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In the 1940's and 50's, there was probably no other man who influenced
the (then relatively new) science fiction genre as much as Curt Siodmak,
first and foremost as a writer and to a much lesser extent as a director.
And while his works would never become as significant for movie history as
the best films of his brother Robert Siodmak (e.g. The Spiral Staircase)
and he certainly never was as good a director,
science fiction (and horror) cinema would without a doubt be much poorer
without his influence. Born 1902 in Dresden,
Germany, Curt Siodmak first studied physics, mathematics and engineering -
something that would be felt throughout his writing career -, but it was as
early as 1926 that his career took a decisive turn whenhis first science fiction short story, The Eggs of
Lake Tanganyika, was published in the German magazine Die Woche
- a story that eventually found its way into the then leading (and only)
American sci-fi mag, Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, as well. The
same year, Siodmak and his wife also found work on the groundbreaking
science fiction morie Metropolis (1926, directed by Fritz Lang) as
extras, but while this is a much-publicized fact, it probably had far less
impact on Siodmak's writings than his studies ... In the late 1920's, Curt Siodmak would start
writing scripts for German silent cinema, for movies like Maskottchen/Mascots
(1929, Felix Basch) and Flucht in die Fremdenlegion (1929,
Louis Ralph), but it was a
script based on one of Siodmak's newspaper articles (he also worked as a
journalist during the 1920's) that would prove to be the turning point of
his career: Menschen am Sonntag/People on Sunday (1929,
script by Billy Wilder, directed by Curt Siodmak, Robert Siodmak, Fred
Zinnemann,
Edgar G.Ulmer).
People on Sunday was a film that was
completely improvised by non-actors that portrayed themselves, young
people on a very ordinary Sunday, doing whatever they did in their pastime,
shot in (semi-)documentary style - today this concept might be considered
an old hat, but back in 1929, it was simply groundbreaking. By the time the
film was shot, neither Billy Wilder nor the Siodmak-brothers nor
Zinneman and Ulmer had any real reputation inside the film industry, but
eventually each of them would wind up to have a (more or less) successful
Hollywood career ...
After
the success of Menschen am Sonntag, Siodmak found himself hot
property within the German film industry, writing screenplays for all
sorts of movies including crime dramas like Der Schuss im
Tonfilm-Atelier/The Shot in the Talker Studio (1930, directed
by Alfred Zeisler) and two comedies directed by his brother Robert , Der
Kampf mit dem Drachen and Der
Mann der seinen Mörder sucht/Looking
for his Murderer (both 1931).
However, it was a film from 1932, F.P.1
antwortet nicht (Karl Hartl), for which he co-wrote the screenplay
based on one of his novels, that would become one of the
cornerstones of his (early) career - and it would further his reputation
as a science fiction author. The movie itself was about the construction of a floating platform for airplanes in the middle of the
Atlantic Ocean and about saboteurs threatening the project. It starred Hans
Albers, then the superstar of German cinema, but eventually, an
English language version (F.P.1
Doesn't Answer) and a French language version (F.P.1 ne répond
plus) were made as well, starring Conrad Veidt and Charles Boyer,
respectively. In ordinary times, the (international) success should have
opened all doors for Curt Siodmak in the German film indursty, but times were
far from ordinary, since the
Nazi gouvernment was in the process of getting an ever tighter grip of the
country, including its movie industry, and since the Siodmak brothers were
Jews, everything was turning against them. Heck, for F.P.1
antwortet nicht, Robert Siodmak was even turned down as a director
to keep the quota of Jews in the production staff low. And that was just
the beginning ...
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In the year 1933, German propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels made his infamous Speech on the Future of German Cinema -
which opened the eyes of the (Jewish) Siodmak brothers and prompted them to leave the
country. It d0dn't take long though before the brothers picked up in France
where they left off in Germany, and Robert filmed an adaptation of one of
Curt's novels, La Crise est Finie (1934). Robert would stay in
France until 1939, but Curt, not versatile enough in the French language
to do what he did best, to write, moved on to Great Britain, where he
found a foothold in the local film industry soon enough.
The
highlights of his British career were The Tunnel (1935, Maurice Elvey),
a science fiction thriller about the building of a Transatlantic tunnel
which he scripted based on a novel by Bernhard Kellermann, and the highly
entertaining Non-Stop
New York (1937, Robert Stevenson), a murder mystery set on a
futuristic plane, which Siodmak co-scripted and which was based on a novel
by Ken Atwill. However, even more interesting than the films he did make
during his British years are probably those which never were
finished or never even got made,
including the unfinished I Claudius, directed by Josef von
Sternberg and starring Charles Laughton, The Deaf-Mute, to be
directed by Alfred
Hitchcock, and Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue, based on the writings
by Sir Walter Scott. In 1938, Siodmak moves to the USA, where
he, unlike other immigrants who had to start from zero, is welcomed with
open arms - some of his stories and novels have been released in the US
and his work on films like F.P.1
Doesn't Answer and The Tunnel has been acknowledged even in
Hollywood. As a result, he soon found work co-scripting Her Jungle
Love (1938, George Archainbaud), a jungle romance that was basically a
showcase for lead Dorothy Lamour, and was one in a line of films starring
Lamour as jungle girl in a sarong.
So ok, a jungle girl film
starring Dorothy Lamour does hardly sound like the most exciting thing
Hollywood has to offer, least of all for Curt Siodmak, whose talents
clearly were with science fiction (and horror, as it would soon turn out),
but one has to start from somewhere, and his next effort, the screen story
and screenplay for Universal's
The Invisible Man Returns (1939, Joe May), definitely was a step
into the right direction. So pleased were Universal
obviously with his script that they hired him for 2 more films of the
Invisible Man-series,
The Invisible Woman (1940, A.Edward Sutherland)
and Invisible Agent (1942, Edward L.Marin), the last one being a
propaganda effort only very loosely based on the H.G.Wells-novel.
From
the Invisible Man-series, it was only a small step to
Universal's
classic horror-cycle, which had just been revived with Son
of Frankenstein (1939, Rowland V.Lee), and soon enough, Curt
Siodmak would write maybe the classic of the second coming of the
cycle (after it died down in the mid-1930's): The
Wolf Man (1941, George Waggner). The film tells the story of a
young man (Lon Chaney jr [Lon
Chaney jr bio - click here]) who, through no fault of his own, is turned into
a werewolf, and is in the end killed by his own father (Claude Rains), who
had previously done everything to save his life. Admittedly, The
Wolf Man pales in comparison to the masterworks of the
horror-cycle in the 1930's, most prominently of course Frankenstein
(1931, James Whale) and Bride
of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale), and where those films were
inventive, trailblazing even, The
Wolf Man is only clichéd - but it is clichéd in a good way, and
as an old-fashioned creeper, it works jsut fine.
With the
success of The Wolf Man,
Curt Siodmak's reputation as a horror scripter was cemented, and he would
wind up becoming one of the most prolific writers of Universal's
horror-cycle in the 1940's, writing the stories for Son
of Dracula (1943, directed once again by his brother Robert
Siodmak) and House
of Frankenstein (1944, Erle C.Kenton) as well as (co-)writing the
screenplays for Black
Friday (produced even before The
Wolf Man, in 1940, directed by Arthur Lubin), Frankenstein
meets the Wolf Man (1943, Roy William Neill), and the lesser known
The Climax (1944, George Waggner), a
disappointing technicolor shocker with
striking similarities to the story of The Phantom of the Opera -
and of course an attempt by Universal
to cash in on their success of previous year's Phantom of the Opera
(1943, Arthur Lubin).
Ultimately
though, the Universal
horrors would grow sillier with each film, and even if they
are held in high esteem by some vintage film-fans nowadays, films like House
of Frankenstein can easily be regarded as utter (if enjoyable)
trash. The same can of course be said about many of the films that Siodmak
scripted away from Universal
during that time, like The Ape
(1940, William Nigh), which Siodmak co-scripted for poverty row studio Monogram
... and I tend to often favour Monogram's
B's over those from Universal,
because Monogram
at least lacked the budget of a big, overblown, and pretentious Universal-B-effort,
meaning they couldn't afford any better while Universal
sometimes just wouldn't. And if you can look behind the cheapishness of The
Ape and its rather uninvolving direction and cheesiness, you
actually find an interesting film about a mad scientist (Boris Karloff),
who did all the evil he did only with the most benign intentions - which
is rather unusual for a horror film. Other films of the early
to mid-1940's Siodmak had his hands in included Aloma of the South Seas
(1941, Alfred Santrell), another Dorothy Lamour/jungle girl in a
sarong movie - and this one also starred Jon Hall [Jon
Hall bio - click here], and the then customary propaganda movies Pacific Blackout
(1941, Ralph Murphy), London Blackout Murders and The Purple V,
plus the crime thrillers Mantrap and False Faces (the last
four films all date from 1943, directed by George Sherman and produced by
Republic).
None
of these films was particularly exciting or memorable, but it was during
the early
to mid-1940's that Siodmak also made two of his most enduring
contributions to the horror and science fiction genre: In 1942, he wrote
the novel Donovan's Brain, the story of a scientist who keeps alive
in his cellar the brain of a murdered and unscrupulous tycoon, which
eventually takes over the mind of the scientist to investigate his own
death ... and maybe more. Now I have to admit, from today's point of view,
this might sound a bit pedestrian, but it was this novel (and the films
based upon it) that heavily influenced (if not invented) the brainsploitation
subgenre as such. Over the years, the novel was filmed (at least) three
time for the big screen - as The Lady and the Monster (1944, George
Sherman - again produced by Republic),
starring Erich von Stroheim, as Donovan's Brain (1953, Felix
E.Feist), and then there was this (quite good) German-English
co-production that had so many different titles I don't know which are the
most famous ones: The Brain/Ein Toter sucht seinen Mörder/Vengeance/Over
My Dead Body (1962, Freddie Francis [Freddie
Francis bio - click here])
- and one time for the small screen - in 1955 as part of the tv-series Studio
One. (If one looks very closely though one might realize that
Siodmak already anticipated parts of the novel in his script for the
1940-film Black
Friday.)
Siodmak's other, maybe even greater genre
contribution was the script to I Walked with a Zombie (1943,
Jacques Tourneur), produced by Val Lewton for RKO,
which would eventually wind up to become one of the few milestone horror
films of the 1940's, and one that most critics can agree upon. The film is
a spooky tale about voodoo and possession that comes to life especially
thanks to its deliberately slow pace and creepy atmosphere. It might
though be argued how much of the film's artistic virtuosity can be
attributed to Siodmak - and Ardel Wray (his co-sripter) and Inez Wallace
(who wrote the story) -, and how much has to be attributed to master
director Jacques Tourneur and/or producer Val Lewton - who was always
hell-bent on giving his shockers a house-style, different from the
Universal-house-style
-, and quite possibly, one might never find out who had how much influence on this
masterpiece of a film, but at least Jacques Tourneur must have been
pleased enough with Curt Siodmak's input, as in 1947 he made another film
based on one of Siodmak's stories, the post-war thriller Berlin Express,
filmed entirely in post-war Europe. The second half of the
1940's did not hold too much promise for Curt Siodmak, assignments were
rare and by and large not very interesting. His more interesting films
from that period include a horror thriller Warner
Brothers, The Beast with Five Fingers (1946, Robert
Florey), a rather dull film that despite Peter Lorre [Peter
Lorre bio - click here] could not live up to
the novel by W.Fryer Harvey it was based on, and Tarzan's
Magic Fountain (1949, Lee Sholem), the first film of the
Tarzan-series
starring Lex Barker [Lex
Barker - click here], which revolves around a presumed
lost aviatrix (Evelyn Ankers) and the fountain of youth. However,
if the second half of the 1940's was a disappointing era for Curt Siodmak,
the 1950's would turn a new leaf in his career altogether, because in the
1950's, the science fiction genre finally evolved into a genre in its own
right. True, there were science fiction films before, actually a great
many of them, but before the 1950's science fiction was never seen as a
genre of its own and there was never something even remotely resembling
the science fiction boom of the 1950's. True, most sci-fi movies of that
time were low budget films, and a great many of them were produced by
small-time studios like AIP
and Allied
Artists and shown mainly in drive-ins around the country, but still these films needed writers, preferably
oes with an
overboarding and maybe a tad macabre fantasy and a background in science -
and Curt Siodmak, having written quite a number of horror films in the
1940's as well as having studied physics, mathematics and
engineering, fitted the bill nicely on both accounts. But that wasn't
all that was new in Curt Siodmak's career, in the 1950's, Siodmak also
started directing on his own ...
The first film Curt Siodmak
directed was Bride of
the Gorilla, released in 1951 and produced by small-time studio Jack
Broder Productions ... and to be quite honest, the film was
anything but great: it's a retelling of Siodmak's own The
Wolf Man, made on the cheap and substituting the wolf for a gorilla and Lon Chaney
jr for Raymond Burr - even if Chaney jr shows up in the film anyhow, as
the chief of police. Still, while Bride
of the Gorilla is not the best written, produced or directed film
there ever was, it's fun to watch anyhow (if for all the wrong reasons)
... Siodmak's second film as a director, The
Magnetic Monster from 1953, fared much better on a quality level.
It's a film about a new element that eats energy and grows to double its
size with every bite it gets, however, the bigger the element (or magnetic
monster) gets, the more energy it needs ... and its not long before it
threatens to suck the whole planet dry. Again, the film was made on the cheap,
and its most impressive special effects, those of a giant dynamo, were
actually snatched from a German film from 1934, Gold (Karl Hartl).
Plus, most of the techno-babble in this film is simply ridiculous - at
least from today's point of view. But despite all these shortcomings, the
film works just fine, a well-paced (if at times incomprehensible and
downright silly) sci-fi thriller if there ever was one ...
The
next year, Siodmak wrote the script for Riders to the Stars (1954),
which was directed by Richard Carlson, star of The
Magnetic Monster and produced by A-Men
Productions (a company that apparently produced only The
Magnetic Monster and Riders to the Stars). The film - about
three astronauts going into space to capture a meteor and bring it
back to earth - is far from being a classic but good sci-fi fun, and this
time budgetary restraints are overcome by using stock footage from
V2-rocket-testflights. The next film Siodmak had his hands in, The
Creature with the Atom Brain (1955, Edward L.Cahn) - produced by Sam
Katzman for Columbia
- is one of those films that might be called typical 1950's drive-in
sci-fi-movies: The plot - a scientist uses atomic rays to turn people into
zombies and later gangsters try to use the zombies for their own evil ends
- is ridiculous, production values are low and the movie was sold mainly on
its sensationalist poster ... and yet, films like this are hard to come by even
nowadays by collectors of 1950's science fiction.
Later in
1955, Siodmak wrote the screen story for Earth vs the Flying Saucers
(1955, Fred F.Sears) - aliens attack earth in (you guessed it) flying
saucers - together with stop motion legend Ray Harryhausen, but
reportedly, Siodmak was not too happy with the film, which was mainly a
showcase for Ray Harryhausen's special effects while being very thin on
original ideas and plot devices. His next two films saw Curt
Siodmak taking double duty as writer and director again: Curucu, Beast
of the Amazon (1956) and Love Slaves of the Amazons (1957),
both produced by Universal
and both having pretty much self-explanatory titles. These were once more
not great films, but for the modern drive-in afficionado once again, they are great
pieces of nostalgia ...
1957 also saw the re-emergence of Gothic
horror thanks to British production outfit Hammer
and their classics Curse
of Frankenstein (1957, Terence Fisher [Terence
Fisher bio - click here]), Dracula
(1958, Terence Fisher) and the like. It wasn't long before the idea was
born to duplicate the success that Hammer
had on the big screen on TV as well, and thus the idea of a
British-American series co-produced by Hammer
and Columbia/Screen
Gems
was born, to be called Tales of Frankenstein. Now in
theory, this idea sounds great, but it seems as if Columbia
was hell-bent on sabotaging the project right from the beginning. Instead
of hiring at least some of the British talent that made the early and now
classic Hammer-shockers
work (with most of them being trained in TV-work anyways) an
American crew was hired and virtually none of the actors that made the
Hammer-shockers
so great made their way onto telefision. And to top it off, Curt Siodmak was hired as the director of the
pilot episode, titled The
Face in the Tombstone Mirror. Now it wasn't that Siodmak did not have
experience as a director - he was actually quite adequate - or experience
in horror - far from it ... but his heyday in horror was with the latter
half of the Universal's
horror-cycle while he had no connection whatsoever to the then
current Hammer-horrors
- which is painfully obvious with the show which looks like a condensed
version of a Universal-from
about 15 years earlier (even down to the monster's make-up) with virtually
no Hammer-influences
whatsoever - which makes one wondered why Columbia
even bothered to bring Hammer
into the mix at all. Besides all that, the script - for once Siodmak did
not have his hands in writing - was fairly silly. To noone's real
surprise, the series was discontinued right after the pilot.
Siodmak's
next assignment was another TV-series, 13 Demon Street (1959), a Swedish-American co-production of an
anthology series of macabre science fiction and horror tales a little bit
like the Twilight
Zone, filmed in Sweden and hosted by Lon Chaney jr [Lon
Chaney jr bio - click here]. This time around, the whole series was
filmed, but alas, it was never aired. Only 3 episodes of the series were
cobbled together in 1961 and, framed by a story about a very alcoholic Lon
Chaney jr playing the Devil (which had nochting to do with his role as
host of the series), released in cinemas as The
Devil's Messenger (Curt Siodmak, Herbert L.Strock). The resulting
film is a so-so anthology flick that has its moments but also its fair
share of let-downs. (Actually, only recently have several episodes of
13 Demon Street found their way onto various DVDs as special
features.)
With the 1960's, Curt Siodmak returned to Germany
but by and large retreated more and more from the movie world: he directed only one more
feature and wrote the screenplays for another two.
In 1962, German
(rip-off-)producer Artur Brauner of CCC-Filmkunst
decided to have another go at the Krimi-genre that was then
immensely popular with rival Rialto's
Edgar Wallace-cycle, and he decided to start a Sherlock
Holmes-series starring Christopher Lee, then a favourite with
the crowds thanks to his many Hammer-horrors.
For the first film of that (proposed) series, Sherlock Holmes und das
Halsband des Todes/Sherlock Holmes and the Necklace of Death,
he even hired Terence Fisher [Terence
Fisher bio - click here] - who had in 1959 already directed another Sherlock
Holmes-film, The
Hound of the Baskervilles, incidently also with Christopher Lee
but in a different role - as a director and Curt Siodmak as writer, which
all sounds very promising ... ... the
result however is a disappointment, a sometimes charming disappointment
but a disappointment still, a muddled murder mystery that tries to much
but delivers too little, that despite the capable hands of director
Terence Fisher lacks proper atmosphere and that, despite its international
cast and crew, shows German stiffness where a certain light-footedness
would have been mandatory. Having said that, the movie's not all bad, it's
sometimes even charming - but most often charming for all the wrong
reasons ... With his script for Das Feuerschiff/The
Lightship (1963, Ladislao Vajda), Siodmak for once turned away from
genre cinema and to literary adaptations (even though he did adapt a few
literary works for the screen before, these were invariably genre tales) -
the film was based on a story by
Siegfried Lenz -, and as a result he delivered one of his best
screenplays and would eventually receive the Deutsche Bundesfilmpreis,
a prestigious German award, for it. 1966, Curt Siodmak would
direct his last film, a film for which he would definitely deserve no
award: Liebesspiele im Schnee/Ski Fever, an
Austrian/American/Czechoslovakian co-production filmed in Czechoslovakia.
The film was a mindless and forgettable ski comedy starring Toni Sailer, a
then immensely popular Austrian downhill-skier, but hardly an actor, and
consequently the reulting film was hardly a good film. And
whatever you think about Curt Siodmak's previous films, and by God, they
were not all great, Ski Fever was a sad farewell to the film world
... But even though Curt Siodmak did turn his back on the film
world, cinema did not forget him altogether: In 1970, one of his novels
was filmed by Boris Sagal, Hauser's Memory, a film about a
scientist who has injected his colleagues memory into his own brain in
order to get access to some missile defense secrets - but he gets access to so much more, and not all of it
pleasant ...
In 1979, James
Bond-producer Albert Broccoli bought the rights to two of
Siodmak's novels, Skyport (1959) and City in the Sky (1974), to use
elements from them in his latest James Bond-adventure Moonraker
(1978, Lewis Gilbert). According to contract, Curt Siodmak was not given
an on-screen credit for his input in the film, but quite a lump of money,
and considering that Moonraker
is one of the silliest (but unintentionally funniest) films of the series,
it might be better that way anyhow ... And even after his death, in
2001, Curt Siodmak received yet another screen credit: For the film Ritual/Tales
from the Crypt Presents: Revelation (Avi Nesher), a remake of the
classic I Walked with a Zombie
he is credited as the author of the
original. Needless to say, Ritual never lived up to I Walked with a Zombie
and should best be forgotten right away ... but it demonstrates the effect
Siodmak has on the genre even after his death. Besides writing
and/or directing films, Siodmak was a prolific writer of science fiction and
horror novels and short stories, he was one of the fonuding members of the Screen
Writers Guild of America in 1938, together with
Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Julius Epstein, and he joined the Anti-Nazi
League as early as 1939, when most of Hollywood (with a ew honourable
exceptions) did not yet know how to deal with the Nazis. Later during the
war he was active in writing subversive, anti-Nazi propaganda pamphlets
that were dropped over cities in wartime Germany. In
2000, at the not exactly tender age of 98, Curt Siodmak died on his ranch
in Three Rivers, California of natural causes. In his life, he might never
have been the greatest of writers, and his works most certainly never
deserved the Nobel Prize, some are even ridiculous from today's
(jaded) poit of view, but that aside his influence on the science fiction
(and to a lesser extent horror) genre simply cannot be exaggerated.
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