wrote: "The mixture of tragic love story and naturalistic character study is also worth seeing by the young Nadja Tiller, who pulls out all the stops of her acting skills as a 'seductive female devil'." It went on: "Although Walter Richter does a great job in the title role, the work lacks brilliant directorial ideas."

Lothar Papke wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that only those who have not seen or read the Hauptmann play “cannot find its coarsening on the screen disturbing”. Gunter Groll from the Süddeutsche Zeitung was of the opinion that an “Austrian Heimatfilm” had been made here that “made one think of Ganghofer, but not of Hauptmann”. In Die Weltwoche it was read that the film “has nothing in common with Hauptmann except the title; among the innumerable herb, field, forest and meadow films it is the worst one ”.

Harry Neumann, on the other hand, took the film under protection and said that “if Gerhart Hauptmann had not been on the program list”, the film could have “claimed a good place in the series of German Heimatfilme”. He was "neatly shot, vividly memorable and good, even very well cast". Fritz Hock also agreed and attested to the film adaptation that “if you leave Hauptmann out of the game”, a film from the Austrian Alps remains, which is particularly noticeable with the “truly brilliant color photography by Günther Anders” and “restlessly moving Sequence of scenes Walter Richter offers a lot of opportunities to live out his warm humanity in tamed and strong play ”. Benvenuto Hauptmann also said that he was “deeply impressed” by the directing performance and that, in his opinion, the director succeeded in “ conjuring up the atmosphere of Fuhrmann Henschel ” and “ capturing it on the screen” in a completely different setting . His father would not have denied this film his placet.

literature

  • Sigfrid Hoefert: Gerhart Hauptmann and the film: With unpublished film drafts by the poet , Erich Schmidt Verlag GmbH & Co., pp. 75-77, ISBN 3-5030-3728-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Sigfrid Hoefert: Gerhart Hauptmann and the film: With unpublished film drafts by the poet , Erich Schmidt Verlag GmbH & Co., pp. 75–77
  2. ↑ Fuhrmann Henschel Fig. DVD case "Film Jewels" (in the picture: Walter Richter, Nadja Tiller)
  3. ↑ Carter Henschel. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  4. ^ Fuhrmann Henschel In: Der Spiegel 45/1956 of November 7, 1956.
  5. ↑ Max Pahl: Fathers and Sons In: Zeit Online, article from December 13, 1956. Accessed September 2, 2015.
  6. ↑ Fuhrmann Henschel at kino.de. Retrieved September 2, 2015.