I was a criminal

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Movie
Original title I was a criminal
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1945
length 71 minutes
Rod
Director Richard Oswald
script Albrecht Joseph
as Albright Joseph
Ivan Goff based
on the model Der Hauptmann von Köpenick by Carl Zuckmayer
production John Hall for John Hall Productions, Inc., Los Angeles
music Daniele Amfitheatrof
camera John Alton
cut Dorothy Spencer
occupation

and in small roles: Sheldon Bennett , Richard Alexander , Vera Lewis , Walter O. Stahl , Lionel Belmore , Crane Whitley , Max Willenz

I Was a Criminal , also known under the secondary titles Passport to Heaven and The Captain from Köpenick , is an American drama film shot in 1941 and released in 1945. Ten years after his acclaimed production of Der Hauptmann von Köpenick , the director Richard Oswald shot a largely unknown remake with Albert Bassermann in the title role, whom he portrayed as "a stubborn, unruly cross-head who opposed the omnipresent, authoritarian state power - an interpretation that certainly was his reflected my own convictions as an emigrant and refugee before the Nazi regime. "

action

The sequence of actions is largely based on the Hauptmann von Köpenick version of Oswald from 1931. The name of the shoemaker Wilhelm Voigt , who is called "Volck" here, is different .

Shoemaker Wilhelm Volck is released after years of imprisonment. The new freedom is unknown to him, he first tries to find his way in this world that has become alien to him. But the shoemaker quickly gets caught up in the mills of the Prussian authorities' arbitrariness. To get a passport, he must have a job, but he can only get the job once he has a passport. Nobody in the Prussian-German bureaucracy feels obliged to help him, everything runs strictly according to regulations. In order to escape the vicious circle, Volck breaks into a police station out of sheer desperation in the hope of getting hold of the urgently needed papers.

He is caught again and has to be behind bars for more years. When he was released again, nothing had changed in the initial situation. But now his knowledge of uniforms and ranks comes in handy. Volck purchases a captain's uniform, takes command of the guards marching past without further ado, and drives to Koepenick . There he took the town hall in a flash and confiscated the municipal treasury.

Production notes

The statue of Wilhelm Voigt as captain of Köpenick in front of the Köpenick town hall

This film was shot under the working title Captain from Koepenick in autumn 1941, but neither Oswald nor the producer could find a distributor who was willing to bring this film into the cinemas. The massively anti-German mood in the USA since the start of the war in December 1941 is assumed to be the reason for the rejection of an originally German material. The premiere of I Was a Criminal did not take place until January 1, 1945, but even at this point in time the film was almost completely ignored by the critics.

I Was a Criminal is one of only three films that the elderly émigré Oswald was able to direct in Hollywood . A number of German-speaking anti-Hitler refugees, including Bassermann's Jewish wife Else , because of whom he left Germany in 1934, and the film architect Rudi Feld , who was employed here as a technical consultant, worked on this artistically ambitious cheap production, which cost around 350,000 $ was created at Talisman Studios, with.

The film structures were made by Frank Paul Sylos , Oswald's 22-year-old son Gerd , who took part in the set design and also assisted the father.

The film was never shown publicly in Germany, so there is no dubbed version. Most recently, I Was a Criminal was shown on March 14, 2013 as part of the Syracuse Cinefest.

Reviews

Deutsche Bundespost stamp, 2006

The film was barely noticed by contemporary critics. Hans Kafka , who works as a columnist for the development , published a few lines about the shooting in his Hollywood Calling section .

In his Oswald biography in 'In life more is taken from you than is given ...', Kay Less recalled Oswald's great difficulties in making good films in Hollywood: "Of his films there, only his rarely shown US variation of his old '' Hauptmanns von Köpenick's material, "I Was a Criminal", with an excellent Albert Bassermann in the title role, of importance. The film material, however, which is difficult to convey to an American audience - the subject matter was Prussian militarism, subservience and lack of democracy - for many years did not find a distributor and was only premiered at the beginning of 1945. "

Jan-Christopher Horak wrote: “The film is a remarkable achievement by the director. The architecture of Berlin is composed of documentary film recordings and studio buildings, and the camera work repeatedly uses light and shadow to bring the symbols of power into the picture: In one shot, the omnipresent image of the emperor is transformed into a leader's portrait by shadows. But the story of the simple shoemaker [...], the Prussian mentality of authoritarian militarism and bureaucratic obedience, the desperation of the unemployed and passport-free who is repeatedly turned away, all this was completely alien to the Americans in the pre-war year 1941. [...] In contrast Regarding Max Adalbert (1931) and Heinz Rühmann (1956), who played the shoemaker as a "little man", Bassermann is rebellious, defiant and angry, despite a strong linguistic accent, always questioning the power of the state, with the consciousness of one of the Nazis Exiles: a gorgeous representation that identifies the film as perhaps the most German of all exile films. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kay Less : "In life, more is taken from you than given ...". Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. ACABUS Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 87.
  2. ^ Film program of the Syracuse Cinefest ( Memento from July 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Famous Old German Tale Being Filmed , The Charleston Daily Mail. October 26, 1941. Retrieved July 24, 2014.  p. 22 (p. 8, col. 1)
  4. ^ Famous Old , The Charleston Daily Mail. October 26, 1941. Retrieved July 24, 2014.  p. 24 (p. 10, col. 1)
  5. ^ Structure, Volume 7, No. 48 of November 28, 1941
  6. ↑ Kay Less : "In life, more is taken from you than given ...". Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. ACABUS Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 381.
  7. ↑ Horak in filmportal.de (PDF; 158 kB)

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