Will Quadflieg Movies

The German/Swiss The Journey (originally Die Reiss) is an objective look at neo-Fascist terrorism. Markus Boysen plays a member of a terrorist gang who breaks away from the movement. He also "kidnaps" his son from the gang's commune, rather than have the boy raised to be a terrorist himself. In flashback, we see that Boysen was the son of a celebrated Nazi author, whose mansion was confiscated by the occupying American troops. It is to this same mansion, now boarded up and in disrepair, that Boysen escapes to with his son. The Journey ends with the suggestion that the child will be traumatically motivated to follow in the bloody footsteps of his father and grandfather. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The cinemazation of Goethe's Faust is little more than a photographed stage play. The story is as ever: ageing scholar Faust (Will Quadflieg) enters into a pact with the Devil, here named Mephisto (Gustaf Grundgens). In exchange, Faust will be granted youth and unbounded intelligence. This unholy alliance results in tragedy for Faust and all who come in contact with him, especially the unfortunate Gretchen (Ella Buchi). Faust was lensed during a performance of the Goethe piece, staged at the Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Max Ophuls' final film (and his only movie in color) is a cinematic tour-de-force masquerading as a biography, in this case a dazzling fictionalized life of the notorious 19th century dancer, actress, and courtesan. A still beautiful, but weary and disillusioned (and, as we later discover, ailing) Lola Montes (Martine Carol) is first seen as the featured attraction at a seedy American circus, appearing at the center of a series of various tableaux depicting the scandalous events for which she is known. With a strangely sincere yet sinister and manipulative ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) providing color commentary, some of it very ironic on two or more levels, the movie flows between these staged recreations in the circus and the events as recalled by the subject. In a series of dissolves, the film takes us through her girlhood with her mother, interrupted when her mother's lover (Ivan Desni) becomes attached to the daughter; her unhappy marriage and its aftermath; romances with composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg), abduction by a Russian general (in the arms of Cossacks, no less); her affairs across the landscape of Europe with men great and notable; her thwarted aspirations as a dancer; and her romance with King Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook) of Bavaria, which led to her being made Countess of Landsfeld, and, later, to his abdication. The gracefulness of Ophuls' cyclical narrative, and the transitions between the recalled elegance of the locales, and the people with whom her romances and affairs took place, and the seediness of the circus -- where she is also compelled, in the course of performing, to perform as an aerialist -- were lost on viewers in 1955. And for many years the movie only existed in a version re-cut without the director's approval, in which the story was presented in linear fashion. It was only in the 1960's, long after Ophuls' death, that efforts were made to restore the original structure, and in 2008 the movie's original Technicolor luster was restored to its full depth and richness. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi