The Directors: Robert Siodmak

A number of great directors fled Germany in the thirties to work in America, among them Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk and Joseph von Sternberg.   Less known to the general public is today's honoree, Robert Siodmak (pronounced see-odd-mack), although he was well-known to fans of film noir since most of his American work falls into that category.

The roots of film noir come from German Expressionist cinematography, black and white, lowkey lighting and shadows which help create mood, mystery and ambivalence.  Siodmak brought his training in this technique to American films with his most lauded work being two stylish, unpretentious noirs and a good thriller all in 1946.

He is certainly considered an auteur director of noirs.  His films are distinguished by imaginative décor,  atmospheric camerawork and a keen eye for quirky minor characters.   When I saw that first '46 noir (not on its original release, mind you), I wanted to learn everything I could about the man whose last name I couldn't then pronounce.

Born in Dresden in 1900 to a banker father who left the raising of his four sons to a devoted stay-at-home mother.  Young Robert tried some acting in his late teens which was his first brush with show business.  He then managed a job writing titles for imported American films and then became a film cutter.

By 1930 he was directing his first film, one that was written by one of his brothers, with an eventual screenplay cowritten with Billy Wilder.  Siodmak and Wilder worked together over the years in German films and when Hitler came to power, both men and Siodmak's wife moved to Paris and continued their work in French films.

In 1940, after fleeing the Nazis a second time, he moved to Hollywood where he briefly worked for Paramount,  directing a few forgettable films.  Universal signed him to a contract in 1943.  The studio was known for its expressionist techniques and neorealism particularly in its bread and butter genre, horror.  The studio was impressed with Siodmak's handling of Son of Dracula (1943) and Cobra Woman (1944) and was eager to let him try his hand at other forms of noir.   America had taken the genre to its collective bosom in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon and it couldn't get enough fast enough.  Without conceit Siodmak knew he was their boy.

His first Universal noir was Phantom Lady (1944) about a secretary out to prove her boss didn't murder his shrewish wife.  Siodmak saw in Ella Raines a perfect noir actress, dynamite as a good girl and better as a bad one, and she quickly became one of the director's favorites.  

With his go-to actress, Ella Raines

Siodmak's noir touches were dazzling.  Critics and the public alike fell all over themselves singing the praises of the great and sometimes scary camera angles, the lighting, shadows, mood, the dark, wet streets, the music and the sex.  Seeing Raines watching Elisha Cook  in a furious drumming sequence and its obvious parallel to a sexual climax is unforgettable.  

Christmas Holiday (1944) may be set around the holiday but it is a poor title for a noir and today is not well-remembered. Have you heard of it?  Equally odd are two musical stars as the leads, Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly.  She is a popular singer (not the prostitute she was in the novel... oh no no no) who's trying to make a go of it with a bum husband.  It was Durbin's top-grossing film and apparently her favorite.

Victorian London is at the heart of The Suspect (1944), a drama about a man (Charles Laughton) in an unhappy marriage who embarks on a simple flirtation with a young woman (Raines) which is developing into a friendship when his wife threatens to ruin both of their lives.  Laughton kills her although we never lose our sympathy for him.  How it turns out is what the film is all about. 

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) has George Sanders as an unmarried clothing designer (oh?) living with his two sisters.  His relationship with one of them (Geraldine Fitzgerald) feels clammy and incestual at times but she steps it up a bit when he takes up, if you will, with a colleague (Raines).  It wasn't particularly successful and I liked it. 

Dorothy McGuire among those noir touches

Then came The Spiral Staircase (1946), the film that caused me to check out Siodmak.  I saw it because I knew it was a thriller but more importantly because it starred Dorothy McGuire.

The story concerns an insane perfectionist who has taken to murdering deformed girls.  The action takes place in a huge, dank and creepy Victorian house.  After several murders, McGuire, a mute attendant to the bedridden family matriarch (Ethel Barrymore), is next on the list.  Played against the backdrop of a fierce storm, Siodmak uses most of his considerable noir arsenal, with a nod to reflections and mirror images, to increase your heartbeat.  

The Killers (1946) is one of the noir classics along with The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Leave Her to Heaven, Crossfire, Out of the Past, Sunset Blvd., The Big Heat. and more than a few others.  It is a beautifully stylized film which provided Siodmak with his only Oscar nomination, launched Burt Lancaster's career and previewed the cold elegance of Ava Gardner in the villainess role that made her a star.  Many would say The Killers is the best film the director ever made.

Burt couldn't resist Ava.  Few could.

The Dark Mirror  was Siodmak's third acclaimed film of 1946, a delicious noir of a familiar theme of twin sisters, one of whom is a murderer.  One of them has been positively identified but both have alibis.  Again, Siodmak's noir skills are very much in evidence.  The title also is more than a simple one.  One of Siodmak's trademarks is his use of mirrors in his films.

Siodmak moseyed over to 20th Century Fox to work with Victor Mature and Richard Conte in another good noir, Cry of the City (1948).  It is the story of childhood friends who grow up on opposite sides of the law... a cop and a criminal.  When these two share a scene, the screen throbs with energy.  While the general theme is a familiar one, Siodmak and his stars turned it into something special.

Criss Cross (1949) reunited Siodmak with Lancaster who plays a bitter, not-too-bright bank security guard who gets involved with a crook (Dan Duryea) who wants to stage a robbery of Lancaster's armored car.  In the center is Duryea's girlfriend (Yvonne DeCarlo) who is also Lancaster's ex-wife.  While I didn't find this quite as compelling of some of Siodmak's other noirs, I still liked it.  I had wished, however, that Gardner again played the femme fatale role.

For some reason Siodmak stepped away from what he knew best and directed a glossy drama from MGM, The Great Sinner (1949).  It concerns a young writer who studies gambling and gamblers for a piece he wants to write and ends up a compulsive gambler himself.  It probably looked better on paper but the end product wasn't so good despite a glorious cast.  Oddly, Gregory Peck is miscast and Gardner, Barrymore, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston and Agnes Moorehead couldn't help much.

He made his penultimate American noir, The File on Thelma Jordon in 1949 with one of the certified queens of the genre, Barbara Stanwyck.  She is accused of murder but a DA (Wendell Corey) feels she is innocent as he falls in love with her.  It may be a B but it's a fine one.  Stanwyck never let down her audience.

Familiar with Siodmak's work as I am, I still can hardly get over what induced him to sign on for The Crimson Pirate (1952) except that title star Lancaster requested him.  The actor was tired of fighting with everyone he worked with and he and the director were as simpatico as anyone could ever be with Lancaster.  

I couldn't begin to say what it's about and really, who cares?  What we do have is one of the most heavily-plotted and globally popular swashbuckler movies of all time.  It is said (and perhaps at studio insistence) that Siodmak turned a drama into a comedy and a very good one.  As a kid I loved it and as an adult (of sorts), I still do.  Lancaster, looking blond and built to bedazzle, is acrobatically exciting.

Siodmak returned first to France and shortly thereafter to Germany after the completion of The Crimson Pirate.  It wasn't the easy shoot (hmmm, I wonder why) he thought it would be.  More to the point, however, is that noirs were beginning to lose appeal with the public that now wanted happy and romantic, light and funny and done in pastels.  He knew he needed to pack up.  

I had to laugh when he said I got out of Germany just ahead of Hitler and out of Hollywood just ahead of Cinemascope.  

He was truly sorry that the movies he loved to make were no longer getting the green light they once did but he was looking forward to resuming work in German cinema.

He made around 15 German movies that few Americans have heard of.  Several were westerns starring former Tarzan Lex Barker playing the same role in all of them.  One exception that played in the States was 1962's Escape from East Berlin that starred Don Murray and Christine Kaufmann (married at the time to Tony Curtis).  The true story features Murray as he spearheads a group that tunnels under the wall to escape to the west.  

In 1967 he was lured back for an American film although it was filmed in Spain.  Custer of the West  is a Cinerama production of a fictional (!) story of Gen. George Custer's life and last stand.  It stars a European married couple, Robert Shaw and Mary Ure, and Americans Ty Hardin and Jeffrey Hunter.  It was a bomb.  The screenplay seemed to mix up the Cheyenne and the Sioux and Custer is written as a misunderstood outsider.  What a lousy way for Siodmak to draw the curtain on his American career.  He would only make two more German films.

He had been living near Locarno in Switzerland when he died there in March, 1973 from a heart attack.  He was 72 years old.  His wife had died a few weeks earlier.

History has been kind to Robert Siodmak.  He has been remembered in film history circles as a visionary director of film noir.  He is almost single-handedly regarded as the man who brought German Expressionist filmmaking to the United States under the moniker of film noir.  

His work in noir and that of other German directors who came to America and also worked in the genre gravitated toward those stories that were influenced by their earlier lives.  Their recollections were dark, fearsome, uncompromising, nefarious, claustrophobic.  To that template was added a look, a style, a mood, lighting, shadows.  He took the look of the American crime thriller and changed it most pleasingly.

Since noir is my favorite film genre, I owe a great deal to Robert Siodmak and I know it.

Next posting:

And on to another favorite genre, 

westerns, and one of John Ford's best