William Dieterle: The Search
Though his career as a film director spanned three decades of near-constant work, William Dieterle (his last name is pronounced “Dee-ter-lee”) has never garnered much of a reputation of any kind. Andrew Sarris places Dieterle in the “Miscellany” section at the end of his book The American Cinema and pats him on the head with this line: “Dieterle was around on the set when many interesting things happened over the years, and it is reasonable to assume that he had something to do with them.” Dieterle has 88 credits as a director, and perhaps there are more bad films on that list than good ones. But the good ones shyly ask for more attention than they have received.
If he is remembered at all, Dieterle is mainly noted as the prime architect of that award-seeking and unloved thing, the Hollywood biopic. He directed Dolores Del Rio as Madame Du Barry (1934), Kay Francis as Florence Nightingale in The White Angel (1935), and Paul Muni in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), which won Muni an Oscar. The following year Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola, which also starred Muni, won an Oscar for best picture, and the Muni-Dieterle team stayed together for the lavish and intricate Juarez (1939). Dieterle did two decent biopics with Edward G. Robinson, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and A Dispatch from Reuter’s (1940), and Van Heflin played Andrew Johnson for Dieterle in Tennessee Johnson (1942). And then Dieterle brought his Hollywood career to a close with a biopic of Richard Wagner called Magic Fire (1955), which he produced himself, and Omar Khayyam (1957), where Cornel Wilde played the Persian poet. While Dieterle’s biopics have some virtues, in the main they are heavy and solemn, seemingly bent on being educational, and marred by the self-important acting of Muni and the miscasting of some crucial roles. A Dieterle retrospective of these ten biopics would probably not be too robustly attended.
Dieterle had been an actor himself in his native Germany. He was born in poverty in 1893, and he worked as a carpenter and scrap dealer before getting jobs in the theater and joining Max Reinhardt’s celebrated theater troupe. He was a handsome guy but reticent, lacking in animation, yet this didn’t stop him from getting lots of acting work, notably as leading man to Asta Nielsen in a film of Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1922) and in some of the major German Expressionist films like Waxworks (1924) and Murnau’s Faust (1926).
Dieterle made his own first film as a director independently, an adaptation of a Tolstoy story called Man by the Roadside (1923), which had Marlene Dietrich in its cast. “We were just four or five very young, enthusiastic, and revolutionary people who wanted to do something different,” Dieterle said. “We brought it out; it didn’t make any money, but it was shown and it was an interesting experiment.” Dieterle was known for his left-wing politics, which got him into trouble later in America, and also for always wearing white gloves on the set (he claimed that this habit started in his theater days when he was always moving furniture around and didn’t want to get his hands dirty).
Kino International gave us the chance to see an early German Dieterle film when they released his Sex in Chains (1928) on DVD. In spite of the salacious title, that movie turned out to be a well-meaning and conscientious story about prison life and reform, with Dieterle himself in the lead role as a man unjustly imprisoned, stuck in a cell and pining for his wife until he yields to a male inmate for sexual release. He went to Hollywood in 1930 and made some German versions of American films, and these films impressed Hal Wallis at Warner Brothers so much that Dieterle signed a Warners contract and made his first film for them, The Last Flight (1931), a John Monk Saunders story about WWI fliers making merry together after the war and moving inexorably toward death.
The Last Flight is a restless movie where the camera is always moving to get across the nerves and the brittle style of its characters. It is a group picture with some of the romanticism you might find in the 1950s films of Nicholas Ray, and it rewards re-viewing because it is very much a dialogue movie, a movie that is basically about the layered, constantly surprising sound of a group of friends. Dieterle takes lots of chances here; the script is special and so are most of the actors, and so he throws caution to the wind and moves with these people wherever they take him.
There are triumphant directorial moments in The Last Flight, like the scene where the friends are all walking down a hallway and howling with drink and Shep (David Manners) starts to move forward as if he were walking on a tightrope, and there are many other scenes here where Dieterle seems to be catching lightning in a bottle. The Last Flight is a real achievement, and maybe it’s so moving and spontaneous precisely because Dieterle approaches the chaos of its theme from his own steady, careful point of view, which he himself has the nerve to abandon at strategic moments.
But Dieterle was unhappy about the assignments he got at Warners after The Last Flight, and also with the general “let’s get it over with!” mood of the studio. Whereas William Wellman and Michael Curtiz responded very well to the Warners programmer grind, Dieterle reacted in a way that was only superficially energetic, so that promising films like Man Wanted (1932) and The Crash (1932) come out feeling pedestrian, or as a biding of time. Both Dieterle’s talents and limits were shown in Jewel Robbery (1932), an imitation-Lubitsch picture that suffers from Warners haste and Dieterle’s own heavy way with comedy, yet the film winds up being delightful anyway. Surely Dieterle would have been more comfortable at MGM or Paramount, but he was unable to get out of his contract and felt he couldn’t turn down the scripts he was given.
He worked with Bette Davis on Fashions of 1934 and allowed her to be buried under excessive make-up and hairstyling, but then that same year he released the demonic Bette in Fog Over Frisco, giving her a terrific bad-girl entrance where she pops balloons until we see her face (“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!” she cries as she pops them). Dieterle is alert to Davis’s swaggering needs in that movie, but he can’t do anything to help her with Satan Met a Lady (1936), a script so bad that the actors are forced to play it semi-tongue-in-cheek. Finally Dieterle presided over one of Davis’s most hysterical scenes when her Empress Carlotta freaks out in Juarez and screams, “You charlatan!” at Napoleon III (Claude Rains) at the top of her voice. All in all, two out of four with Bette isn’t bad.
Of his programmers in this early period at Warners, which he deemed “unfortunate,” Dieterle seems stimulated only by The Firebird (1934), a modest mystery where Stravinsky music is a key plot point. He only fully came into his own when he persuaded Warners to allow him to help his old boss Max Reinhardt make a film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) with many of the Warners stars in Shakespeare roles. Reinhardt had done a production of the play in Hollywood already, and so he was in charge of directing the actors while Dieterle handled the filming itself, and it’s a really lovely movie, like some fantasy project that somehow actually got done. Dieterle deserves much credit here for the spritely playfulness of the visuals, and the general orchestration of the quite disparate actors. A Midsummer Night’s Dream made clear that Dieterle was a cultured man, and he responded best when he felt a project had some high cultural or political value and fulfilled his wish to, as he put it, “enlighten intelligent audiences.”
On that basis, Dieterle made Blockade (1938), one of the few movies of this time to deal with the Spanish Civil War, and then The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), which featured Charles Laughton at the height of his inventiveness as Quasimodo. That movie is filled with shadowy lighting that molds the faces it touches, and several shots of Maureen O’Hara’s Esmeralda that seem to show the influence of Reinhardt again, as if Dieterle were remembering something he saw in Reinhardt’s famous staging of The Miracle. To get to the fathoms-deep emotional level of the scene where Laughton’s Quasimodo is suffering on the pillory, Dieterle did many takes, and Laughton’s wife Elsa Lanchester reported that on the sixteenth take Dieterle leaned in to Laughton and said, “Now Charles, listen to me. Let’s do it one more time, but this time I want you…I want you to suffer.” Lanchester said that Laughton never forgave Dieterle for this direction, for he had been suffering, or trying to, but the result is on the screen, and Dieterle helped Laughton to achieve it. The whole richly detailed, concentrated film, which is done on a large scale, supports what Laughton is doing, and that is a very great deal.
Dieterle did a version of the Faust legend called The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) where he really underlined the light and shadows in the compositions; this was not a financial success and it suffered from some crude cutting before it was restored in the 1990s. Another project that got away from Dieterle was the fascinating Syncopation (1942), a film that sought, in its first hour, at least, to honor and describe the history of jazz music by showing its roots in the struggles of African-Americans. This film places a young black trumpeter played by Todd Duncan in balance with white friends played by Jackie Cooper and Bonita Granville, and there are moments of lyric writing here (the script was co-written by Philip Yordan) that make Dieterle scale some of the same heights he reached in The Last Flight. But Dieterle was not able to make Syncopation what he wanted it to be. He told his friend Bertolt Brecht that RKO Studios pushed him to “cut out as many negroes as possible” in favor of more “boy meets girl.”
Dieterle then worked for David Selznick, showcasing Jennifer Jones in Love Letters (1945) and Portrait of Jennie (1948), romances that tapped into Dieterle’s own liking for solemn lyricism. He stressed the feelings between Joan Fontaine and Joseph Cotton in the swoony September Affair (1950) and the touching relationship between William Holden and Johnny Stewart in the racetrack movie Boots Malone (1952), but the emotionalism of Anna Magnani was clearly too much for him in Volcano (1950). Dieterle made clear that sex was never his thing with Salome (1953), where Rita Hayworth did a decorous dance of the seven veils, and then his career petered out, due at least in part to political pressure. “Although I was never to my knowledge on any blacklist, I must have been on some kind of gray list because I couldn’t get any work,” Dieterle said. His film The Searching Wind (1946), an adaptation of a finger-pointing Lillian Hellman play, cannot have helped matters for him in this area.
Dieterle went back to Germany and worked a bit there. His final American film, Quick, Let’s Get Married (1964), was shot independently in Florida in outdoor locations with Ginger Rogers, and it is so bad that it shows what can happen to studio directors with no studio. His filmography is littered with duds, but Dieterle made The Last Flight, Jewel Robbery, Fog Over Frisco, The Firebird, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Syncopation, and Portrait of Jennie. And no one else would have made those movies quite the way he did.
by Dan Callahan