Robert Siodmak

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Robert Siodmak
Born(1900-08-08)8 August 1900
Dresden, German Empire (now Germany)
Died10 March 1973(1973-03-10) (aged 72)
Ascona, Locarno, Ticino, Switzerland
OccupationFilm director
Years active1927–1969
SpouseBertha Odenheimer (1933–1973; her death)
FamilyCurt Siodmak (brother)

Robert Siodmak (/siˈɒd.mæk/; 8 August 1900 – 10 March 1973) was a German film director who also worked in the United States. He is best remembered as a thriller specialist[1] and for a series of films noir he made in the 1940s, such as The Killers (1946).

Early life

Siodmak was born in

Stürme der Leidenschaft, with Emil Jannings and Anna Sten
, Siodmak found a style that would become his own.

With the rise of

Rene Clair, until Hitler again forced him out. Siodmak arrived in California
in 1939, where he made 23 movies, many of them widely popular thrillers and crime melodramas, which critics today regard as classics of film noir.

Hollywood career

Beginning in 1941, he first turned out several B-films and programmers for various studios before he gained a seven-year contract with

Universal Studios in 1943. The best of those early films are the thriller Fly by Night in 1942, with Richard Carlson and Nancy Kelly, and in 1943 Someone to Remember, with Mable Paige in a signature role. As house director, his services were often used to salvage troublesome productions at the studio. On Mark Hellinger's production Swell Guy (1946), for instance, Siodmak was brought in to replace Frank Tuttle only six days after completing work on The Killers. Siodmak worked steadily while under contract, overshadowed by high-profile directors, like Alfred Hitchcock
, with whom he had been often compared by the press.

At Universal, Siodmak made yet another B-film, Son of Dracula (1943), the third in the studio's series of Dracula movies (based on his brother Curt's original story). His second feature was the Maria Montez/Jon Hall vehicle, Cobra Woman (1944), made in Technicolor.

His first all-out noir was

Best Foreign Language Film in 1957.[4]

While still under contract at Universal, Siodmak worked on loan out to

MGM he tackled its lux production The Great Sinner, but the prolix script proved unmanageable for Siodmak who relinquished direction to the dependable and bland Mervyn LeRoy. On loan out to Paramount in 1949, he made for producer Hal B. Wallis his penultimate American noir The File on Thelma Jordon, with Barbara Stanwyck at her most fatal—and sympathetic. Siodmak saw in this film a thematic link with The Suspect and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, with the failed lovers of these films and significantly their tragic conclusions (ten years later he addressed the same theme in The Rough and the Smooth). Perhaps his finest American noir—although not his last—is Criss Cross that was to reunite him not only with Lancaster, but also The Killers producer Mark Hellinger, who died suddenly before production began in 1949. Working without the hands-on control of Hellinger again, Siodmak was able to make this film his own as he could not the earlier film. Yvonne De Carlo's working-class femme fatal (a high mark in her career) completes the deadly triangle, along with Lancaster and Dan Duryea
: the archetype of doomed attraction central to all Siodmak's noirs, but the one he could fully express to its nihilistic conclusion.

Siodmak immersed himself in the creative process and genuinely loved working with actors, acquiring a reputation as an actor's director for his work with many future stars, including Burt Lancaster,

Yvonne de Carlo, Barbara Stanwyck, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Ella Raines.[1]

He directed Charles Laughton (a close friend) and George Sanders, and got from both perhaps the unlikeliest, most natural and under-acted performances of their careers. From Lon Chaney Jr. he drew an uncharacteristically controlled and coldly menacing performance for Son of Dracula. He managed with Lancaster to capture a youthful vulnerability in The Killers, despite the actor's age (he was 33). He was able to get a believable, dramatic performance from Gene Kelly. He also helped raise Ava Gardner's public profile.

Return to Europe

Before leaving for Europe in 1952, following the problematic production The Crimson Pirate for

Norma Productions (distributed through Warner Bros.) and producer Harold Hecht
, his third and last film with Burt Lancaster (Siodmak dubbed the chaotic experience "The Hecht Follies"), Siodmak had directed some of the era's best films noirs (twelve in all), more than any other director who worked in that style. However, his identification with film noir, generally unpopular with American audiences, may have been more of a curse than a blessing.

He often expressed his desire to make pictures "of a different type and background" than the ones he had been making for ten years. Nevertheless, he ended his Universal contract with one last noir, the disappointing Deported (1951) which he filmed partly abroad (Siodmak was among the first refugee directors to return to Europe after making American films). The story is loosely based on the deportation of gangster

Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Siodmak had hoped Loretta Young would star, but settled for the Swedish actress Märta Torén
.

Those "different type" of films he had made—The Great Sinner (1949) for

MGM, Time Out of Mind (1947) for Universal (which Siodmak also produced), The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951) for Columbia Pictures (Ernest Borgnine's debut and Dorothy Gish's return to the screen)—all proved ill-suited to his noir sensibilities (although in 1952 The Crimson Pirate, despite the difficult production, was a surprising and pleasing departure—in fact, Lancaster believed it was inspiration for the tongue-in-cheek style of the James Bond
films).

The five months he collaborated with Budd Schulberg on a screenplay tentatively titled A Stone in the River Hudson, an early version of On the Waterfront, was also a major disappointment for Siodmak. In 1954 he sued producer Sam Spiegel for copyright infringement. Siodmak was awarded $100,000, but no screen credit. His contribution to the original screenplay has never been acknowledged.

Siodmak's return to Europe in 1954 with a Grand Prize nomination at the

Mein Schulfreund, an absurdist comedy, dark and strange, with Heinz Rühmann as a postal worker attempting to reunite with childhood friend Hermann Göring. In April 1958, Siodmak was made an executive in Kirk Douglas' film production company Bryna Productions, as European Representative.[6]

Between these films, and Mein Vater, der Schauspieler in 1956, with O. W. Fischer (the West German Rock Hudson), he took a detour into Douglas Sirk territory with the sordid melodrama, Dorothea Angermann in 1959, featuring Germany's star Ruth Leuwerik. Later the same year he left Germany for Great Britain to film The Rough and the Smooth, with Nadja Tiller and Tony Britton, yet another noir, but much meaner and gloomier than anything he had made in America (compare its downbeat ending with that of The File on Thelma Jordan). He followed with Katia also in 1959, a tale of Czarist Russia, with twenty-one-year-old Romy Schneider, mistakenly titled in America Magnificent Sinner, recalling—unfavorably—Siodmak's other costume melodrama. In 1961, L'affaire Nina B, with Pierre Brasseur and Nadja Tiller (again), returned Siodmak to familiar ground in a slick, black-and-white thriller about a pay-for-hire Nazi hunter, which could be argued was the start of the many spy themed films so popular in the 1960s. In 1962, the entertaining Escape from East Berlin, with Don Murray and Christine Kaufman, had all the characteristic style of a Siodmak thriller, but was one that he later dismissed as something he had made for "little kids in America." His work in Germany returned to programmers like those that had begun his career in

The Shoot, The Treasure of the Aztecs, and The Pyramid of the Sun God, all taken from the western, adventure novels of Karl May
.

Later career

Siodmak's return to Hollywood filmmaking in 1967 with the wide-screen western

heart attack,[7]
seven weeks after his wife's death.

The British Film Institute held a retrospective of his career in April and May 2015.[8]

Filmography

References

  1. ^ a b "Wettbewerb/In Competition". Moving Pictures, Berlinale Extra. Berlin. 11–22 February 1998. pp. 84–85.
  2. ISBN 9783870244699
    . Retrieved 1 August 2015.
  3. ^ Glaser, Emeli (3 September 2021). "The invented serial killer". Die Tageszeitung. Retrieved 6 September 2021.
  4. ^ "The 30th Academy Awards (1958) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Retrieved 25 October 2011.
  5. ^ "5th Berlin International Film Festival: Prize Winners". berlinale.de. Retrieved 24 December 2009.
  6. ^ Variety (1958). Variety (April 1958). Media History Digital Library. New York, NY: Variety Publishing Company.
  7. ^ "Robert Siodmak, Film Director, 72". The New York Times. 12 March 1973.
  8. ^ "Welcome to the BFI Southbank online". whatson.bfi.org.uk. Archived from the original on 16 March 2015. Retrieved 1 August 2015.

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