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Die Ratten (The rats, 1955), Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (The Devil strikes at midnight, 1957), and—arguably— Dorothea Angermann (1958), Siodmak’s second German career remained one of unfulfilled promises and aborted ventures, a period of mere industriousness that ended in Siodmak’s final retirement in Ascona, Switzerland, during the 1960s. To be sure, The Devil Strikes at Midnight did win more or less every award German cinema had to offer in the late 1950s; the Süddeutsche Zeitung hailed this tale about sexual murder in murderous Nazi Germany as an “oasis in the vast desert of formal boredom.”58 And both The Rats and Dorothea Angermann, similar to The Devil Strikes at Midnight, alluded to American film noir in order to picture West German society as a dystopian space of repression and displacement haunted by a past that would not go away. But when compared to the most productive phases of his earlier career (Berlin, 1929 –1933; Paris, 1936 –1939; Hollywood, 1943 –1949), Siodmak’s German films of the 1950s clearly lacked formal rigor and creative direction. “The long list of failed projects in the 1950s evidences the delicate circumstances [Siodmak] tried to master. In contrast to Hollywood, he encountered poor cinematographers; he had to fight arduously to finance his endeavors. Siodmak, who had always benefited from established configurations, who had been able to adapt and integrate himself, was now forced to create these connections himself, had to find stories, production facilities, and sponsors.”59 Leaving the Hollywood studio system at the brink of its disintegration, Siodmak failed to find in West Germany what throughout his earlier career had propelled him to excellence: a self-assured film industry driven by highly professional standards and a clear division of labor.
On his first return to Germany in 1952 Siodmak was struck by how the war had changed the light of his native city, Berlin.60 As if Nazi warfare had realized what modernist architects had aspired to all along, Siodmak perceived the gaps in the urban landscape as a chance to start from scratch and build a culture of light and enlightenment rather than of darkness and terror. Three years later Siodmak was eager to attribute this sense of a new beginning to the position of postwar German cinema as well: “Certainly, technically a great deal is still to be desired here. But in Berlin what you do not have is the unbearable pressure of the big studio as in Hollywood, the industrial business to which every director must subject himself, whether he wants it or not. It is inevitable that creativity suffers under such pressure; one has to summon up one’s whole power and energy in order to get one’s way.”61 Oddly miscalculating the grounds of his own earlier successes, Siodmak’s 1955 assessment proved to be right and wrong at the same time.
Once he returned to West German filmmaking, Siodmak was soon to en-
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counter high-handed producers, such as Arthur Brauner, who dictated contracts from above and—assured of domestic box office returns—radically pared down any investments in location work, production values, screenplays, and cinematographic quality. What Siodmak initially perceived as the blank slate of German filmmaking turned out to be an institutional vacuum that frustrated his remarkable ability to negotiate conflicting talents, agendas, and traditions. Whereas the contested force field of classical studio filmmaking indeed impelled Siodmak to unfold his full power and energy, the administered provinciality of German postwar cinema in the 1950s quickly resulted in a personal history of formal stagnation and ideological self-denial. Once a highly proficient engineer of universal stories and gripping audiovisions, Siodmak began his most onerous exile when he returned to what used to be home.
For a brief moment in 1959 it seemed as if Siodmak’s second German career could take a dramatic turn for the better. In a review article for the influential Filmkritik Enno Patalas praised the visual style of The Spiral Staircase, placing Siodmak right next to the heroes of Weimar expressionist theater and cinema: “Here, the world of German silent film is still alive, the world of mirrors and shadows, of demons and of the demonically haunted. Already the title announces a well-known motif: the staircase—
handed down by Jeßner’s stage (Jeßner himself shot Hintertreppe)—provided a symbol for an ‘inward turn,’ an architectural means to integrate space vertically, to encompass human beings, to tie them to a specific path, to restrict their escape into the open.”62 Siodmak represented for Patalas a
“better Germany,” a German cinema that had subterraneously survived Nazi barbarism in exile. Moreover, Patalas endorsed Siodmak as a missionary for a new national art cinema powerful enough to displace the growing influence of American mass culture in Germany as much as the cloddish amnesia of the homespun Heimatfilme. Siodmak, Patalas implied, was to bring to West Germany what Bergman, Chabrol, Fellini, Godard, and Truffaut at the same time developed in other European film contexts: a modernist language of experimentation and transgression, a cinema of strong authorial signatures that escaped generic formulas and the star system.
But Patalas’s praises of 1959, of course, only evidenced yet another facet of Siodmak’s misrecognition in West German postwar culture. As I argued above, Siodmak had never been an expressionist in the canonical sense.
Whatever was reminiscent of Weimar cinema in his Hollywood work was highly performative; it recalled the past as pastiche and masquerade to challenge reified notions of continuity and historical determination. Nor had Siodmak ever been an auteur in the emphatic perspective of the postwar
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generation. His place was clearly not among the young European cineastes who set out toward the end of the 1950s to rebel against Hollywood illusionism. In spite of Patalas’s accolades Siodmak remained distant to the group of German filmmakers who at the Oberhausen festival in 1962 declared their intention to redo German film history and free German cinema
“from the conventions of the established industry.”63
Contrary to the program of young filmmakers around 1960, Siodmak’s most remarkable films had evolved from within the bounds of a viable studio system. Whereas West German popular taste continued to reject Siodmak’s American work of the 1940s, the young German filmmakers of the 1960s quickly came to scorn Siodmak as a representative of both Hollywood commercialism and Papas Kino. In part because of his own critical misjudgments, the former exile Siodmak was never able to fit any of the categories postwar German film culture was developing in order either to flee or to confront the Nazi past. He was seen either as too much or as too little of an avant-gardist, and he soon disappeared into oblivion. It was not until the Berlin Film Festival of 1998 that a broader public finally reassessed the troubled relationship of German cinema to Siodmak’s many careers. In the festival’s retrospective Siodmak reemerged as a director whose best features embraced studio filmmaking in order to explore the dialectics of modern contingency. The festival reestablished Siodmak as a highly versatile director who had melded images and sounds into a cinematic language that at its best was at once popular and modernist.
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7 Pianos, Priests,
and Popular Culture
Sirk, Lang, and the Legacy
of American Populism
Robert Siodmak’s triumph in Hollywood dovetailed with the boom of the American film industry during and shortly after World War II. Siodmak’s film noirs of the mid-1940s indicated the extent to which the war had brought a host of new talents, a spirit of innovation, and relative progressivism to the classical studio system. As a B genre par excellence, film noir in the 1940s might have relied on the same kind of industry structures and moviegoing habits that had characterized American cinema since the arrival of synchronized sound in the late 1920s. It was designed for viewers who considered motion pictures an integral part of American cultural life and who went to the movies at least once a week on average. But on the other hand the rise of film noir in the early 1940s inaugurated a period in which various political, economic, social, and technological forces would deeply change dominant industry structures and audience expectations. Film noir demonstrated that the war experience had passed a new kind of maturity on to American audiences as much as to the film industry. Siodmak’s success around 1945 in no small part relied on his ability to use studio filmmaking at the height of its productivity to communicate a pending sense of crisis and industrial transformation. His films espoused the entire range of modern experience and mass culture, yet at the same time they gratified newly emerging demands for greater product differentiation and cultural diversification.
Although American global power in the immediate postwar era was radically on the rise, the Hollywood film industry experienced a dramatic downturn in 1947. The late 1940s in fact became the most afflicted period of American filmmaking. The industry was plagued not only by drastically declining box office returns but also by labor struggles and runaway production costs, by censorship battles and anticommunist hysteria, by defiant 201
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exhibitors and antitrust rulings.1 For many the 1948 Paramount Case—
which outlawed the practice of vertical integration that had proven so profitable for the major studios and thus effectively terminated classical studio operations within less than a decade—signified the climax of Hollywood’s postwar troubles. But the downfall of American filmmaking starting in the second half of the 1940s did not simply reflect the impact of unprecedented political interventions into studio structures, nor did it result solely from inner-industrial struggles or the escalating uncoupling of star and studio systems. Rather, it had much to do with postwar transformations of American society as a whole: “[P]ostwar changes in the average work week, leisure time, disposable income, and consumer interest disrupted the loyal partnership that had existed for more than twenty years between the motion picture industry and its audience.”2 Suburbanization moved audiences away from inner-city theaters. Instead of spending their money for movies, Americans in the immediate postwar period invested in homes, cars, house appliances, or bank accounts. After years of wartime shortages consumers suddenly yearned for new kinds of leisure activities that privileged participatory recreation over mass-produced entertainment. They wanted to engage in golfing or boating, camping or gardening, and found Hollywood particularly ill prepared to satisfy their demands for more diversified pastimes.
In spite of dwindling audience figures and growing political constraints, however, Hollywood features of the immediate postwar era showed some surprising signs of vitality and aesthetic experimentation. Films such as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler), Crossfire (1947, Edward Dmytryk), Gentleman’ s Agreement (1947, Elia Kazan), and All the King’ s Men (1949, Robert Rossen) infused American cinema with an innovative blend of realism and social awareness. They addressed burning issues of the day (veteran’s reintegration, anti-Semitism, political corruption), bran-dished present hypocrisies from a liberal-left perspective, and upset dominant standards of illusionism and identification. By 1950, however, little was left of this spirit of departure. Troubled by both the HUAC inquiries and the dramatic decline of the market, studios such as MGM, Warner’s, Paramount, and RKO eschewed whatever could be read as a trace of left-leaning liberalism. With the notable exception of Twentieth Century–Fox, Hollywood major studios turned openly conservative. They desisted from aesthetic innovation and social realism to appease anticommunist inquisi-tors as much as to recapture viewers who preferred to spend their leisure time amid the more alluring scenes of the outdoors and of suburban commodity consumption.
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James Agee, in a 1948 column for The Nation, described the troubled position of postwar American cinema as follows: It is hard to believe that absolutely first-rate works of art can ever again be made in Hollywood, but it would be idiotic to assume that flatly. If they are to be made there, they will most probably develop along the directions worked out during the past year or two; they will be journal-istic, semi-documentary, and “social-minded,” or will start that way and transcend those levels. . . . It is now an absolute certainty that every most hopeful thing that has been stirring in Hollywood is petrified more grimly than ever before.3
