Little friend

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Movie
Original title Little friend
Country of production United Kingdom
original language English
Publishing year 1934
length 85 minutes
Rod
Director Berthold quarter
script Margaret Kennedy ,
Christopher Isherwood
production Michael Balcon
music Ernst Toch
camera Günther Krampf
cut Ian Dalrymple
occupation

Little Friend is a British married and family drama by Berthold Viertel from 1934. The plot is told from the perspective of the teenage Felicity Hughes, who was played by the then 14-year-old film debutante Nova Pilbeam . Fritz Kortner plays a guest role here. The story is based on the novel Little Girlfriend (1931) by Ernst Lothar .

action

England in the early 1930s. The married couple and parents, John and Helen Hughes, both representatives of the upper class who lack nothing financially, lead, like many representatives of their class, a life that is well-trodden. Despite their two daughters, Felicity, they live more next to each other than together. Now John has moved out too, and his wife Helen is hardly at home either, because she is having an affair and having fun with a smear actor named Hilliard, who in an ingratiating way calls Felicity his little friend . The greatest victim of this cold-frozen domestic situation is this twelve-year-old girl who is devoted to father and mother with idolatrous love and who suffers from nightmares because of her fears. Most of the time she is left with the governess Miss Drew.

Felicity cannot find a contact person to cope with the nightmares that arise from this situation, at most the messenger boy Leonard Parry, with whom she crashed while fleeing from mother's lies and excuses, she seems to understand. In her imagination, Felicity imagines the worst for the future. Felicity sets everything in motion and tries, with the means a little girl has at her disposal, that the parents finally get closer. One day after finding her mother in the actor's bed, she resorted to the hottest and ultimate remedy that was left to her: Felicity attempted a (rudely executed) suicide. Only with this act of desperation does the girl find her parents' ears with her emotional needs. She even lies in court to save her mother's tarnished reputation.

Production notes

Little Friend premiered on July 24, 1934. The film was not shown in Germany. (Exile) German influences can nonetheless be felt everywhere, as René Dufour alias Richard Dyck stated in the Pariser Tageblatt in 1935 .

Robert Stevenson took over the production management. Alfred Junge designed the film structures, Elsa Schiaparelli the costumes. Louis Levy took over the musical direction.

Reviews

The following was to be read in Film Weekly : “With this film work, the English not only took the path of the quietly toned, psychological chamber play for the first time, but they also raised a subject into the general valid, the general human and thus created a work of art, that has an effect beyond the day. A film of great class ... With a careful hand, the finest movements of a child's soul are tracked here, all half and quarter tones in the subconscious of an expectant person are gently made to sound. "

At the time, The New York Times praised the film as "very close to a masterpiece of its kind".

Halliwell's Film Guide found the film to be "a fairly well-written but fake domestic drama that has maintained a small reputation."

CineGraph said that with Little Friend , director Viertel created "a film that, in an almost eerie way, immersed itself in the world of thought and feeling of the English bourgeoisie."

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ There it says: “There is nothing English about this Gaumont-British Picture film other than the representation and the company that produced it. Otherwise: the screenplay is based on the novel 'Kleinefreund' by Ernst Lothar, the direction was directed by Berthold Viertel, the background music was created by Ernst Toch "
  2. ↑ according to Pariser Tageblatt of February 8, 1935
  3. ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwells Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 604
  4. ^ London Calling. Germans in British film of the thirties. A CineGraph book. Munich 1993, p. 28

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