Nazis and Parallel Worlds.

I’ve wanted to see the l932 F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer  through the five decades since I caught a half reel  clip with Conrad Veidt at a back yard 35 millimeter show in North London, where they kept the inflammable nitrate film in uncomfortable proximity to an open fire. The production was obviously an early example of the esthetic of The Shape of Things to Come, a cosmopolitan, high art sensibility brought to movie science fiction - wow, yes! Well unexpectedly, the film has shown up, for a short time only we are told, on You Tube, as Secrets of F.P.1, that same English language edition. 

In the brief period between the nineteen twenties arrival of film sound and the mid thirties
development of dubbing and sub-titling, it became common practice to produce parallel versions of movies. In Hollywood, film makers like Claude Autant Lara, José López Rubio and Jacques Feyder no less, would troop onto sets vacated by American directors, after the English speaking cast had gone home, and make their own versions with casts doing dialogue in French, German or Spanish. In the era of DVD extras, a few of these re-surfaced giving substance to the legend that Feyder’s version of Anna Christie with Greta Garbo again or George Medford doing the 1931 Dracula were superior to the ones we’d always watched.

 In Europe, the same thing was happening, producing a flock of lookalike, sound-different movies for their separate markets. A few notable productions were scooped up in this process - Congress Dances or the first sound films of Fritz Lang. Hitchcock did Mary, a German Murder, with Alfred Abel in the Herbert Marshall role. These consumed the early career of the then immensely popular Jan Kiepura but their big star was Conrad Veidt - two out of three Congress Dances and the English version of  Kurt/Curtis Siodmark’s “F.P.1 Does Not Answer.” Siodmark, brother of Robert, was, like Veidt, a specialist in fantasy and terror.

F.P.1. -  Albers, Veidt and Boyer.

Some of these alternates were made-later re-workings, rather than simultaneous, using as much footage as they could where original support players players weren’t recognisable - Kiepura in My Song for You and the Korda remake of Alex Ganovski’s Taras Boulba - but the F.P.1s  were genuine siblings with a photo taken of Veidt, Hans Albers and Charles Boyer, the fly boy heroes of the three versions, standing side by side on the decor to prove it.

They each recorded a version of the film’s theme song, with Albers’ becoming a hit still performed today.

As if just finding F.P.1 was not enough, the copy Is dazzling, looking like it came off the original negative correctly shown through the early sound aperture and impeccably graded. The brief, under cranked and forced processed night time exterior of the shipping offices, with fire engines rushing to the scene, is the best clue to the otherwise polished film's age.

Secrets of F.P.1. - Esmond & Veidt.

Secrets of F.P.1 opens at a black tie gathering in Hamburg, with Veidt’s Major Ellissen, who 'phones his press photographer associate Donald Calthrop (“an odd looking gentleman”) to get coverage for the bogus fire alarm he will send from the Lennartz Ship Yard, using the confusion to break into the file room and shift, to the owner’s office, plans on Floating Platform Number One -  “an artificial island in the middle of the Atlantic - made of steel and glass.” This creates interest in the neglected scheme designed by his friend, Leslie Fenton’s Capt. Droste.  

Veidt’s call was overheard by the glamorously turned out Jill Esmond, who proves to be part  owner of the Lennartz company.  The romantic leads that played opposite Veidt in his sound films always looked like his daughters and Esmond, then married to Laurence Olivier and fresh from a successful movie debut in Hitchcock’s version of The Skin Game, manages elegant nicely. She actually was the daughter of Eva  Moore from Whale's  The Old Dark House.

Smitten, the Veidt character moves on her but his life style is a stumbling block. “A man can’t always live in hotels. There are other things than hunting elephants and beating records” (Ever wonder why most English cinema failed to connect with a popular audience?) The offer of a revolutionary new plane is too tempting and Conrad signs on to pilot a marathon flight and disappears in Australia, while like Things to Come a superimposed machinery and flight material montage covers the remarkably swift Lennartz Company construction that gets F.P.1 up to the point where sailors gather on it’s deck and do the song about “The Lighthouse Across the Bay”.

Jill and Leslie have have become an item, upsetting our world weary traveler hero when he re-appears hair appropriately greyed, to explain to her “I didn’t want to come home a failure”.  Un-named nasties, who presumably have connections in surface transport (“There are spies in industry as there are in war”), have planted a saboteur on the Platform. We can spot Calthrop and Francis L. Sullivan among the jolly tars who fish off that imposing pylon in the studio tank - one of the nice pieces of staging that makes us forgive the unconvincing, un-populated model shots which provide the distant views of the platform.

Filling the sea water ballast tanks gives the bad hats’ agent a chance to sink the platform and a shoot-out with Fenton ensues - one of the movies' least exciting action scenes. Back in the Hamburg office, Jill hears this break out before the two way radio goes silent and she wants to use her plane to investigate the fact that F.P. One doesn’t answer but (surprise!) the only pilot available is Conrad, while the crew of the sinking construction have been gassed into immobility, with ballast controls jammed open and it’s planes out of commission.

Heroic intervention includes the later familiar shot of the plane take off, dropping off the lip of the deck only to soar skywards again!

What was intended as a ripping adventure yarn, (think Korda’s Clouds Over Europe/ Q Planes or Robert Stevenson’s King Solomon’s Mines) here emerges ninety years later as an antique, more revealing of its day than the makers intended and not in a good way. Well, be careful what you wish for.

   Montage image.

The French companion piece F.P.1 ne réspond plus with Charles Boyer as Ellison appears only to survive now as an inaccessible 9.5 sound edit. However, also on You Tube with excellent sub-titles, we can find the German copy, F.P:1 antwortet nicht again directed by Karl Hartl. Versions of the multi language productions, provided foreign partners, often omitted production values offered home audiences. This one was more than a reel longer than the English language film. Montages using  prismatic and superimposed images at the opening and during the rescue flight, tracked with Walter Reisch's "Flieger, grüß mir die Sonne," have been omitted in the English copy where the  credits have been abbreviated, possibly to disguise the foreign origins. Contributing writer Reisch had a long career, becoming part of the thirties exodus to Hollywood where he settled at 20th Century Fox for many years.

 

As I watched the German version, I first noticed how closely the British  followed it, with Veidt and Esmond performing the same movements and bits of business Hans Albers and Sybylle Schmidz do - not unlike Feyder’s cast repeating Clarence Brown’s angles in his Anna Christie. However as it rolled on, I also realised how much more I was enjoying it. The tempo matched the content more effectively, even before we get to the finale where Ellison’s discovery of the immobilised crew is extended and made more a matter of shocked realisation and his change of heart is slowly unrolled, moving from a feeling of betrayal to resolution. 

F.P.1 antwortet nicht - Schmidtz & Albers.

Albers is far more at ease in the Ellison part, given complexity as a prankster whose levity he is outgrowing while we watch. Veidt is one of the most authoritative performers of all time. His dismissing the angry mob with a sweep of his arm is something Albers can’t match but all his tormented screen apparitions haunt Veidt's attempts at being dashing in this one, as they do in Walter Forde’s 1935 King of the Damned or Victor Sjöstrom's enjoyable 1937 Under the Red Robe. Albers, given one of his best outings, is more plausible and involving here. Sybille Schmitz is not a conventionally pretty girl. Her career had been given a great launch with Ernö Metzner's realist two reel Polizeibericht Überfall /Police Report! Assault and the famous Carl Dreyer Vampyr, making her a German cinema A Lister, and here she plays with more shading than the better groomed Jill Esmond. (the striking shot of Esmond in her opera cloak, framed by the two caped bobbies, is actually better in the English version) Peter Lorre, frequently Albers’ side kick in German films of the day, takes the photographer part, though surprisingly Donald Calthrop (the blackmailer in Blackmail) is notably more effective. It is with his chess game, omitted in the English version, that the character’s function in the films emerges. Only Paul Hartman (later in Kazan’s Man on a Tightrope) is eclipsed by Leslie Fenton, fresh from his appearance in The Public Enemy. Fenton would go on to direct the exceptional Tomorrow the World and Alan Ladd Whispering Smith, among his more routine product.

Secrets - Fenton & Ward.

Rather sadly, we spot Warwick Ward, imposing-lecherous villain in Variety and the Bigitte Helm Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna / The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna, here almost invisible as Fenton’s first officer, like Lang regular George John, his King of the Nibelungens and the blind man in M, in this one glimpsed as the aggro sailor leading the mutiny. Friedrich Gnaß from Razzia in St. Pauli & M is Lennartz' watchman. 

 

The Composer Alan Gray would also score the early films of Powell and Pressberger and Gunter Rittau (Metropolis, Blue Angel) is among the camera credits. Director Karl Hartl, formerly editor on films by Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda, promoted with the arrival of sound, would also handle the Albers vehicle Gold and the excellent 1935 Zigeunerbaron. He was one of the most talented film makers of the Third Reich.

This brings us to the elephant in the room. Albers, Hartl and several more would achieve their greatest successes in the Nazi years.  Assume that is why their work is so little commented, as English language critics had little access to it, though Secrets of F.P.1 had a Marble Arch first run in London. Even if writers were familiar with 3rd Reich product it would have been an act of some daring to express admiration for it. From this distance, it would seem that Hans Albers was foremost among what have been described as “Deserter” film makers, people who neither endorsed or opposed the German government. Albers’ enormous popularity among German speaking audiences would have made him a formidable opponent and he never played a Nazi in any of the films I've seen, though he did do a Merchant Marine in Helmut Käutner’s WW2  Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 only to see the film banned by Dr. Goebbels.

A closer examination of Albers’ films shows him receiving unexpected vindication from a British Court in Unter heißem Himmel (1936) and as agent of the American Police, Sergeant Berry, der gangster schrek aus Chicago (1938). I like to think of those as indications where his sympathies lay, though they are just as likely to be part of the German attempt to enlist sympathy for a forthcoming war with the Bolsheviks.

 

The F.P.I films can be seen as clearly a highlight in the European proto-science fiction cycle that goes back at least to William Wauer’s 1915 Der Tunnel and  Emil Jannings in the 1920 Algol, through Metropolis and Maurice Elvey’s 1929  High Treason and the Tunnel sound movies to Korda’s Things to Come - short on monsters from outer space but full of the abuse of technology. Add F.P.1. to the then-contemporary product, packed with unruly mobs roused by (presumably Bolshevik) agitators - include Metropolis, Giftgas and Michael Powell’s Red Ensign of a couple of years later, which the FP1s frequently resemble.

It is frustrating that such a classy entertainment and key piece of film history are virtually never mentioned in literature devoted to the subject. Though he had been a leading man since the early twenties, F.P.1 is the first of the major Hans Albers adventure films which appear to be the mother lode in 3rd Reich Cinema - include Gustav Ucicky’s Flüchtlinge (1933), Herbert Selpin’s Sergeant Berry (1938),  Hartl’s Gold (1939) and Selpin’s Wasser für Canitoga (1939).

Even more significant is the fact that the F.P.1s were Erich Pommer’s last pre-WW2 German productions, ending a list that includes Caligari, Metropolis, Variety and The Congress Dances. The combined pull of Hollywood and push from the Nazis emptied Berlin of possibly the greatest concentration of film making talent then in the world. Pommer’s departure alone changed the nature of German film visibly, ending the stream of master pieces he had nurtured. Selpin had been a writer, Hartl an editor and Ucicky a cameraman. They achieved films of this standard following their association with masters. It is a perverse tribute to Pommer's talent and that of his peers that their second rank could take the big step forward and emerge from largely mediocre work being done around them.

It was worth waiting fifty years. With all its flaws, F. P.1 antwortet nicht stands among the most enjoyable work of its day from any source. The film shows some of the most talented people then working pushing themselves to their limits in a tradition of great imagination. Having the parallel version is extraordinarily revealing. These are examples of the kind of film that mandate the existence of the Cinémathèques - which we do not have.

 

Conrad Veidt - heroic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022.