Bonuses on death

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Movie
Original title Bonuses on death
Country of production Austria
original language German
Publishing year 1950
length 85 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Curd Juergens
script Kurt Heuser
Curd Juergens
production Alpen-Film Austria AFA (Graz)
music Willy Schmidt-Gentner
camera Günther Anders
Hannes Staudinger
cut Herma Sandtner
occupation

and Hermann Erhardt , Gusti Wolf , Iván Petrovich , Herta Baumann , Eugen Eisenlohr , Liselotte Gerhard , Hans Graff , Martha Hartmann , Hans Mraschner , Ernst Therwal

Prämien auf die Tod is an Austrian detective melodrama written in 1949 by the actor Curd Jürgens , who is directing here for the first time. Werner Krauss can be seen in his first post-war role, with Siegfried Breuer , Jürgens' wife at the time, Judith Holzmeister, and Jürgens himself playing other leading roles.

action

Somewhere in a southern European port city where the heat is depressing, a man is sitting in prison and recapitulating how things got this far. The famous mime and singer Gunnarsson once gave a performance, or more precisely: a premiere, in the city's Thalia Theater. There he saw, Peter Lissen, who was sitting in the remand prison, a small and not particularly successful insurance agent who ran from door to door, the woman he was supposed to fall madly in love with: Evelyn, a lady of high society. Lissen is downright obsessed with winning over this woman. He believes that he can only achieve this by drawing level with her financially and thus becoming her equal. And so one day he got the insane idea of ​​a sophisticated insurance fraud.

Lissen insures non-existent customers and lets them “die” one after the other in order to then collect the insurance premium. To make these deaths plausible, he enlists the help of an old and rather shabby ship's doctor named Dr. Schmidt, who issues bogus certificates and death certificates. While Lissen gets deeper and deeper into his crimes, he does not see that the adored Evelyn shows more interest in the celebrated star Gunnarsson, even if Evelyn is quite impressed by his charm after the first encounter and a stroll with Lissen. One day the lie-and-deceit construct of Peter Lissen bursts like a soap bubble, because the first invented policyholder turns out to be alive and well and pursues Lissen like a phantom. Lissen is arrested and sent to remand prison. There he receives a visit from Evelyn, and it seems as if she is ready to wait for him.

Production notes

The shooting of Bonuses on Death began on June 13, 1949 and ended in September 1949. The shooting took place in Thalerhof near Graz (studio) and in the port of Genoa (exterior shots). The film premiered in the Künstlerhauskino in Vienna on January 13, 1950 and had its German premiere on May 5, 1950 in Düsseldorf and Hamburg. It was first broadcast on German television on July 14, 1959 on ARD .

Herbert Sennewald took over the production management, the film structures were designed by Werner Schlichting and his wife Isabella Ploberger . Willy Egger was the production manager.

useful information

Jürgens had already written the synopsis for this film in the form of a novella in 1947.

Immediately after this film, director Jürgens and main actor Breuer changed roles, and Jürgens played (from September 19, 1949) for the same Graz production company under Breuer's direction in the Austrian crime film “ Shot through the window ”.

Reviews

During the time it was read: “On the good way to give the film what the film is and to advance into the areas of the fourth dimension, the first film by Austrian director Curd Jürgens 'Prämien auf den Tod' shows good approaches . He carefully studied the great French and English role models in the field of filmed depth psychology ... But he didn't add enough of his own. (...) The film had a particular attraction in Hamburg and other West German cities due to the first reappearance of Werner Krauss, who as a crashed ship's doctor is so intensely there at the first fleeting appearance that he almost goes beyond the scope of his supporting role. But in his idiosyncratic tendency to over-punctuate this figure, he gets too theatrical at the expense of the artistic statement and real shock. Siegfried Breuer in the double game of a great bon vivant and a little agent, unsympathetic as always, but less conventional than usual, with routine and verve masters a comprehensive range of nuanced nuances from human passion, unrestrainedness, impaired consciousness to despair and fear. "

The lexicon of the international film found: "Except for the unreliable ending, a not uninteresting, with slightly surreal elements, brooding-melancholy crime story."

“Where does such a film come from? You think the usual, a crime film or something like that. And then you experience what the memory of Dr. Caligari comes close, something agonizingly surrealistic […]. Willy Schmidt-Gentner's music cooed ghostly into the scenes, the whiskey bottles shine, day and night, the swivel armchair at the bar is the center of the world. Terrifying movie from today. You wake up from a nightmare when it's over. "

Individual evidence

  1. Kladde to "Prämien auf den Tod" on filmportal.de
  2. ^ Filmography Curd Jürgens in the German Film Institute
  3. ^ Review in Die Zeit from July 13, 1950
  4. Bonuses on death. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed February 5, 2020 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  5. Therese Fromm in the night edition of January 12, 1950

Web links