Joe May

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Joe May , actually: Julius Otto Mandl , pseudonym Fred Majo (born November 7, 1880 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † April 29, 1954 in Hollywood , Los Angeles , California , USA ) was an Austrian film director and producer . He is one of the pioneers of German film .

Live and act

Early phase: establishment of detective series

The son of a wealthy Austrian family first studied in Berlin and in 1902 married the Viennese actress Hermine Pfleger , who later called herself Mia May . He then did various odd jobs, for example in the textile industry in Trieste and as a car salesman. From 1909 he was an operetta director in Hamburg , where he came into contact with film in 1910 and directed it from 1912. His first film was In the depths of the shaft . It was also the first film role for his wife Mia May .

In 1914 he started as Joe May - the stage name he took over from his wife - at the Berliner Continental-Film with the production of a film series about the detective "Stuart Webbs". He was very successful with Ernst Reicher in the role of detective and made this genre popular in the German-speaking world. Later in 1914 he founded his own film production company, May-Film GmbH, and successfully continued the production of detective series. The detective was now called "Joe Deebs" and was played by Max Landa and later by Harry Liedtke .

Other productions by the young film company were melodramas and social pieces with his wife in the lead role. Some films of Joe-Deeb series he let go of Harry Piel turn.

Joe and Mia's daughter Eva May (1902-1924) also worked as a film actress from 1917 onwards. However, she committed suicide at the age of 22, after which Mia withdrew from the film business.

In 1917 Joe May brought Fritz Lang into the film business, which he discovered and promoted just like his future wife Thea von Harbou and EA Dupont . Fritz Lang wrote the script for part of the Joe Deebs series ( The Wedding in the Excentric Club ) and then often worked for May.

Directing career in the Weimar Republic

After the end of the war in 1918, Joe May had his own “film city” built in Woltersdorf (near Berlin) and shot the adventure and period films popular at the time with an exotic flair, which ushered in the German monumental film era: Veritas vincit (1918), the eight-part colossal work Die Herrin der Welt as well as the two-parter Das Indian Grabmal 1921. The script for the latter came from Fritz Lang and his then wife and partner in the film business, Thea von Harbou. Lang, who actually wanted to film this material himself and to whom this was initially promised by the producer Joe May, but then refused, shot a remake based on the same script in 1958/59 , also in two parts, Der Tiger von Esnapur and the Indian tomb .

In 1923 Joe May directed the four-part social drama Tragedy of Love - his most artistically successful film, which in its perfection offered everything that the film's state of development at the time required. In his other films, Joe May turned to realistic subjects and created, among other things, the notable films Homecoming and Asphalt (both 1928) with a socially critical and expressionist tendency. As one of the most successful and important film pioneers of German film he attended in the same year the film studios of Hollywood to become familiar with the new features of the sound film to get acquainted. Back in Germany, he continued his directorial career with lighter entertainment films.

Emigration and attempts to gain a foothold in Hollywood

With the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933 emigrated it to London. A year later he received an offer from the former UFA production manager Erich Pommer to direct a film at Fox Corporation . He accepted the offer, and so the first Hollywood film was made, which was made with significant involvement of refugees from National Socialism: Music in the Air . Even Billy Wilder , whom he supported in the emigration, worked as a screenwriter with already in this film, which, however, was a commercial flop.

Subsequently, however, Joe May had a harder time starting a new career in Hollywood, as he was already over 50 years old and was used to working as an independent producer, which was not possible in the studio system . This is probably one of the reasons why he met with suspicion from many studio bosses. Even the direction of Music in the Air ( Warner Bros. ) he got only at the instigation of Pomeranian. Studio boss Jack L. Warner always kept resentment towards Joe May, as can be seen from memos and letters from and to Warner. Again and again there is talk of a bad reputation that precedes May - possibly going back to May's Hollywood travels in 1928 and 1930. During filming, for example of Confession (1937), he regularly aroused the annoyance of the heads of production and unit managers , who have to monitor that a production is running in the sense of the studio, since he already "cut the film with the camera" - that is, put himself in the picture when an edit should take place. A procedure that other exiles such as Henry Koster , Robert Siodmak or Max Ophüls have also used to ensure that the film is cut in their favor. He also needed an interpreter for a long time - Wolfgang Reinhardt , Max Reinhardt's eldest son , interpreted for him at Warner Bros.

After his first films were unsuccessful, he had gambled away both his credit and his good reputation from previous films. In 1938, however, Paul Kohner helped him get a place at Universal Studios . The six films shot there, which had to make do with a medium to low B-movie budget, did not get beyond respectable successes. With The Invisible Returns , a film that is now one of the classics of Universal's special effects , he and Curt Siodmak succeeded in creating a film full of irony and visual gags about the character of the mad scientist , who became the protagonist of a series of follow-up films , Suspense thrillers and horror grotesques.

In 1943 May drafted the script for the anti-Nazi film The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler with Fritz Kortner , which featured a large number of European exiles . May was originally intended to direct, but had to hand it over to James Hogan after two weeks. In 1944, May directed Johnny Doesn't Live Here Any More for the last time. Universal realized one of his screenplays again in 1948 - Buccaneer's Girl - but when the film was released in 1950, May had no prospect of finding a place in one of the studios.

Impoverishment after retirement

May's film career was over, and so he tried a different profession for his final years. Together with his wife, he opened a restaurant specializing in Viennese cuisine , the “Blue Danube”, on South Robertson Square . The restaurant, which only came about thanks to funding from his friends Hedy Lamarr , Otto Preminger , Walter Reisch , Henry Koster and Robert Siodmak , had to close again after a few weeks. Until his death in 1954, May and his wife had to rely on the support of their friends and colleagues as well as the aid organization European Film Fund .

Joe May's brother-in-law Heinrich Eisenbach , allegedly his brother, first became known as a cabaret artist, then as a grotesque comedian ("Wamperl") and actor in Austrian silent films .

Aftermath

In November 1990, the 3rd International Film History Congress of CineGraph May's work in Hamburg was devoted to Agents, Adventurers & Amours - The Atelier Worlds of director and producer Joe May .

At the end of November 2018, the “ Cinefest ” - the international festival of German film heritage, with the 31st CineGraph Congress, once again turned to the work of Joe May as an important producer and film mogul. In addition, the version of May's two-part The Indian Tomb, restored by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation , was published for the first time in Germany on DVD and Blu-ray in 2019 in the cinefest edition .

“What is it that makes May so important?” Asked Thomas Brandlmeier in the film service. "Murnau, Lang, Pabst and Lubitsch are more present in the cinematic memory because their works are available and are often performed. But they are only the tip of the iceberg called 'Weimar Cinema'. A huge chunk of it is Joe May. Ein A megalomaniac, a mogul, sometimes an artist who wanted to build a German Hollywood and conquer the world market. Joe May was an industrialist with a fantasy: 'Direction is organization,' said Joe May in 1919. 'For me, it is the direction The art of drawing the people you need and enlivening them with a fine spirit. A good director is someone who knows how to create such a generous organization, the mechanism of a machine that works and is behind the wheel . '"

Filmography (selection)

as a director, unless otherwise stated

literature

  • Helmut G. Asper: "Something better than death ...". Film exile in Hollywood. Portraits, films, documents (= Edition Film-Dienst. Vol. 2). Schüren, Marburg 2002, ISBN 3-89472-362-9 , pp. 102-113.
  • Hans-Michael Bock , Claudia Lenssen (Red.): Joe May. Director and producer (= CineGraph book ). Edition Text + Critique, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-88377-394-8 .
  • Olaf Brill, Jörg Schöning (editor): Masters of Weimar cinema. Joe May and the wandering picture. cinefest catalog. Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-86916-787-9 .
  • Bodo Fründt: fairytale treasures. Joe Mays "Mistress of the World" 1919. In: Peter Buchka (Ed.): German Moments. A sequence of images to a typology of the film (= off-texts. Vol. 1). Belleville, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-923646-49-6 , p. 30 f. (P. 31: production design), (first: Süddeutsche Zeitung 1995).
  • Gerald Ramm: When Woltersdorf was still Hollywood. 2nd, corrected edition. Bock and Kübler, Woltersdorf 1993. ISBN 3-86155-024-5 .
  • Gerald Ramm: The Brandenburg tomb. Forgotten film legends from two locations. Ramm, Woltersdorf 1997. ISBN 3-930958-06-6 .
  • Swenja Schiemann, Erika Wottrich (editor): film pioneer and mogul. The empire of Joe May. (= CineGraph book ). Edition text + criticism. Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-86916-863-0 .
  • Rudolf Ulrich: Austrians in Hollywood. Your contribution to the development of American film. Edition S, Vienna 1993, ISBN 3-7046-0419-4 , pp. 194-195.
  • 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. P. 337 ff., ACABUS-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marie-Theres Arnbom: Friedmann, Gutmann, Lieben, Mandl and Strakosch - five family portraits from Vienna before 1938. 2nd, unchanged edition. Böhlau, Vienna (among others) 2003, ISBN 3-205-99373-X .
  2. ^ Gerhard Lamprecht : German Silent Films 1903-1912 . Deutsche Kinemathek eV, Berlin 1969, p. 340 .
  3. ↑ Karen Thomas (Director): Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood . Warner Home Video, Burbank, CA 2007.
  4. ↑ Helmut G. Asper: "Something better than death ...". 2002, pp. 102-108.
  5. ^ Georg Wacks: The Budapest Orpheum Society. A vaudeville theater in Vienna 1889–1919. Holzhausen, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-85493-054-2 .
  6. ↑ Thomas Brandlmeier: Portrait: Director Joe May. In: film-dienst. Retrieved December 4, 2018 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ On February 8, 1915, the Hungarian premiere of The Man in the Cellar ( A Rawson-ház titka ) took place in the most elegant cinema in Budapest ( Corso-Mozi , 1911–1950, Váci utca 9 / Waitzner Gasse 9 ). - See: Theater, Art and Literature. (...) "A Rawson-ház titka". In:  Pester Lloyd , Morgenblatt, No. 38/1915 (LXII. Year), February 7, 1915, p. 15, center left. (Online at ANNO ). .Template: ANNO / maintenance / pel
personal data
SURNAME May, Joe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Almond, Joseph; Mandl, Julius Otto; Majo, Fred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian director and producer
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria
DATE OF DEATH April 29, 1954
Place of death Hollywood