Late last year, I ran a short series of blogs highlighting some of the new and unusual material I have come across while researching Louise Brooks' life and career. This was research conducted over the internet during the stay-at-home doldrums of the 2020 pandemic lock-down. My research has continued into 2021, as have the stay-at-home orders. Thanks to longtime Louise Brooks Society supporter Tim Moore, I have recently come across a handful of new and unusual items which I wish to share. This post kicks off another short series of blogs highlighting that material.
In the past, the UK newspaper Daily Telegraph ran a regular feature called "London Day by Day," featuring short news bits about and related to life in the English capitol. In August of 1934, it ran a piece on the English-born actor Charlie Chaplin, followed by a piece on the German actor Fritz Kortner (Brooks' co-star in Pandora's Box), who was then a recent emigrant to England. These two piece reveal the tenor of the times.
Chaplin’s movies were banned in Germany because of the actor’s suspected Jewish heritage. Though Nazi hatred of Chaplin is well known, their deep contempt for the widely loved comedian is still surprising, even shocking, after all these years - especially when one reads the Nazi description of Chaplin as "A nasty little Jew, not yet hanged." This clipping, it is worth noting, came 6 years before Chaplin satirized Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940).
Also surprising to me is the mention of Pandora's Box (a silent film) having shown in Berlin in 1934, some five years after it was first released - that is, four to five years into the sound era and a year after the Nazis assumed power. What also surprised me is the description of Pandora's Box as a "distinctly Liberalistic, if not Marxist" film. (It is unclear to me if that is the attitude of the Nazis, or the newspaper.) The clipping also mentions that Pandora's Box was one of the last films shown at the Camera theatre before it was closed by the Nazis, implying that this "world famous pocket cinema" was shuttered because of the films it showed.
The director behind Pandora's Box, the Austrian-born G. W. Pabst, was known as a left-of-center film-maker, and a number of his films contain subtle and not-so-subtle critiques of German society. (Pabst's critical attitude toward German society is also apparent in the other film he made with Brooks, Diary of a Lost Girl). Despite, or perhaps in addition to Pabst's leftist politics, what likely got the Camera theatre shuttered was the fact that Brooks' co-star in Pandora's Box, Fritz Kortner, was Jewish. (No doubt, Kortner left Germany in 1934 because the Nazis prohibited Jewish individuals from working in the film industry. Also exiled because of the Nazi ban were members of Syd Kay's Fellows, the small jazz band seen playing at Lulu's wedding in Pandora's Box.)
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| Fritz Kortner looms over Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box. A Menorah sits on the shelf to the left. |
I don't know much of anything about Die Kamera theater, now demolished, except for what can be found on its Cinema Treasures page. Built in 1928, the theater was badly damaged by Allied bombs during World War II. It was not reopened, and later the Russian Embassy was built at its site. If any reader of this blog knows more, I would certainly be interested to learn what I might about its existence in the early 1930s. I would also be especially interested in obtaining any vintage newspaper advertisements from the time, especially for Pandora's Box. I wonder which German newspaper might have carried them?
Cinema Treasures has a couple of image of this historic theater, one an interior view, and another 1936 image of an exterior, street view. (That image, the image shown below, is a cropped from this Wikipedia image.) Its name, Kamera, can be seen behind the lamp pole above the door in the middle of the image. Another image of the theater, dating from 1934, and with Nazi flags hanging from the building exterior, can be found HERE.
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