Monsters, Criminals and Private Dicks: Hollywood Exile Cinema of the ´30s and ´40s

The influx of émigré filmmakers from Germany and Central Europe to Hollywood had already begun before the Nazi Party seized power, but after 1933 artists from the German film industry flooded into Los Angeles. Directors, writers, and actors like Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, and Vicki Baum joined already-established Hollywood figures like Ernst Lubitsch, Marlene Dietrich, and Salka Viertel, who were or would soon become unwelcome in their homelands. Over the next several decades, this group of directors, writers, and producers would leave a lasting imprint on Hollywood cinema, becoming particularly associated with the development of genres with darker themes, like horror and film noir. In this course, we will look at some of the films produced by this diverse group of émigré filmmakers, including The Black Cat (Ulmer, 1934), Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935), You Only Live Once (Lang, 1937), The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle, 1937), To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch, 1942), Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944), The Phantom Lady (Richard Siodmak, 1944), and Der Verlorene (Lorre, 1951). We will ask to what extent we can understand such a varied body of work as unified by its insistence on the political within the “apolitical” framework of Hollywood--as Gerd Gemünden has defined German exile cinema in his study Continental Strangers.

Patrick Brown is a visiting instructor from the University of Iowa.

This course is particularly recommended for students of the Angewandte Studiengänge.