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| Betty Amann |
Alright - which Hollywood starlet trooped off to Weimar Germany to give one of the all time great silent movie performances, worked with Hitchcock and Ivan Mozjoukine and hung around to make more European hits before quitting the country to make B westerns back home?
If you said Louise Brooks you failed. Virtually no one now remembers Betty Amann. She’s not even in Ephram Katz' exhaustive Film Encyclopedia, though her career paralleled the now legendary Brooks, peaking in Amann’s lead opposite Gustave (Metropolis) Frölich in Joe May’s 1929’s Asphalt, one of the great physical performances in one of the last great silent movies.
She was spotted as Bee Amann, a minor Hollywood starlet, and signed by Germany’s ever talent conscious Erich Pommer for the Joe May film, where she was too conspicuous to ignore. Through the early thirties Amann had leads in other German, British and Polish films playing opposite stars like Heinrich George and Hans Albers without repeating her success. She’s notably ill served as the would-be exotic Princess in Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange. With the German situation becoming ever more tense, Jewish Amann decamped for the ‘States, where she was relegated to minor parts in minor movies.
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| In Rich & Strange - with Henry Kendall. |
I found no answer looking at her other accessible performances. Most of her European movies are gone or at least out of reach. Still in her mid twenties when she made Asphalt, she comes out of 1929’s Der Weisse Teufel well enough as Mozjoukine’s Slavonic squeeze and she’s awful in Rich & Strange but so is everyone else.
The one new piece of data is her last European film Schleppzug M 17 / Tugboat M17 which looks like a personal venture for star Heinrich George, who you will have seen as the spanner waving foreman in Metropolis. He was the leading sound era Emile Jannings imitator, notably in the 1940 Der Postmeister and a major star in the Nazi era, dying in a Russian prison camp at the end of WW2.
George began the direction of Schleppzug M 17 himself and his wife Bertha / Berta Drews co-stars. He plays the Captain of Tugboat M17, first seen penetrating the fog off the German coast with him at the wheel singing. His family, wife Drews and his two sons, live on board. We are in the then current river world cycle of Jean Gremillon’s Maldone, the Vigo L’atalante, Helmut Kautner’s Unter den brücken, Marcello Pagliero’s Les amants de Bras-Morts or Ingmar Bergman’s Skepp till India land and most of the memorable material shows life on board - passing through he locks to the Berlin mooring, showering the kids with a watering can on deck, loading the cargo of timber.
Our hero goes back to his disfunctional family on the boat but when he takes them walking on Potsdammer Platz, he leaves to squire Betty and we are back in Werner Hochbaum territory complete with a riverside Grosen maskenball offering phones on the tables, accordion music, a girl chorus line with Betty whisked off by a sailor leaving the Captain engulfed by streamers and girl revelers, to slump back by day light with gifts of chocolates and balloons for his family. That doesn’t go too well, with firemen rushed to the scene, and Heinrich is left stoically poling his ship through the shallows, his back to camera.
The film has not fully absorbed the conventions of sound film, retaining montages - the seedy chorus line, passing the Berlin buildings and factory chimneys or the effect of quick cross cutting George’s glasses-to-eyes views of Amann and Drews. It is occasionally technically rough with jerky tilts and scene setting that outstays its welcome and it could be dismissed as gloomy ersatz Jannings melodrama. Outside of the interest it offers as an example of the undershown German cinema of the thirties it is particularly interesting as the one occasion we can now hear Betty Amann speak German, the language of her greatest successes. Her femme fatale role is quite brief but she registers as film’s most intriguing element - alongside the Berlin settings.
That pretty much leaves us with In Old Mexico which proves a routine entry in the redoubtable sixty six Hopalong Cassidys. Robert Mitchum recalled doing nine of these these as an agreeable living, shooting two at a time with the crew filming the studio segments of the first before going off to out doors location for that one and the next and coming back to do the remaining interiors. Mitchum shared billing on these with such celebrity participants as musician Victor Young, cameraman Russell Harlan, who did major Howard Hawks movies, and To Kill a Mocking Bird and designer Lewis Rachmil, who ran Universal Studios for a while.
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| Amann & William Boyd - In Old Mexico |
However director Edward D. Venturini‘s most notable credit is the silent 1922 Will Rogers Headless Horseman. He’d been doing Spanish versions of Hollywood films at that stage. Paramount and producer Harry “Pop” Sherman had woken up to the fact that they were on to a good thing and pumped up the production values on the series adding music through out and not just on the action climaxes and taking advantage of the scenic possibilities of locations like the California Joshua Tree National Park used here. Harlan is on top of his game with great trackings of riders against the distant mountains and even a few shadowed foreground compositions. Unfortunately Harrison Jacobs’ script - evil master of disguises Paul Sutton plots revenge on Hoppy and Rurales Colonel Trevor Bardette - is plodding in Venturini‘s hands with the action broken up by maudlin buddy comedy and Jan Clayton’s song.
Betty Amann takes full advantage of having the film’s one shaded part, before Hoppy sends her riding North because he doesn’t jail women. Even here she has authority and looks good. It’s surprising to finally hear her use the English of her New York childhood making her a pioneer of the club of foreign speaking movie stars who revealed English as a first language. Include Eddy Constantine, Maggie Cheung and Jeanne Moreau. By the time she gets to Edgar Ulmer’s awful 1942 Island of Lost Men, Amann’s given up. That’s a genuine movie tragedy.
Transit’s excellent transfer of Asphalt (right Amann with Freulich), a tinted Tugboat M 17 without sub-titles and a soso
copy of In Old Mexico are on You Tube.
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