Sibylle Schmitz Movies
The haunting Leone in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), Sybille Schmitz remains perhaps the most unusual of Nazi-era German stars, her tragic fate long remembered by such postwar filmmakers as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who based his Veronica Voss (1981) partially on her. Dark and with enormous brooding eyes, Schmitz's almost somnambulistic beauty was perfect for Dreyer's vampire allegory but Ufa didn't know what to do with her and the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, disliked her and thought her "too foreign."A favorite of director Frank Wysbar (Wisbar in Hollywood), Schmitz starred in one of the strangest films to emerge during the Third Reich, Fährmann Maria (1936), in which she played a ferryperson attempting to save a doomed youth from Death. Wysbar remade the film for low-budget company PRC in Hollywood in 1945 but former Miss America Rosemary La Planche was hardly a worthy successor to the ethereal Sybille. Schmitz suffered blacklisting by the regime for a while but stage director Gustaf Gründgens persuaded Goebbels to allow her to star in Tanz auf dem Vulkan (Dance on the Volcano, 1938), one of the many circus melodramas made during the Nazi regime. She was also in Titanic (1943), a retelling of the famous maritime disaster that was promptly banned by Goebbels for being too depressing and not anti-British enough. The drama survives, however, and Schmitz once again offers a standout performance.
Fearing that she was washed up and probably suffering from the aftereffects of her Nazi-era troubles, the postwar Sybille Schmitz became addicted to alcohol and drugs. She still worked regularly both in films and on the legitimate stage but the old mystique was missing. In April 1955, she was found unconscious in her Munich apartment, an apparent victim of a suicide attempt. Without regaining consciousness, the former star died a few days later at a Munich hospital. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
- 1952
This minor 1952 drama resurfaced during the 1989 Berlin Film Festival, and was found to have previously unsuspected historical and artistic merit. At the time it was made, Sybille Schmitz, one of the great movie stars and beauties of the Nazi era, was fading into her final dissipation and scandal-ridden suicide in 1955 (the subject of a later film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Veronika Voss). At the same time, two of her costars in this film, Hardy Kruger and Hildegard Knef, were just beginning to make their presence known. The story in this black and white film in some ways parallels the actor's actual circumstances at the time, and gains resonance from that fact. In the film, Schmitz is a wealthy widow who has grown romantically attached to a band leader who is at least as well known for his seductions as for his music. When her son, Kruger, becomes aware of her impending marriage to this cad, he enlists the help of his tragically ill fiancee (Knef) to unmask this man for the villain he really is. Alas, when the widow's illusions are shattered, her dreams are also, and by the end of the film she is alone and miserable, watching the two young lovers head off "into the sunset." ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Hardy Kruger
This dramatic recounting of the disastrous maiden voyage of H.M.S. Titanic was produced in Germany during WWII and features an undertow of anti-British propaganda absent from other versions of the story. The building of the luxurious ocean liner Titantic proves to be a hugely expensive proposition, and Sir Bruce Ismay (Ernst Fritz Furbringer), president of White Star Lines, wants to make sure that the ship's first crossing is big news. It is at his urging that Capt. Edward J. Smith (Otto Wernicke) pushes for a record speed in their voyage to New York, sowing the seeds for later disaster. This Titanic features a number of rich, decadent British passengers and a handful noble German peasants. While the film was produced with the participation of the Nazi government, its portrait of a disaster at sea proved to be more depressing than inspiring, and it was pulled from theaters shortly after its initial release, though it has since appeared on television and on home video in Europe. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- 1933
This deluxe German/British production was originally released as simply F.P. 1. The story and characterizations take a back seat to the massive sets and state-of-art (for 1933) special effects. The floating aerodrome which provides the film's centerpiece is a truly impressive creation, far more so than the penny-dreadful espionage plotline involving plans to sabotage the mid-Atlantic airport. Among the scripters were future directors Curt Siodmak, Walter Reisch and Robert Stevenson, all of whom flourished in the dual Berlin/London market that would be broken up with the emergence of Hitler. Retitled F.P. 1 Doesn't Answer, the film was released in the U.S. by Hollywood's Fox Studios, which bestowed top billing upon American actor Leslie Fenton--over and above the more illustrious Conrad Veidt. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Hans Albers, Paul Hartmann, (more)
German filmmaker G.W. Pabst and Hollywood expatriate Louise Brooks re-team after the success of Pandora's Box for the silent film Diary of a Lost Girl. On the day of her confirmation, innocent young Thymiane Henning (Brooks) is given a lockable diary as a present. She's distraught because the housekeeper Elisabeth (Sibylle Schmitz) is leaving under curious circumstances and turns up presumably dead. Her duties are taken over by the conniving Meta (Franziska Kinz), who accepts the advances of Thymiane's pharmacist father (Josef Ravensky). Trying to understand Elisabeth's fate, Thymiane agrees to meet her father's assistant, Meinert (Fritz Rasp). She passes out, he carries her up to her room, and by the next scene she has borne a child by him. Meta snoops in Thymiane's diary and finds out it was Meinert's baby, so she suggests they get married. Thymiane refuses, so they throw her in a creepy reformatory for fallen women and leave her baby with a midwife. While in the reformatory, she meets Erika (Edith Meinhard), with whom she eventually escapes. To escape from poverty and homelessness, the girls then become nominal prostitutes in a brothel and are "sexually liberated." ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Louise Brooks, Fritz Rasp, (more)
