Reinhold Schünzel

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Reinhold Schünzel around 1921 on a photograph by Alexander Binder

Reinhold Schünzel (born November 7, 1888 in St. Pauli , Hamburg , † September 11, 1954 in Munich ) was a German actor , film director , screenwriter and film producer .

life and work

After completing his commercial training, he initially worked part-time as an extra , later an actor on stages in Hamburg , Bern and Berlin . He made his film debut in 1916 under Carl Froelich and was discovered by Richard Oswald the same year . From then on he was part of the Oswald cast with Anita Berber , Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt in the role of villain . He played with Veidt in 1919 in Anders als die Andern , where he played the blackmailer of a homosexual violinist (played by Veidt). Since 1918 Schünzel has directed it himself.

In the second half of the 1920s, a series of Schünzel films , episodic comedies, in which Schünzel played the leading role, produced himself and took over the overall direction. These masterpieces of German film comedy have only been rediscovered in recent years and shown again at the CineGraph Congress and the CineFest in Schünzel's hometown of Hamburg and at the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary .

Reinhold Schünzel between boxers Max Schmeling (right) and Jose Santa during the filming of the film Liebe im Ring (1930)

With the start of the sound film, Schünzel's comic talent as a director came to better advantage, especially with Viktor and Viktoria (1933) , The English Marriage , The Daughters of Her Excellency (1934) and Amphitryon - Happiness Comes Out of the Clouds (1935) all four were already created under National Socialist rule . He appeared in Georg Wilhelm Pabst's film adaptation of The Threepenny Opera in 1931 as Police Chief Tiger Brown and in the same year played the Minister of State Herlitz in Her Highness Orders based on a script by Billy Wilder . After 1933 he was only allowed to work with special permission from the Nazis, as he was considered a “ half-Jew ”. In 1937 he emigrated to the United States. There he played, since his own directorial work was not very successful, in 1943 in Fritz Lang's Also Henker Die and in 1946 in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious .

In 1949 he returned to Germany. Amazed and disappointed, he found the same officials in the film admissions authorities who had made work difficult for him during the Third Reich. And now the same difficulties arose again. Schünzel did not make his own film again after the war, but in 1951, at the request of the producer Franz Tapper, he co-directed the already wacky but unsuccessful film adaptation of Die Dubarry . He worked at the theater in Munich and as a supporting actor in film. In 1954 he received the Federal Film Prize as “Best Male Supporting Actor” for his role in Gerhard Lamprecht's literary film adaptation of My Father's Horses, Part II His Third Wife .

Reinhold Schünzel has appeared in over 100 films. From his marriage to the actress Hanne Brinkmann , the actress Annemarie Schünzel emerged, who called herself Marianne Stewart after emigrating to the USA .

Honors

In 1988, on the occasion of the 100th birthday , CineGraph - Hamburg Center for Film Research dedicated the 1st International Film History Congress in Hamburg to the work of the director and actor. Inspired by the resulting book publication, Hans-Christoph Blumenberg shot a cinematic examination of Schünzel's biography in 1995 under the title The next kiss I'll bang him down .

Since 2004, an international jury will award each at the opening of CineFest - International Festival of the German film heritage a Reinhold Schünzel price as a prize for many years of service to the care, preservation and dissemination of the German film heritage.

So far:

  • 2004 Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart, long-time film program manager in the Goethe House in New York.
  • 2005 Manfred Klaue, former director of the State Film Archive of the GDR and President of the international association of film archives FIAF , Erkner.
  • 2006 the Italian film historian Vittorio Martinelli (†).
  • 2007 the film historian Gero Gandert (†), Berlin.
  • 2008 Vladimír Opěla, former director of the NFA - Národní filmový archiv, Prague.
  • 2009 the film journalist Volker Baer (†), Berlin.
  • 2010 the film scholar Heide Schlüpmann , Frankfurt.
  • 2011 Barton Byg, founder of the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
  • 2012 the French film historian Bernard Eisenschitz, Paris.
  • 2013 the film journalist and critic Wolfram Schütte , Frankfurt.
  • 2014 the film historian Horst Claus, Bristol.
  • 2015 Vera Gyürey, former director of the Hungarian Film Archive, Budapest.
  • 2016 the literary and film scholar Heike Klapdor , Berlin.
  • 2017 the film historian and curator Lenny Borger, Paris.
  • 2018 the film historian and archivist Jan-Christopher Horak , UCLA, Los Angeles.
  • 2019 the film historian and festival director Giovanni Spagnoletti , Rome.

Filmography (selection)

actor

Director

Screenwriter

literature

Web links

Commons : Reinhold Schünzel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Schünzel, Reinhold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor and director
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Pauli, Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1954
Place of death Munich