Second hand fate

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title Second hand fate
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1949
length 96 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Wolfgang Staudte
script Wolfgang Staudte
production Real-Film GmbH, Hamburg
( Gyula Trebitsch ,
Walter Koppel )
music Wolfgang Zeller
camera Willy Winterstein
cut Alice Ludwig
occupation

Fate from second hand (alternative title: Future from second hand ) is a German feature film drama from 1949 by Wolfgang Staudte with Marianne Hoppe and Ernst Wilhelm Borchert in the leading roles. With this story, Staudte addressed the belief in fate of many people in those years.

action

The story begins with a crier at a fair, where the clairvoyant Sylvio Sylvestro claims to be able to guess the thoughts of his audience. Several visitors wrote it down on a piece of paper and folded it. School teacher Gärtner, who visits the performance with a friend, thinks all of this is lazy magic and gives his opinion loudly. The clairvoyant approaches him and challenges gardeners. Right at the beginning he exposes Gärtner in front of all the other viewers by divulging some of his “youthful sins” in such a way that he is said to have dishonored a girl who then killed herself. Gärtner is deeply indignant, but knows exactly that that ominous Sylvestro is right. Also present is the old teacher, whom everyone just calls "penguin". He later comes into the wardrobe of the fortune teller, whom he knows from earlier as Michael Scholz, when he was still his student. “Pinguin” admits that, as a former teacher, he feels complicit in the social decline of Michael Scholz to “Sylvio Sylvestro” entertainer.

Flashback: Michael Scholz is happily married to Irene. At the coffee table with two other friends, the conversation turns to clairvoyance, which made the mentally unhappy Fraulein Bruns, who was well known to the group, very unhappy because she became intellectually subservient to a charlatan, a certain Professor Sapis, who had the death of her father , of a captain, who then actually found the seaman's death. Scholz visits Sapis personally, who is amazingly well informed about the accountant and his wife. Sapis seems less of a cheat to him than a desperate old man who himself suffers from the burden of predicting the future of clients who seek advice from him. Sapis does not have good news for Scholz either. He predicts: “You will lose your wife!” Scholz laughs strangely, but hurries home in a panic, where he arrives almost at the same time as his wife, who is unharmed.

Although he doesn't want to, Scholz worries about his wife continuously from this point on. So he wants to know whether her recent visit to the doctor resulted in any worrying diagnoses. But when everything is in order and Irene's husband believes he can see his wife obviously disappearing into the house of the old school friend, the gardener, whom Scholz accused years later of in his role as clairvoyant Sylvestro of having assaulted a young woman Michael walks into the house and puts the gardener in his apartment. In fact, Scholz does not find his wife in a compromising manner, but rather the already mentioned young Miss Ruth Wegener, who is anxiously trying to evade the intrusive gardener. A little later, Irene's brother, Senator Delius, also causes trouble. He looks down on his brother-in-law Scholz with displeasure, as he is not worthy of his sister Irene in his opinion. Delius accuses Scholz, who is not financially well off, that he could not offer Irene a proper life. Then Delius patronizingly slips his brother-in-law a check. Scholz, although it is very difficult for him to do this, pocketed the money and then had a small marital row with Irene. At a festive ball, Michael realizes all too clearly that he actually cannot keep up with the lifestyle of those circles from which Irene comes. Frustrated, Scholz begins to reach for the bottle.

From then on, Michael tried to use speculative business to maintain Irene's lifestyle she had been used to since childhood. When he reads about the tragic suicide of the young Ruth Wegener in the newspaper, he immediately thinks of the sexually harassed girl in Gärtner's apartment. He blackmailed the teacher, who was about to marry a wealthy woman in society, for a loan, which he grudgedly grants because he fears a scandal that could threaten his existence. In a pub, Scholz met a fortune teller, from whom he was able to predict the future for the first time. He is advised of a death in the family. When he learns that it is supposed to be a woman, Scholz is deeply shaken for a brief moment. Moreover, jealousy plagues him more and more, so he hires a detective to shadow Irene. The man gives him an address where Irene has gone. This address corresponds to that of the lawyer van Hooven, whom Michael met as a gallant dancer with his wife at the ball recently, whereupon Scholz assumes that Irene must be having an affair with the lawyer. That the radiologist Dr. Michael does not know Beringe, whom Irene occasionally consults and runs a practice.

Michael's suspicion that Irene is having an affair with van Hooven is reinforced when he sees his wife and the lawyer talking in private for a moment during a company that the Scholz couple give. Little does Michael know that Irene and Van Hooven about a possible lung disease that the X-ray doctor Dr. Ringing was believed possible. Mistrust and a lack of communication take on ever stronger forms: Irene gradually feels estranged from her strangely behaving husband, who in turn is now firmly convinced that Irene is betraying him with another man. Pretending to his wife that he has to go to a business meeting, he lies in wait for her on the doorstep to pursue her should she go to her subordinate lover. In fact, Irene went to van Hoovens' house, but this time too to see Dr. To seek out rings. He has good news for her: Irene is perfectly healthy. Michael sees confirmation that she and van Hooven are cheating on him. Back home, Irene sits down at the piano and plays while her husband hatches a sinister plan. An unbuttoned button on the back of her dress seems to Michael to be the last evidence of her infidelity, since he himself had closed all the buttons there that morning. He puts his hands around her neck ... and squeezes. So the prophecy that Michael Scholz would lose his wife one day came true in a murderous way.

Epilogue: The flashback is over, and Sylvestro alias Scholz explains to his old teacher “Pinguin” why, despite all this experience with the terrible consequences of fortune-telling, he also got into this profession, and then also at the lowest fairground level. Sylvestro says that after serving ten years in prison for what he did, he didn't have a wide range of career options. “People need illusions” and “They don't all get stupid” says Sylvestro alias Michael Scholz with resignation. At the end, outside at the fair, the crier announces the next performance.

Production notes, publication

The second-hand shooting of Schicksal began on May 30, 1949 in the Hamburg Real Film studios and ended there on July 31 of the same year. The exterior shots were taken in Hamburg. Herbert Kirchhoff designed the film structures with the support of his assistant Albrecht Becker , the costumes were designed by Trebitsch's wife Erna Sander . Her assisted Irms Pauli . Edith Heerdegen , who can be seen here in the small role of a young woman who has fallen into the clutches of an alleged fortune-teller, made her film debut here.

Until he moved to the West in 1956, Schicksal secondhand was the only post-war production by Staudte that he did not produce for DEFA .

The world premiere took place on October 6, 1949 in Hamburg. From November 1, 1949, Fate could also be seen second-hand in the western part of Berlin. In Austria, the premiere took place on May 26, 1950. On August 22, 1964, the first television broadcast of this film took place on ARD ; in the GDR, the film was first seen on May 27, 1967 in the television program of DFF 1 . It was also published under the title Sylvestro, selvännäkijä in Finland and under the title Sudbina iz druge ruke in Yugoslavia.

Reviews

In 1949 the weekly Die Zeit read:

“The film 'Second Hand Fate', which premiered in Hamburg, moves between the illusory world of the fairground and that of an exclusive social class burdened with prejudices. (...) The direction works with almost brutal thoroughness, so a treacherously open button on a lady's dress is pursued with the camera as a 'corpus delicti' for so long that the viewer, as in other places, time and again for absurd thoughts wins. But it is to the artistic merit of the director and screenwriter Wolfgang Staudte (who attracted attention soon after the war with 'The murderers are among us') that he lets the camera speak instead of chatty dialogues. And in Marianne Hoppe he has an actress whose clear, expressive face, scanned by the camera (Willy Winterstein) in close-ups, really says something. Wilhelm Borchert wraps his piercing psychological study of an unfounded swaying in an all too effective gloom. The advantage of the film is that it treats a sensitive current topic, occultism, responsibly and with delicacy, even if it is very simplistic within the scope of its possibilities and chooses the convenient way out of placing the plot in a bygone era. But the time color of the years between 1910 and 1930 is captured with care and great empathy. "

- Die Zeit No. 41/1949, edition of October 13, 1949

“An attempt to denounce superstition, with the film depicting bourgeois society as a breeding ground for such irrational tendencies. A captivating melodrama through camera and actor guidance. "

- Lexicon of international film

film.at found: " Second-hand fate is a warning against the flight from reality with the rampant clairvoyance at the end of the 1940s and exposes its vertigo and the associated dangers."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Second-hand future Fig. Film photo with Marianne Hoppe
  2. ↑ fate secondhand In: Time . No. 41/1949, October 13, 1949. Retrieved on October 20, 2018.
  3. ^ Second hand fate. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 20, 2018 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  4. ↑ fate secondhand sS film.at. Retrieved October 20, 2018.