Alan Boyle pointed out on the Louise Brooks Society Facebook page the recent availability of Dance with Death: The Ufa Star Sybille Schmitz (2000), a ten year old documentary about the once popular 1930s German actress who not only had a small featured role in the Louise Brooks film, The Diary of a Lost Girl, but was also the inspiration for the title character Veronika Voss in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s celebrated film of the same name.
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| Sybille Schmitz and Louise Brooks in The Diary of a Lost Girl |
Besides Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), Schmitz's other early roles include Carl Th. Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), and eventually F.P.1 (1932), where she played her first leading role. I don't speak German, but was able to watch this fascinating documentary with the closed captions turned on, as if it were subtitled.
In The Diary of a Lost Girl, Schmitz plays Elisabeth, the pregnant housekeeper who is thrown out of the house by Thymian's father. Elisabeth is soon found dead, setting in motion a chain of events with tragic consequences. As Dance with Death notes, it was Schmitz's second film role, and already her second on-screen death. The documentary also notes the dark atmosphere which seemed to hang around the actress. The Wikipedia entry on Schmitz states, "Coincidentally, the last film she made less than two years before taking her own life (1953's The House on the Coast, now considered a lost film) had Schmitz's character committing suicide as a last act of desperation. A much earlier film, Frank Wisbar's The Unknown (1936) ends with the suicide of Schmitz's character, also in a final act of desperate hopelessness.)
Despite it's gloom, I recommend Dance with Death: The Ufa Star Sybille Schmitz. It is interesting to say the least. For example, with the rise of Nazism, the film suggests Schmitz felt a frustration with a film industry which increasingly devalued her dark features. As her Wikipedia entry states, "... her explicitly non-Aryan appearance relegated her mostly to femme-fatales or problematic foreign women." That got me wondering about Brooks' dark features and what role they may have played in her acceptance among German film goers.
Another documentary about another supporting player in The Diary of a Lost Girl is Prisoner of Paradise, the story of Kurt Gerron. In the Brooks film, Gerron plays Dr. Vitalis, who is featured in the nightclub scene where Brooks' character, Thymian, is auctioned off.
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| Kurt Gerron and Louise Brooks in The Diary of a Lost Girl |
Prisoner of Paradise is a 2002 documentary about one of the great German actors of the 1920s and 1930s.
He appeared in many films and stage productions, but today is best
remembered for a key supporting role in The Blue Angel (1930), with Marlene Dietrich. After being sent to a
concentration camp, Gerron was forced by his captors to direct the pro-Nazi
propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews. In addition to
exploring his life, Prisoner of Paradise details a remarkable detective story in which
Gerron's film, lost for decades after World War II, was tracked down and
painstakingly put back together.
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