7. German-American Production in Hollywood and the Meaning of National Cinema

Somewhere in the film ruins of Neubabelsberg we store the seal of superior film art; such a secret is not exportable. The great directors and performers must leave it here when they go to America and go after the dollar. Certainly we don’t intend to cry over them because Hollywood has changed them, made their works and achievements more marketable. But we will admit that they were different here, that they were better here—even if they create more profit over there.^[1]

Weimar culture owes much of its nimbus and retrospective coherence to the exodus of German artists and intellectuals in 1933. As refugees from National Socialism, scientists, novelists, film or theater directors and performers enriched other cultures and in many cases gained impressive profiles in exile.^[2] Yet for the cinema, the large-scale exodus occasioned by Hitler’s assumption of power represented the second wave of emigration rather than a revolutionary departure. Well before Nazi coordination of German film production a substantial group of outstanding film artists accepted employment in America. Beginning with Ernst Lubitsch, Pola Negri and Dimitri Buchowetzki after EFA’s collapse, reaching almost epidemic proportions at middecade and concluding in 1930 with the departure of Marlene Dietrich, the German emigration made a formidable contribution to Hollywood.

Although the American careers of several émigrés—F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch and Marlene Dietrich—have received attention, the collective story of this first motion picture exodus has never been fully told.^[3] In part this omission reflects the evanescence of the original German colony. For a variety of reasons the first contingent of emigrants was no longer active in American cinema when the second group arrived. In fact, by 1930 the only really prominent ones among them were Lubitsch, Dietrich and Wilhelm Dieterle. But transitory though the initial colony proved, it played a role in American production transcending the personal experiences of the individuals involved. Moreover, the emigration had far-reaching implications for Weimar cinema. In this respect it assumes importance here. At issue is not Berlin in Hollywood (eminently deserving of independent study though it is) but the reading of émigré work in Germany. From this vantage point the emigration meant obvious losses to domestic production but also the opportunity to evaluate the impact of Hollywood norms and expectations on German personnel. It presented, in short, a microcosm of German cinema under the influence of America. Analysis of American films by these artists served to pinpoint the meaning of Hollywood for Weimar cinema.

American companies showed such discrimination in their choice of German personnel that the list of émigrés reads almost as a who’s who of Weimar production. From the mid-1920s they included the producer Erich Pommer, the directors F. W. Murnau, Paul Leni, E. A. Dupont, Ludwig Berger, and Wilhelm Dieterle, actors Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt and actresses Lya de Putti, Camilla Horn and Vilma Banky.^[4] To these can be added the eminent screenwriter Hans Kraely and the directors Dimitri Buchowetzki, Paul Ludwig Stein, Lothar Mendes and Berthold Viertel. While representative rather than exhaustive, this list includes no one, apart perhaps from Vilma Banky, insignificant to Weimar cinema. Lubitsch, Leni, Berger and Dupont were all enticed to leave when they ranked among the very best directors in the country. Erich Pommer, in his role as production chief at Decla-Bioscop and UFA, represented as no other individual the blend of artistic experimentation and entrepreneurial boldness which generated the classics of the early 1920s. Negri, though of Polish descent, achieved stardom in Germany under Lubitsch.^[5] Both Jannings and Veidt were performers without peers in their dramatic specialties, as was the screenwriter Hans Kraely.^[6] The departure of Berthold Viertel or Lya de Putti constituted an only marginally less significant talent drain. All in all, even if the majority failed to establish themselves permanently in American cinema, their absence left gaping holes in domestic production programs.

The caliber of the German emigration made the exodus a serious issue to all those concerned with the welfare of the German cinema, especially because it coincided with the critical years in which German production appeared in constant danger of becoming an extension of Hollywood. While it would be a futile exercise to calculate the creative and commercial loss to German cinema, the emigration has rightly figured in its middecade troubles. Not surprisingly, some contemporaries interpreted Hollywood’s buying up of German talent as a plot to destroy the German cinema, even suggesting that American producers cared less about utilizing European artists than depriving other nations of their cinematic footings.^[7] Broadly speaking, however, upset at the immediate loss quickly translated into interest in the creative yield of this German-American partnership. American motion pictures in which German producers, directors, performers or script writers played key roles provided a laboratory for the theories of conflicting cinematic styles which circulated widely in the German film community. They also offered test cases for the possibility or desirability of one film culture fertilizing the other, both in the short and long term. The mix of German personnel and the American production system offered a rare opportunity to identify the corrosive or beneficial influence of America on German culture.

News that a prominent director or performer had a contract to work in America had the immediate effect of reminding German trade circles that in scale and financial backing Berlin remained a distant second to Hollywood. American moguls could pay more attractive salaries and finance more adventuresome projects. The talent drain, like the EFA episode or Parufamet, therefore deflated ambitions of meeting Hollywood on an equal footing. However, in a manner reminiscent of EFA, the reminder of economic inferiority did not necessarily entail pessimism or belief that departure of leading film artists meant a crippling blow to German production. Just as the internal migration caused by the founding of EFA confirmed German artistic excellence and created hope that motion pictures made by Germans with American funding would see worldwide distribution, so employment of Germans in Hollywood certified German excellence and could enhance the international reputation of German cinema.^[8] Moreover, some read American hiring policy less as an act of sabotage than as a means by which Hollywood could rejuvenate its own stagnating production. As Felix Henseleit suggested, American interest in German talent in 1925 and 1926 followed directly from Hollywood’s realization of European resistance to its movies. The recruitment campaign aimed to regain the favor of disgruntled European moviegoers. German personnel represented an artistic force which Hollywood desperately required. And to the extent that American hiring policy was a plot to destroy German cinema, it demonstrated Hollywood’s fear of competition from superior filmmakers.^[9]

There was, however, another side to the problem. EFA’s enlistment of talent for production in Germany had promised to give creative opportunities and international exposure to German cinema after its wartime isolation. Yet even under these circumstances not all observers had agreed that its films really counted as domestic products. Pictures made by Germans in Hollywood presented more complex problems of nationality. Frank admission that projects of sufficient ambition to interest a Murnau or a Jannings were beyond domestic means, and that these artists were better employed in Hollywood than not at all, did not make their work overseas redound to the credit of German cinema any more than pride in their abilities nullified the loss or outweighed anxiety over their fate.^[10] Whether benefits accrued to German cinema from the presence of these artists in Hollywood remained debatable. Did they, in the sharp formulation of Robert Ramin, represent “colony or competition” for their former homeland? Ramin argued that what appeared an outpost of Germans in Hollywood presented serious competition for the German cinema. Pride was misplaced because the émigrés did not deserve consideration as German representatives abroad.^[11] In economic terms he was clearly correct. In broader cultural terms most observers saw the case as less clear-cut. They gauged Berlin’s loss and Hollywood’s gain by assessing the degree to which the motion pictures made by émigrés exhibited German or American characteristics. Their interest focused on the question whether Germans in Hollywood could preserve artistic links with the homeland and in this regard act as apostles of German film abroad.

The first, most long-standing and sharpest test of German fates in Hollywood was the American work of Ernst Lubitsch. When Lubitsch left Germany in late 1922, to return only briefly before settling in Hollywood in 1923, he was Germany’s most celebrated and versatile film director. Already attuned to the American production system from financing through EFA on his last German pictures, and by inclination arguably the most “American” of German directors, he became a permanent fixture in Hollywood.^[12] While other equally famous German film artists worked in Hollywood for certain periods of the twenties and early thirties, his American career alone spanned virtually the entire era on which this study focuses (unlike most of his compatriots he survived the transition to sound in the late 1920s). In his early years with Warner Bros. he also enjoyed artistic license within the budgets assigned him. Working frequently in conjunction with Hans Kraely he directed more than a dozen feature films in the decade 1923–1932.^[13]

If in retrospect Lubitsch appears a natural transplant to the American motion picture world, his compatriots saw him as a German director tackling the leviathan of the Hollywood system. Precisely because of his exalted reputation, his fate in Hollywood appeared pivotal for the prospects of German cinema on the world market. Whether he could maintain the level of excellence set in Germany amidst the standardization of Hollywood sat at the forefront of critical concern. Would he be true to his German roots, would he be thoroughly Americanized, or would he land somewhere between these cultural poles? Full answers to these queries required familiarity with American film practice which Germans experts were only beginning to acquire through study trips to New York and Hollywood. Yet paucity of information presented little discouragement to commentators anxious to categorize his work. His first two American pictures, a Carmen film (Rosita) starring Mary Pickford and a society comedy (The Marriage Circle), his first film for Warner Bros., were both produced in 1923. They premiered in Germany almost simultaneously in the late summer of 1924, giving experts hard evidence upon which to base an evaluation of cultural hybridization.

A frequent contributor to Kinematograph, Dr. Ernst Ulitzsch, went straight to the central issue in a joint review entitled “The German and the American Lubitsch.” As this title suggests, the point was to classify the national character of Lubitsch’s achievement. In his opinion, Rosita, a work scripted by a German writer, Norbert Falk, on a theme previously filmed by Lubitsch in Germany, lay very much in Lubitsch’s German tradition. It confirmed that Lubitsch could attain those cinematic feats—discipline of performers individually and corporately—for which the Americans had hired him. The Marriage Circle, a light comedy of tangled marital relationships set in Vienna, did not classify so readily. Ulitzsch claimed that it represented a departure from anything previously done by the Americans in film humor. Without direct German forerunners, it drew upon German achievements in comedy and the chamber drama. On these grounds Ulitzsch affirmed that despite relocation to Hollywood Lubitsch remained a “German master” whose work strengthened the international prestige of the German cinema.^[14]

A parallel case from another trade paper illuminates both the representativeness and analytical softness of such a nationally determined approach. The editor of Der Film, Dr. W. Theile, generalized from Rosita that “the style of our outstanding German directors does not change when they have a task to accomplish under different conditions than in Germany.” Like Ulitzsch, however, he floundered trying to establish a German pedigree for both pictures. Although he conceded that Lubitsch’s approach in Rosita had altered since his last German works, he still traced these unspecified developments to the “German element of filmic art which remained his directorial style.” But in the next breath he credited American input for the success of the picture and expressed unease about Lubitsch’s future development.^[15] With The Marriage Circle Theile reiterated that Lubitsch remained true to form, but again contradicted himself attempting to determine what that meant. Granting that Lubitsch had learned from Hollywood in precision of camera work, he still insisted that an unnamed German influence set the overall tone. In an abrupt disavowal of the whole analytical project he then momentarily decided there was no point debating whether Lubitsch proved himself more German or American, only to renege immediately by describing Lubitsch’s personal touch as essentially German.^[16]

The discourse adopted by Ulitzsch and Theile indicates that Lubitsch’s first American releases in Germany became test cases for national cinematic survival as Hollywood began to flood the German market. It also illustrates how preoccupation with national characteristics programmed critical analysis in terms that produced more passion than precision.^[17] Whether or not critics applauded Rosita, they measured it with a national yardstick. Lichtbildbühne described the film as less than “authentically Lubitsch” precisely because its subject matter, though scripted by a German, was “a little too shallow, a little too much Americanized.” “Consciously or unconsciously American sensitivities were obviously allowed to have an influence.” Although Lubitsch represented a major asset in Hollywood, full realization of his abilities required freedom from “dilutive American influences.” As these characterizations suggest, Lubitsch was expected to resist watering down his films to please the American public. Degeneration in Lubitsch’s work, loosely defined as shallowness, was blamed on Hollywood. Regeneration presupposed freedom to make German motion pictures with American financing and resources.^[18]

In the case of The Marriage Circle, which premiered just four days after Rosita, Lubitsch gained credit for preserving his individuality. By general consensus The Marriage Circle was an outstanding achievement. All commentators were impressed and many ecstatic, largely because they saw in it a significant departure in motion picture history. Lacking familiarity with Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), a picture of fundamental importance for Lubitsch’s development (released in Germany only in 1926), they attributed that departure to Lubitsch’s German heritage. While Ulitzsch and Theile intimated this, Heinrich Fraenkel stated it categorically.

Lubitsch’s last American-made work is without a doubt one of the finest, most tasteful, technically most successful, most entertaining and—most un-American films ever created. It is an encouraging sign of the fact that this German artistic personality is strong enough not to let himself be “Americanized” and conform to his new home, but again and again to place on his work his own unmistakable stamp.^[19]

Not the least of the “un-American” features of the film was its refusal to be bound by moral prudery. Heinz Michaelis surmised that a director of Lubitsch’s artistic authority was required “to lead American film comedy out of the constraints of Sunday school into the realm of superior comic genius,” confirming once again that German influence had proven determinative.^[20]

Beyond the confines of the trade press reactions to Lubitsch’s first American pictures showed similar interest in the relative strength of German and American ingredients and comparable problems of distinguishing between them. Frank Warschauer, for example, interpreted the uniqueness of The Marriage Circle in terms of three variables—its German setting, its essentially American treatment and an extra un-American intonation which by implication came via Lubitsch from Germany. This last quality was evident in the steady yet comfortable pace at which the picture unfolded and in the balance found in comic style; without refinement to the point of becoming bland, humor remained subtle. Warschauer recognized the novelty produced by the hybridization of the American and German cinemas, but perceived Lubitsch as the principal influence in the birth of a uniquely accented filmic style.^[21]

Although preoccupation with Lubitsch’s contribution to Hollywood meant that the deviation of The Marriage Circle from German type went largely unexplored, two commentators inverted prevailing perspectives. Hans Siemsen maintained that Rosita and The Marriage Circle belonged to two radically opposed traditions. The former represented the heavy-handedness, pathos and pomposity of the German Lubitsch; the latter revealed a reborn American Lubitsch characterized by dramatic reserve, lightness of touch and ability to create authentic human types.^[22] Similarly, Kurt Pinthus, who was wildly enthusiastic about The Marriage Circle as a demonstration that properly conceived and executed film sequences, though silent, could attain an eloquence superior to that of the spoken word, found it no coincidence that Lubitsch made it in Hollywood. Lubitsch succeeded through marriage of the subtlety and refinement of the German chamber drama to the lightness and knack for popular subjects for which the Americans were noted: “Here the chamber drama and popular play are successfully fused. Here is the first and only perfect comedy ever produced by a German hand—tragicomically in America.”^[23]

Pinthus’s reference to the harmonious union of sophistication and slickness in The Marriage Circle made explicit what other critics had been reluctant to state outright: American and German cinematic approaches could be welded successfully into a unity greater than the sum of their parts. At a time when German critics were becoming sceptical about the suitability of many American movies for German theaters, this work indicated that crossbreeding could produce films attractive to demanding and less discriminating audiences. However, sequels were to show, for Lubitsch and later émigrés, that the union was anything but consistently happy. What critical spirits sought in American motion pictures involving German artists coincided irregularly with the demands of the American production system and German moviegoers. The line between German and American traditions proved a fine one indeed. As in the days of EFA, critics disturbed by the blend of German and American approaches usually blamed an excess of American ingredients.

The danger of Hollywood for Lubitsch, and by inference for future émigrés, surfaced in his very next release in Germany, Three Women. This picture transposed the romantic entanglements of The Marriage Circle from a playfully harmless to a more serious mode involving murder and acquittal before happy ending. The timing of its release—September 1925—contributed to the coolness with which it was treated, since critics claimed it contained liberal quantities of what were increasingly objectionable Americanisms. But the discursive framework within which it was evaluated had not significantly changed. The common theme in reviews of Three Women was the discrepancy between American and German worldviews and Lubitsch’s accommodation to the former at the cost of his appeal in Germany. Concessions to American tastes were identified in Hans Kraely’s script, which ran from comedy and sensationalism to a theatrical climax with a sentimental American denouement.^[24] The conservative daily, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, went so far as to charge Lubitsch with having become an American and directing a purely American average film. The chief problem was Kraely’s script, American kitsch which neither Kraely nor Lubitsch would ever have contemplated shooting in Germany. Lubitsch was advised to stick to his specialty, the light comedy, and warned not to allow himself to become further Americanized.^[25]

The distinct sense of disappointment characteristic of these evaluations of Three Women was related more or less explicitly to the willingness on the part of Lubitsch and Kraely to put their talents at the service of American tastes, particularly in toleration of stylistic pluralism in the screenplay. This disappointment clearly implied disapproval of those qualities which spelled popularity. Kurt Pinthus had acclaimed The Marriage Circle for finding the middle way between artistic seriousness and lightness. Commentary on Three Women suggests that in the backlash of middecade experts recoiled from a work by two German masters which compromised artistic purity. Alienated by mass import, they proved hypersensitive to indications Lubitsch was becoming a popular director on American terms.

Willy Haas put his finger directly on the sore spot with a massive review conceived along lines later developed by Béla Balázs in reflection on the German film crisis. As a script writer Haas concurred with those who judged Kraely’s screenplay “un-German,” but he was fascinated by its originality and vitality. How had Kraely managed to shed his German skin? Haas believed that by careful study of English stage dramas Kraely had struck the balance of convention and originality absent in German drama. In the German tradition conventionality was almost invariably confused with banality, and originality with eccentricity. As Haas later argued, whereas the Anglo-American hero was an “ideal average man,” the German hero was by definition above convention, the supreme individualist.^[26] Taken together these characterizations suggested that artistic significance demanded disregard for popular tastes. In the case of Three Women, Haas perceived a bridge by which to unite the alienated categories of art and popular culture. Precisely what other commentators viewed as undesirable concessions to the public, he singled out as the principal lesson that German film people needed to learn from the film—the absolutely assured popularity of its theme and the momentum with which it was delivered cinematically.

Notwithstanding Haas’s opinion, the touchstone of critical approbation for Lubitsch’s American work remained its Germanness. Following mixed reviews of Three Women and Forbidden Paradise, (in the latter case ranging from praise to allegations that Lubitsch had fouled his own nest in depicting European culture), his standing in Germany was restored in early 1926 with Kiss Me Again.^[27] Here, as if heeding the advice of German experts, he reverted to the thematic and stylistic pattern of The Marriage Circle, the light domestic comedy. Drawing accolades comparable to those used for that picture, Kiss Me Again likewise won respect for its exploitation of devices from the German chamber drama. It was judged a creation of the German, or at least European, rather than the American Lubitsch because its intellectual pedigree, subtlety and acting style were un-American.^[28] Willy Haas took Kiss Me Again as proof that the German chamber drama could have international relevance and bewailed domestic preoccupation with satisfying an invented notion of world tastes while Hollywood learned from Germany.

If for years we hadn’t succumbed to the inflated idea of finding ‘suitable subjects’ for inhabitants of the South Sea islands, if we had concerned ourselves more with our own tastes than with the tastes of Massachusetts, New Orleans, Mexico…we would today be the foremost film country in the world. As always with us we fertilize the entire world and don’t gain a thing from it because we don’t believe in ourselves. We only discover ourselves in Hollywood.^[29]

Haas’s conclusion affirmed the potential for fruitful collaboration between Hollywood and Berlin, but like virtually all other tributes to the German element in Lubitsch’s American films it displayed remarkably little concern for popular appeal or box office. This is particularly striking insofar as it came from trade papers, otherwise sensitive to commercial prospects. Only rarely did experts say openly what Warner Bros. and American theaters soon discovered: like the German chamber drama, Lubitsch’s films were for viewers of refined tastes.^[30] Since his German reputation rested on box office as well as cinematic adeptness, he may well have encountered less friendly criticism had he made such films in Germany. Given, however, that the German industry stood to gain only indirectly from his work, considerations of prestige overrode those of profit. The principal ambition was to maintain national profile at a moment when American inroads threatened to obscure or erase it.

This brief survey of discourse on Lubitsch’s early American films exposes the concerns which dominated subsequent discussion on the work of German artists in Hollywood. Foremost among these was the balance of American and German ingredients struck by the émigrés. Next to it was the tendency to trace creative flaws to Americanisms. That tendency gained momentum with the growing reaction against Hollywood in Germany. By the middecade emigration experts had become very doubtful about the benefits of transplanting German talent to Hollywood. When generalizing, they judged the work of German émigrés as failing to measure up to, not to mention surpass, standards earlier set in Germany. Even before the main wave of émigré films which began to appear in 1927, they reached sweeping conclusions by extrapolating from the fates of Lubitsch and Pola Negri. In early 1926 Georg Mendel decided that émigrés either failed to adapt to the Hollywood system or became, like Lubitsch, thoroughly American. Either way their work was bound to be disappointing.^[31] Later the same year lead articles in Kinematograph and Film-Kurier blankly stated that none of those who had moved to Hollywood had enhanced their reputations. Rather, they had been rapidly Americanized. Instead of reciprocal enrichment the emigration had produced a “dangerous blend of styles.” Lubitsch in particular directed one pioneering film, The Marriage Circle, before settling down to become “Lubitsch in a circle,” making reruns rather than venturing into new territory as he had in Germany. Drawing the logical conclusion, Fritz Olimsky warned that the return of Americanized émigrés would threaten further Americanization of domestic production.^[32]

Probably the most insistent, reasoned evaluation of the detrimental influence of the Hollywood environment on German artists came from Herbert Ihering in response to the Parufamet agreement. It too prophesied as much as analyzed. Reflecting in light of Parufamet on earlier American-Swedish “cooperation,” which had cost that country two outstanding directors, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, Ihering saw an ominous parallel with current attempts to rescue the drowning UFA. The balance sheet of German achievement in Hollywood was not promising. Of Lubitsch’s works, only The Marriage Circle demonstrated constructive American input—the remainder showed America’s standardizing influence. Pola Negri’s performances likewise betrayed the absence of artistic development. Looking ahead following the news that Emil Jannings was bound for Hollywood, Ihering forecast that he too would be “absorbed” by the American system. What was the subtle trap set by Hollywood? For Ihering it was erasure of the distinction between filmic adeptness and artistic devotion which characterized the German cinema.

The development of inspiration, the enrichment of a personal approach has not kept pace with the necessary increase of ability in the filmic craft. For the American mastery of the craft and filmic inventiveness are identical. For Germans this is not so at present. They conform technically and thereby lose their personal imagination.^[33]

In one respect Ihering was simply warning against the excess routine for which American production was infamous. At another level, however, he was trying to articulate a distinction between Hollywood and Berlin which revisits that suggested by Haas’s review of Three Women. Where Haas noted the irreconcilability of conventionality and originality in German screenplays and their successful marriage in America, Ihering believed that a balance rather than a fusion of artistic and filmic impulses distinguished the German cinema from its American counterpart. Any upset of this balance portended extinction of what was unique to the German cinema. In thereby suggesting that German artists were not yet ready for Hollywood, Ihering defended the peculiarity of the German cinema which weakened it in international competition with American motion pictures.^[34]

Ihering’s dissatisfaction with German-American motion pictures focused on the incompatibility of American screenplays and German artists. Here he was not alone. Critics generally faulted films by émigrés, even those otherwise applauded, for just this weakness. Pola Negri’s American fate, a long and fascinating tale in its own right, can be summarized from the German perspective almost exclusively in these terms. With very few exceptions, notably one film directed by Lubitsch and two produced by Erich Pommer discussed below, her American work found little critical favor because it was felt she was saddled with unfortunate and inappropriate screenplays.^[35] Similarly, Emil Jannings, though winner of an Academy Award for his performance in Joseph von Sternberg’s The Last Command, became partner to sufficiently sentimental and moralizing screenplays to fulfill Ihering’s prophecy. E. A. Dupont, the famed director of Varieté, received some sympathy for being compelled to shoot an impossible script in his one American work.^[36] Similar sympathy was extended to Conrad Veidt for both roles he played in Hollywood. Although in all these cases the German artist was usually held less responsible than the dictates of the American production system, their subjection to that system was clearly not welcomed.^[37]

Unflattering assessments of German-American collaboration drew on prejudices which predated the main wave of emigration at middecade. These prejudices, reinforced by the backlash against Hollywood in Germany, growing disenchantment with Lubitsch’s output and apparent assembly-line exploitation of Pola Negri, spawned disparaging generalizations about émigré work in Hollywood even before the majority of them had a chance to prove themselves. Only in 1927 did the release of the maiden works of the most prominent producer, director and actor to depart in the wake of the UFA debacle—Erich Pommer, F. W. Murnau and Emil Jannings—offer a broader foundation for evaluating Hollywood’s meaning for German film artists. By then the main lines of critical discussion had already been established: concern for artistic purity in tension with popular appeal, fear that the liaison with America sapped German talent of its unique genius, and preoccupation with the screenplay as the beginning of Hollywood’s evil. Within these parameters the American debuts of Murnau, Jannings and Pommer assumed paramount significance for evaluations of German-American production. Murnau’s maiden work for Fox, Sunrise, based on a novel by Hermann Sudermann which was adapted by Carl Mayer, was the first of three features made over the next three years. Jannings’s The Way of All Flesh opened an American career spanning six films (one directed by Lubitsch) over three years. Pommer’s only two American productions, Hotel Imperial and Barbed Wire, starred Pola Negri and were set in the Great War. All four pictures presented German (Austrian) characters; three of them had European settings. Together they marked the zenith and limitations of German production in Hollywood.

Erich Pommer’s American work can easily be passed over as a minor interruption in a career marked by extraordinary achievements after World War I and again in the early phase of sound films. As production chief with Decla-Bioscop and UFA, Pommer made a substantial contribution to the flowering of German cinema and served as patron to a wide range of outstanding German film talent. Powerful, but increasingly at the center of controversy over UFA’s strategies when the credit crunch came in the midtwenties, he departed for the United States and found employment with Paramount. Returning to Germany in 1927 he served once again as UFA’s foremost production chief and supervised several of the most commercially successful early German talkies until forced to flee by the Nazi takeover.^[38] While his reputation therefore rests on two stages of German production, the hiatus in America presented an important transition. As contemporaries recognized, Hollywood schooled Pommer in production strategies appropriate to the international market.^[39]

Hotel Imperial and Barbed Wire chose motifs interwoven with the war yet at one remove from the front. The former, set in the Polish town of Lemberg under Russian occupation, chronicled romance between a wounded Austrian officer and a hotel maid. The latter, set behind the French lines, presented a tale of love and national reconciliation between a German prisoner of war and a French peasant girl. Both blended suspense, romance, feminine virtue, the struggle between good and evil and happy ending—in short, the stock-in-trade of Hollywood which critics usually lamented. Nevertheless, reaction to Pommer’s work was generally positive. Despite sharp hostility to American scripting conventions, critics admired these pictures not least for the relevance and human accessibility of their subject matter. They also recognized the cleverness with which Pommer selected setting and theme to avoid giving offense and to invest potentially divisive subjects with broad appeal. In several instances they expressed regret that Pommer had not produced movies of this stamp in Germany, thereby conceding that Hollywood had contributed positively to reorientation in his approach.^[40] His last German features, Faust,Tartüff and Metropolis, had been costly prestige pictures (in the case of Metropolis outrageously so) and an enormous burden to UFA when not sufficiently popular in the United States. Now the advocate of national cinema art as the key to international success supervised pictures whose subject matter and filmic polish had truly international appeal. The gap between artistic and box-office value had been overcome.^[41]

General approval for Pommer’s two American productions for combining cinematic sophistication and broad appeal suggests a shift in critical perspective since the release of the early Lubitsch imports. These, whose trademark was cultivation and subtlety, usually met criticism insofar as concessions were made to popular tastes. By contrast, Pommer received congratulations for satisfying them. The explanation for this apparent inconsistency lies in the circumstances under which each emigrated as well as in the evolution of critical expectations. In Germany Lubitsch had directed polished and popular motion pictures which paved the way to his employment in the United States. Pommer’s name was associated with a wide variety of motion pictures, but latterly with big-budget projects of dubious value to the industry at home or abroad. Although it would be an exaggeration to say he left Germany under a cloud, he certainly exited with the jury still out on whether he had been bane or blessing for postwar German cinema. Given this distinction in German profile, Pommer was under some pressure to redeem his reputation as a producer of remunerative entertainment.

At first glance this appears a countervailing pressure to that exerted by the shift in critical attitudes toward Hollywood since Lubitsch emigrated. In fact, however, sharpening discrimination toward the American product rested primarily on its inappropriateness for German audiences. By 1927 considerations of prestige so evident in discussion of Lubitsch’s early American work had given way to more pragmatic concerns. Germany could no longer afford costly experiments which might or might not pay their way. Solid, smooth entertainment of the sort offered by Hotel Imperial and Barbed Wire deserved emulation, just as it caused some retrospective chagrin that UFA had pursued unremunerative policies. Once more an outstanding German talent found his stride in Hollywood, to the benefit of the American industry.^[42]

While endorsing the two Pommer productions, experts proved much less eager than in response to Lubitsch’s work to distinguish between “German” and “American” influences. They did not, therefore, explicitly deduce that Hollywood deserved credit for modifying Pommer’s approach. Nor did they draw the rather obvious conclusion that these two films testified to the feasibility of mixed marriages that Lubitsch’s fate denied. Nonetheless, their commentary left little doubt that in this case Hollywood had provided a much needed corrective to domestic tendencies. By inference, they also conceded the Americanization of their own standards of motion-picture excellence: if Pommer’s work upon return to Germany can be taken as a guide, they would have had difficulty denying the importance of the lessons he learned in Hollywood.

While judgments passed on Pommer’s American output implied a bright future for joint German-American production, Sunrise and The Way of All Flesh reactivated controversy on this subject. Sunrise, in particular, provoked the most contradictory responses. Once again the earlier German career of Murnau set the stage for critical evaluation. If Pommer was the doyen of the German art film, Murnau was his foremost protégé. From Phantom and Nosferatu to Der letzte Mann, Faust and Tartüff, Murnau demonstrated an intensity of poetic vision and commitment to cinematic advance which marked him for special attention from the discriminating critic and viewer. Diverse, fantastic and potentially sensational though his film subjects proved, his thematic, rhythmic and photographic sensibilities were quite unlike those conventionally ascribed to Hollywood. It was these which William Fox purchased as artistic augmentation for his studio. From the German perspective, however, Murnau faced the formidable challenge of straddling the cultural divide between Hollywood and Berlin.^[43]

As a narrative Sunrise follows a peasant, bewitched by a seductress into attempting to murder his wife, from country to city and back again; from lust and attempted murder to remorse, reconciliation and happy end. Given that it was scripted by Carl Mayer, considered by many Germany’s foremost author of film, from a tale by Hermann Sudermann, and that its director and set designer (Rochus Gliese) were also Germans, it is understandable that Sunrise appeared “extraordinarily German,” despite American financing and production initiative.^[44] It was no secret, furthermore, that William Fox had given Murnau creative and financial license to create an artistic showpiece surpassing his German productions. American provision of monetary and technical support for German creative genius was an ideal balance of inputs. German artists therefore could create a picture of truly international significance to bridge the proverbial gap between national mentalities.

These extremely favorable preconditions notwithstanding, Murnau’s first American film did not live up to all expectations. Sunrise did, to be sure, elicit superlatives for overcoming deeply entrenched beliefs about the discrepancy between the artistic potential of cinema and the other creative arts. Attaining for serious drama what Chaplin had accomplished for comedy, Murnau synthesized the artistically valuable and commercially successful motion picture. Yet even the most ecstatic reviews registered caveats with regard to the screenplay. Despite the essential Germanness of the picture, Sudermann’s novel had been “Americanized” for the screen. Chief concessions to American tastes were the blatant contrast of character types and dramatic settings and the bending of Sudermann’s denouement to create marital bliss for the peasant and his wife. Critics complained that by rescuing the husband from the death he deserved Mayer did Sudermann an injustice, violated his own dramatic code and created psychological inconsistencies in the plot. Hans Pander captured critical ambivalence toward the picture when he remarked that the cooperation of Murnau and Carl Mayer was bound to result in an intriguing motion picture, but being American the film was equally bound to leave the viewer divided.^[45]

Thematic concessions were highlighted by Murnau’s fantastic cinematographic achievements, above all his facility at capturing ambience with light, lens and rhythm. Murnau had crafted an absolutely stunning work of cinematic art. Such awesome technical mastery in the service of “A Song of Two Humans” (the film’s subtitle) had critics groping for superlatives. But this same mastery intensified regret that Sunrise exhibited flaws of characterization and motivation. Here appeared confirmation of Ihering’s prophecy that German émigrés, especially the most artistically sophisticated of them, would find their creative capacities overwhelmed by Hollywood’s cinematic genius. Synchronization between Geist and Technik was lost. As one reviewer concluded, Sunrise was a superb motion picture, grandly conceived, but marked by unnerving concessions.^[46]

The discontinuities identified in Sunrise parallel discrepancies in critical standards applied to Murnau and Pommer, and not unlike those between Pommer and Lubitsch. Given the association of Pommer and Murnau prior to their respective departures for the United States, it is not immediately apparent why one should have been congratulated for concessions to public tastes while the other fell afoul of German opinion for the same. Critical practice arguably had vague auteurist tendencies, attributing greater weight to director and script writer than to producer: Murnau and Mayer were artists whereas Pommer was a businessman. Since, however, outstanding artists were applauded for overcoming the dualism of creativity and commerce, to reaffirm this dualism meant upholding critical paradigms which condemned cinema to second-class citizenship. The problem was not Sunrise, but latent resistance to the kind of synthesis otherwise so eagerly sought. As that synthesis came closer to realization in German-American production, experts resorted to conceptual structures which denied its possibility. The dividedness of Sunrise was essentially of their own making.

The incongruence between Geist and Technik critics identified in Sunrise surfaced even more glaringly in The Way of All Flesh. An outstanding character actor, Emil Jannings, served an enormous, well-oiled, technical apparatus to squeeze saline solution from the tear ducts of viewers. In Germany Jannings had starred in numerous pictures under the leading directors of the time—Lubitsch, Murnau, E. A. Dupont and Joe May. Rivaled as a character actor perhaps only by Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt, he had excelled in such diverse dramatic roles—historical, mythical and contemporary—that he increasingly became the cynosure of the pictures in which he played. By middecade prominent and self-possessed enough not to be a pawn of any interests but his own, he was an obvious if expensive recruit for Hollywood.^[47] Given his enormous and multifarious talents, it was fitting that whatever film included him should be crafted to capitalize on these talents. The Way of All Flesh did not disappoint in this regard. Critics gave Paramount full marks for recognizing and exploiting Jannings’s talents. He was the excuse for making the movie and was given a role designed to parade his capabilities.^[48]

If Jannings fully merited a starring role, the subject in which Paramount showcased his talents provoked much distaste and ironic criticism. Through division of The Way of All Flesh into a first half which objectively and masterfully recreated the lifestyle of a German-American family with Jannings at its head, and a second half which depicted his descent, via alcohol and seduction, to disgrace and destitution, critics pinpointed the objectionable elements of the American formula. That the second half offered no miraculous restoration of the outcast father did not redeem the film. The tragic ending proved as forced and fanciful as the fairy-tale ending of Der letzte Mann. The thick sentimentality in which it was wrapped overwhelmed any respect for what otherwise may have qualified as narrative consistency.^[49] Hollywood had calculated the tear-jerking effect and in the process abused Jannings’s great talents. According to Willy Haas, the last half of the film was pure melodrama which could “bring tears to the eyes of a wooden trunk.” With a touch of ironic humor mustered by few others, he refrained from detailed criticism of Jannings’s virtuoso performance by claiming visual impairment by tears.^[50]

Very mixed responses to the blend of Jannings and Hollywood militated against approval of German-American collaboration. However, despite major flaws in the screenplay from a German point of view, reports of audience reaction suggest that The Way of All Flesh had the intended effect on German as well as American tear glands. Haas’s eyes were not the only wet ones in German theaters.^[51] Hollywood therefore deserved credit both for placing Jannings in the spotlight and for devising a popular subject and treatment with a German ambience—the same facility identified in Pommer’s American works. Hans Wollenberg, editor of Lichtbildbühne, isolated Hollywood’s contribution to the mix by contrasting German and American utilization of a talent like Jannings. The former searched literary works for a motif suited to a psychological chamber drama. The latter found a popular subject calculated to grip hearts and dampen eyes. From this perspective a synthesis of Jannings and Hollywood was fruitful, even though The Way of All Flesh qualified as a world-class motion picture solely thanks to Jannings.^[52]

Even though in 1926–1927 Murnau and Jannings, not to mention compatriots like Paul Leni, Ludwig Berger, Conrad Veidt and Lya de Putti, were just launching American careers, with The Way of All Flesh the thematic cycle of German interest in émigré production in the United States was essentially complete. From first anxious inquiries about the shape of Lubitsch’s American films to assessments of maiden works by Pommer, Jannings and Murnau, critics revisited the cultural divisions assumed to exist between Germany and the United States. The permutations possible in answer to the question whether Germany’s best would remain German and unsurpassed in Hollywood mark the points on a preset circle of opinion. In Lubitsch’s first works experts addressed the threat of deterioration in national film identity. Open exultation in the triumph of German artistry alternated with regret or recrimination at émigré transgression of boundaries set in Germany. Oscillation followed a discernible pattern. First came elation at the breakthrough of native talent overseas and confidence that it made a unique contribution to Hollywood. Close on its heels came hairsplitting over the Germanness of the final product. At middecade, when the main exodus took place, experts still waffled on whether to judge by criteria of art or accessibility, prestige or profit. Depending upon the prior record of the émigré and predilection of the reviewer, émigré work could be welcomed for its universal appeal (Pommer), greeted as a cinematic milestone but criticized for compromise (Murnau) or given both treatments simultaneously (Jannings).

In parallel with this critical trimming experts developed a two-track scheme for apportioning responsibility for the finished work. The mainline approach, presaged already in analysis of EFA, was to credit German personnel with the laudable features of a given production, blame American meddling or mentalities for concessions and pity German artists condemned to second-class status by the Hollywood system. Fault belonged to the Americans primarily because they imposed unbearably formulaic screenplays on German directors and forced performers into schematic roles. Even when the end result was box-office value which experts urged for domestic production, approbation remained qualified and quality was credited to German input. Fear of losing German filmic traditions curbed gratitude that German artists were finally gaining international popularity via Hollywood. In all of this there obtained enormous confidence that Germans overseas enhanced American production values, that Hollywood desperately needed German talent to inject art and culture into its factory system. Regressive or unproductive influence worked in one direction—from California to Berlin.

Against this mainstream there flowed, however, currents of opinion both more favorable to Hollywood and explicitly critical of Germany’s contribution to American cinema. Appreciation for Pommer’s achievement, and with qualifications for the American work of Lubitsch, Murnau and Jannings, included respect for Hollywood’s input and for further German-American collaboration. In select cases it went further to question whether German personnel were slaves of the American system or necessarily positive contributors to it. Contemporaries did not always exonerate the émigrés as helpless victims. Rudolf Arnheim castigated Jannings for doing no more in The Way of All Flesh—at a very high salary—than had been expected of him, and Herbert Ihering accused him of going “the way of Hollywood,” that is, allowing himself to be partner to cheap melodrama.^[53] Kurt Pinthus took criticism a step farther, inverting the usual concern for Americanisms which polluted German artistry to consider Germanisms which misled Hollywood. Using Sunrise and The Way of All Flesh as test cases, he argued that Hollywood had incorporated features characteristic of the German chamber drama to the detriment of its own cinematic excellence. Already superior to the German cinema in comedy, adventure and society films, the Americans chose to play catch-up in a German specialty. The result, however momentarily novel to American audiences, was anachronistic for German eyes. The incongruity he noted in Sunrise was not that between form and content but between state-of-the-art American cinematography and antiquated acting styles. The American performers, George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor, had abandoned sparse mimicry for dramatic effect but achieved quite the opposite. Exaggerated, ponderous acting was not only dated, but also, ironically, out of place because it had long since been superseded in Germany by a style gleaned from America. In The Way of All Flesh the Americans deserved credit for curbing Jannings’s tendency to overact. But if first-rate as a solo performance, the very role and its filmic rendering were essentially atavistic. According to Pinthus, the character types depicted here were reminiscent of motion picture practice twenty years earlier.^[54]

The moral of the story has a familiar ring. In the era of initiation Herbert Ihering had suggested that by some perverse logic the exchange of national film identities resulted in the adoption by each country of precisely those traits of the other which were least fruitful or desirable. Pinthus arrived at much the same conclusion. Though differing from those who feared loss of German purity in the American film capital, he too cast doubt on the advisability of cooperative production. He also joined majority opinion on Sunrise and The Way of All Flesh in the tacit judgment that while both represented progress for Murnau and Jannings in certain respects, they also revealed the breakdown of the overall consistency for which these artists were celebrated in Germany. Gains impressive in isolation were no compensation for loss of rootedness and consistency. In this context it was no longer necessary to denounce Hollywood or defend the Germans who worked there. Germany’s best were still supreme, but not in America. In sum, working from a generally high opinion of the American cinema, Pinthus joined with other critics to judge German endeavors in Hollywood artistic misfits. To use the language employed by Harry Kahn in reference to The Way of All Flesh, the combination of German and American ingredients resulted in motion pictures which were “not meat and not fish, not Hollywood and not Babelsberg, but a sugary, schmaltzy mixture of both.”^[55]

Subsequent American pictures by Jannings confirmed that over time mixed marriages had decreasing chance of success. Like Lubitsch, Jannings was seen as too talented to be ruined entirely by Hollywood’s commercialism. But also like Lubitsch, he appeared suspended between cultural poles, leaning first one way and then the next, but increasingly tending to surrender to the American side. When teamed with European directors on European themes—as in The Patriot (Lubitsch) and The Last Command (Joseph von Sternberg)—he came closest to meeting German expectations.^[56] When employed to revisit the depths of Anglo-America moralizing or family schmaltz, as in The King of Soho or Sins of the Fathers, he prostituted his enormous abilities.^[57] In sum, despite important exceptions, attitudes toward German production in the United States, both before and after the middecade exodus, were sceptical. Generalizations made in 1926 did not lose their force. The path from curiosity and anxiety to ambivalence and scepticism proved a one-way street. The lesson taught by the American careers of Lubitsch, Murnau et al. was that the longer the sojourn in Hollywood, the less possibility there appeared for fulfillment of artistic promise shown in Germany.

The original emigration to Hollywood proved a short-lived phenomenon. Apart from the inability of some émigrés to find their niche in America, the sound revolution altered the whole foundation of their existence abroad. Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt and Pola Negri all abandoned Hollywood late in the decade. Erich Pommer began work again for UFA in late 1927. Paul Leni died suddenly, still a young man, in 1929. F. W. Murnau came under studio constraints after the poor box-office showing of Sunrise and made only two further pictures, City Girl and Four Devils, neither of which lived up to his German reputation. Thoroughly disenchanted with Hollywood, he shot a film about life in the South Seas, Tabu, before an automobile accident claimed his life in 1931. At the start of a new decade only two really prominent Germans, the original émigré, Ernst Lubitsch, and the most recent one, Marlene Dietrich, were active in Hollywood. Those Hollywood otherwise enlisted to produce German talkies were of lesser fame and their output elicited neither great interest nor great enthusiasm.

In retrospect it is arguable that the émigrés had so many conflicting standards to meet that they were all but condemned in the long run. In the silent era their efforts met with intense scrutiny, both because of their lofty reputations and out of preoccupation with the consequences of blending German and American approaches. For the same reasons critical opinion was seldom unequivocal. Had the artists in question remained at home, their endeavors would still have been measured by a very strict rule, particularly beyond the confines of the trade press. The fact that they worked in Hollywood simultaneously blunted and sharpened criticism. Shortcomings in their films were blamed on Hollywood, yet they were expected, as representatives of the German cinema, to meet the highest qualitative standard. In a number of cases initial joint productions met with acclaim, relief that the given German artist had not been absorbed by Hollywood, or even admiration for the amalgamation of American finance and German Geist. The long-term prospects for Germans in Hollywood were, however, dimly viewed. American inroads into German independence seemed inevitable. Sooner or later the American system extracted concessions from German artists which compromised their talents.

Notes