The Student of Prague 100th Anniversary

Next month will mark the 100th anniversary of 1926's The Student of Prague, one of the most beautiful and interesting films of Conrad Veidt's career.

A hundred years feels like a long time ago. Probably because it is. But like many silent films, The Student of Prague retains a peculiar timelessness. 

Despite being an incredibly successful film in its time, playing to sold out theaters and praised by critics for Veidt's performance and the stunning visuals, The Student of Prague is rarely included in the primary Weimar film canon. Maybe that's because, while technically a genre picture, it's not a textbook example of German Expressionism (although not all German filmmakers were working in that style anyway). Or maybe because, when it comes to directors of Faust adaptations, Henrik Galeen doesn't have the same prestige or name recognition as F. W. Murnau. But I don’t know, maybe some film scholar somewhere can explain this to me one day because the movie I just watched absolutely without a doubt holds its own against classics like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

There is a bewitching quality to The Student of Prague. From Conrad Veidt's dual performances as both Balduin and his Double to the atmospheric cinematography and special effects, it really stands out as a dark and dreamy supernatural period piece. 

Veidt considered this film one of his personal favorites and his intense, soul-deep dedication to his leading role is obvious. It's one of my own favorite Veidt performances as well. I first watched this film during the fall of 2023, and something about that memory will forever make me connect The Student of Prague to the autumnal changing of the seasons. I want to live inside this movie. It's one of those films that, in spite of its faults, sweeps me effortlessly into the world of the story.

With each subsequent rewatch, I find myself reacting differently. Previously, I had felt like it was too slow, that the story dragged and the pacing could have been tighter. But this time I really enjoyed that slowness, how it takes its time to not only establish but to savor the spaces between the action. These long takes help to conjure the spell the film casts over its audience, the way Scapinelli weaves his magic to draw Balduin and Margit together. 

I also found myself reacting differently to Balduin. On my last viewing, he came off as obnoxious and entitled, whereas this time I had much more empathy and understanding for Balduin as someone subjected to the consequences of bad choices made out of youthful desperation.

This also just to be the first silent film I've covered on the blog (not including Liebe macht blind which I haven't actually seen). Its 100th anniversary has something to do with that. But, frankly, the silent era was a blind spot for me for most of my movie-watching life. But I've really come to respect this era of film history thanks in part to Conrad Veidt. Something interesting happens emotionally and/or psychologically when I watch a silent film. I think about all the people 100+ years ago either behind or in front of the camera, all the hands and minds and eyes that went into making these movies, all the talent and skilled labor and creativity and personalities, the artists who left behind these stories and images. Sometimes I feel like there's something vaguely haunted about silent film. How lucky we are to be able to enjoy the residual artifacts of these people, these ghosts who never knew their work would be so lovingly restored and stewarded into a new century. 

Veidt in Hollywood: The 1940s, Part II

 

I play the greatest meanie in the world. I befriend a girl who has never had a friend, and then, when she falls desperately in love with me, I try to make her the instrument of a terrible vengeance against my fate. If only I can make people feel this man, this spirit of evil, is an unhappy human being. Sick with unhappiness, the unhappiness of Lucifer, the angel cast out of heaven. If I can do it as I see it, other unhappy people will feel they're lucky by comparison. And even happy people will have a little sympathy for him.

- Conrad Veidt, "Villain By Accident" by Betty Harris, Modern Screen, June 1940

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A Woman's Face is a strange film. In some ways it's very ahead of its time, while in others it tips into the realm of what director George Cukor called "conventional melodrama." The story itself doesn't really make a lot of sense, but the film does work as a challenge for its actors, especially Joan Crawford, and because Cukor clearly had a unique sensibility that translated a weird and somewhat soapy plot into a relatively layered and complicated film.

Conrad Veidt reportedly called his character, the villainous Torsten Barring, "Lucifer in a tuxedo." Torsten truly embodies the fallen angel's narcissistic ambition and sadism. No stranger to playing infernal bad men, Veidt had played the Devil himself twice in the silent era (Satanas, 1919; Kurfürstendamm, 1920) and Barring is repeatedly described as satanic in almost every review of the film. It's an almost camp performance that somehow still reminds us that Torsten is all too human, perhaps uncomfortably so.

For me, A Woman's Face was the point of no return early on in my initial deep dive into Veidt's work. This film is genuinely unusual and fascinating, even for a modern audience; from Veidt's and Crawford's masterful work on screen to the implications of the story itself, A Woman's Face stands out from a lot of other big studio fare in the early '40s.

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Welcome to Part Two of Conrad Veidt in Hollywood, my blog series exploring the films Veidt made under the American studio system in the early 1940s. Part one covered his first film back in Hollywood in over a decade, 1940's Escape, which can be found here.

With the success of Escape, Conrad Veidt became an official contract player for MGM. A Woman's Face was his first follow-up under Louis B. Mayer and saw him working with director George Cukor again, an uncredited co-director on Escape, a project Cukor was originally slated to helm, but MGM passed on him because they thought he wasn't suited to the material. They did however call Cukor in to direct re-shoots and additional scenes once principle photography had wrapped on Escape.

If the character relationships were complex in Escape, A Woman's Face takes it even further. There is a subversive cast over this film, especially for the time in which it was made. Today, the Hollywood films of the 1940s aren’t typically considered overly-complicated, although the trauma of the war and the rise of film noir brought a new psychological landscape to filmmaking later in the decade. A Woman's Face is not noir, though. It's a bizarre, dark little jewel I keep finding myself turning over and over after each subsequent rewatch. 

And so, before I get into the film itself, I wanted to briefly address the production standards of the era, namely the infamous Motion Picture Production Code.

Conrad Veidt & The Archers: Part 2

That evening, at the Ramsgate Hotel, I could hardly believe my eyes as I looked around the crowded lounge. The bar was doing a brisk business, and our crew, including Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson… were hobnobbing with the Royal Navy, the Royal Naval Reserve, and the Royal Volunteer Reserve, all very much on deck. Connie and Valerie has the biggest crowd around them, asking what it was like to be a film star, and telling them what a wonderful job they had done in The Spy in Black…  

I rubbed my eyes and marveled… But it couldn't possibly last. Such openness and enthusiasm, and such innocence!

- Michael Powell, A Life in Movies

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England had changed by the time Contraband went into production. The war had officially arrived, scores of enemy ships were reported off the coast, and the film industry was at a standstill. Studios were shut down and turned into supply warehouses, and what little resources were left to filmmakers almost immediately went toward shooting new propaganda pictures. 

The British government knew it was only a matter of time until air strikes on their cities and towns would begin. Blackouts were enforced in an attempt to protect civilians and infrastructure, but they posed their own safety concerns.

September 1939 saw the official declaration of war between England and Germany. German-speaking emigres in Great Britain were now considered "enemy aliens". The Aliens Department of the British Home Office set up internment camps for likely Nazi sympathizers. Many German-speaking Jews were considered refugees and escaped internment. 

Conrad Veidt and his wife Lily, a Hungarian Jew like Emeric Pressburger, were lucky. They had received their official British citizenship papers in 1938. Had they not, it's very possible they would have avoided internment anyway because of their outspoken hatred of Hitler and the Nazis.

Contraband was Powell and Pressburger's first film tackling the second world war. In fact, it was the first feature-length propaganda film made during the war, period, and therefore an experiment for everyone involved. It was an experiment for Conrad Veidt as an actor, for the filmmakers to prove their first collaboration wasn't a fluke, and for England's Ministry of Information which was overseeing all film productions at this time.

Conrad Veidt & The Archers: Part 1

I had been longing to get my hands on Conrad Veidt ever since he came to England. He was such an overpowering personality that directors were afraid of him. He was tall, over six foot two inches, lean and bony. He had magnetic blue eyes, black hair and eyebrows, beautiful, strong hands, and a mouth with sardonic, not to say satanic, lines to it. He used an eye-glass. He was the show-off of all time. In private life, as I was to discover, he was the sweetest and most easy of human beings.

…Conrad Veidt was seated alone at a table by the window drinking coffee when Emeric [Pressburger] and I arrived at the studio restaurant. Emeric and I exchanged a glance. This magnificent animal was reserved for us. I went over and stood at his table. He looked up and I got the full impact of those deep blue eyes under black brows.

I said: ‘Mr Veidt, my name is Michael Powell. Alexander Korda has told me that we are to work together on ‘The Spy in Black’.’

He said: ‘Ye-e-e-s.’ Pumas purr like that.

- Michael Powell, A Life in Movies

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Before the stunning Technicolor dreamscapes of The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, before they became known as The Archers and two of the most innovative and visionary filmmakers in Great Britain, director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger originally joined forces at Alexander Korda's London Films in 1938.

They both came from separate but equally impressive backgrounds in their respective fields. Powell, originally from Kent, had worked his way up the ladder in the days of silent film in France and England. Pressburger, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant forced to flee Europe in the '30s, had worked with the likes of Fritz Lang at the height of German Expressionism in the Weimar Republic.

There's probably a lot to be said for their combined experience coming into the early days of their famous and storied partnership. And the fact that they teamed up with fellow film veteran, Conrad Veidt, very likely impacted the extremely polished look and feel of their debut work together, The Spy in Black.

VBA is on Instagram!

 

Well, I finally decided to make a companion Instagram account for this blog, which you can visit here or follow @villain.by.accident

The idea was to hopefully connect fellow fans and folks with similar interests to this space, but for now it's just the single post. So whether you find it via the 'gram or through this blog, please feel free to like, comment, share, etc!

Link: New Interview with Jim Rathlesberger

To commemorate the 83rd anniversary of Conrad Veidt's passing, there's a great new interview with the founder of the Conrad Veidt Society, Jim Rathlesberger, over on Monica Ilie-Prica's website. I highly encourage anyone interested in the history of the CVS and Veidt's legacy among various generations of fans to check it out. 

I would love to do a longer post about the Society one day, but Mr. Rathlesberger gives a fairly comprehensive account of the CVS's founding, its mission and activities in the interview. Since I first read about the Society in Conrad Veidt on Screen, I've wondered if there's a place for a more conventional, organized fan space dedicated to Connie. We're scattered across various platforms and cross communication is relatively infrequent, despite the ultra-connected internet age we live in. 

You can read Monica Ilie-Prica's interview with Jim Rathlesberger here.

And to celebrate Connie's life and work, go watch one of his films! There is a Youtube playlist and I just curated a list of several titles on the Internet Archive here as well.

Veidt in Hollywood: The 1940s, Part I

In the spring of 1940, Conrad Veidt and his wife Lily traveled from England to America to promote and distribute his new film with Powell and Pressburger, Contraband. This was during a critical time in Great Britain's fight against Germany, and the film was thought to be a perfect opportunity to increase American support for the British war effort. The isolationist United States was still a neutral power in 1940, and the UK could use all the help it could get.

But no sooner had Connie and Lily arrived in New York than Hollywood came calling. There's a role opening up in MGM's new picture with Norma Shearer and Robert Taylor, they said. The actor we originally cast as the villain isn't scary enough! Would you be interested in the part? they said. Oh, and by the way… the character is a Nazi general.

It's not a stretch to assume that Veidt would have felt conflicted about this offer. On the one hand, MGM's Louis B. Mayer was requesting Veidt specifically, and the opportunity could have led to a long-term contract with the most prestigious studio in Hollywood. But conversely, being asked to play a Nazi must have been disappointing, to say the least, to such an established and versatile performer as Veidt who was a fervent anti-fascist. Connie had never been cast in a role like this. He had played many villains across his storied career, but never a Nazi. 

So what would possess him to agree to this?

The offer would certainly mean more money, but a hefty paycheck wasn't really important to Connie personally. However, because he was donating the bulk of his salary to support England's war relief, perhaps he was thinking about the various scenarios in which he could do the most good for the most people. And maybe that meant doing something symbolic in addition to practical financial support. It's possible he thought that, by accepting this role and any future roles like it, he could help make American audiences see how much of a problem the Nazis were, something he had first-hand experience with.

Regardless, going after Veidt was a smart move on MGM's part. Connie was a huge box office draw in the UK, a headliner, often receiving top billing. So MGM literally snapped him up the second he set foot back on American soil. 

But once they had him, it's like they didn't know what to do with him.

Conrad Veidt, 1940, by Clarence Sinclair Bull

Welcome to the first of a series of posts about Conrad Veidt's work in the United States between 1940 - 1943. I've been wanting to write about this particular part of Connie's career for a while, mainly because there is an underlying sense that the way Hollywood treated him in this period was one of the factors that contributed to his lack of a broader legacy in film history compared to his peers.

Veidt's return to Hollywood was sadly cut short by his sudden death in 1943, but in that time he made eight very different films under the fabled American studio system: Escape, A Woman's Face, Whistling in the Dark, The Men in Her Life, All Through the Night, Nazi Agent, Casablanca, and Above Suspicion. These titles make up the bulk of Veidt's films that one might occasionally encounter on the Turner Classic Movie channel, some of which are better than others for sure. 

In only one of these late career films Veidt was allowed to play the heroic lead. Between 1940 - 1943, his Hollywood contract saw him typecast as six villains, four of which, unfortunately, were Nazis. And none of these roles were close to approximations of romantic leads or love interests as a number of the parts he'd played in the UK in the '30s had been. Regardless, Conrad Veidt infused his 1940s Hollywood roles with complex and subtle, at times verging on subversive, sexuality. The notable exception was of course when it came to his portrayal of Nazi antagonists in All Through the Night, Nazi Agent, and Casablanca.

But Hollywood was uninterested in offering Connie any parts that were particularly challenging. His most memorable roles during this era are the ones he made work through sheer force of will.