Greetings gentle readers and welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s the tale of a sweet-hearted scoundrel who always lands on his feet: The Confessions of Felix Krull. Today’s bonus is a Billy Strayhorn album called “7”. Billy was a giant of jazz and worked along side Duke Ellington himself.
And a special shout out to Jeff W for his idea of linking next weeks movie in order to give the readers time to watch it in advance!
Here is next week’s offering:
Reviews of The Confessions of Felix Krull:
Letterboxd says:
If Die Halbstarken, made one year before, put Buchholz on the map, Felix Krull solidified him as one of the most notable German actors of his generation. The film is based on one of Thomas Mann’s lighter novels, and Buchholz is effortlessly charming as a young imposter who is wiggling himself out of being drafted for military service and then starts a career as a con man in Paris, working himself up the ladder, and breaking the hearts of women (as well as the occasional gay-coded older gentleman) along the way.
and
What a charming little scoundrel Felix is. This is my first Horst Buchholz starring movie (very interested in seeing this bisexual king’s career) and oof he has such great screen presence, and this film is a great showcase of range. Lots of fun, lots of twists, highly recommend. Gives me Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder vibes.
imdb says:
This film was my introduction to Horst Buchholz. Albsolutely delightful! I have been chasing a copy of it for years, and finally located a VHS of it — it has recently been released on DVD in Germany. If you can get your hands on it, do so. The young Buchholz is an enchanting rogue in this saga of the rise of a charming confidence man, swindling and cheating his way to the top. He sent on to star in films in the US and in Europe, but was seldom as delightful as here, in this early work. His innate good looks and personality are given free reign. One of the most delightful scenes in the epileptic fit he throws for the draft board to avoid military service. Inspired!
and
A really entertaining comedy! I don’t know the original novel by Thomas Mann but the film doubtless did justice to Mann’s language. It’s a pleasure to hear Horst Buchholz in the role of Felix Krull leading everybody up the garden path with hilarious wordiness! I enjoyed every minute of this movie. It’s true that it’s old-fashioned but that’s what makes up its attraction.
My take:
An entertaining and amusing film, the comedy is sweetly innocent even for the 1950s. Horst Buchholz is perfect for the role with his angelic good looks and disarming charm. It’s not great cinema and some reviewers were harshly critical but it’s a great way to spend and hour and forty five minutes in my opinion.
Director: Kurt Hoffman
Writer: Thomas Mann (novel), Erika Mann, Robert Thoeren
Notable Actors: Horst Buchholz, Liselotte Pulver, Ingrid Andree
Plot (Spoilers!):
Felix Krull is a smooth operator. He comes from a family of champagne producers who have fallen on hard times and the experience has shaped him profoundly. Beautiful, charming, and crafty, he manages to finagle his way out of military service in the German Imperial army.
Next he is off to Paris. He engages in a bit of petty theft that turns out to not be so petty. He lands a gig as a hotel worker for a ritzy hotel that caters to aristocrats and the well-heeled. He rapidly climbs up the chain of command and seduces a beautiful woman or two along the way.
Naturally, this produces some jealous husbands and boyfriends. One threatens to shoot him but they work out a deal. Felix will take his place on a trip around the world, allowing the man more time with his lady. Felix, facing a gun, accepts.
While in Portugal he meets the family of a professor he encountered on his train ride from France. He sleeps with the professors wife, seduces his daughter, and is eventually sent to jail for his hi-jinks back in Paris. With the help of the professor, who forgives his indiscretions, he escapes and rejoins his Parisian lady. Together they embark on a new adventure far from jealous boyfriends and the law.
***
Jazz Bonus: This is one of my favorite jazz albums. Strayhorn had a beautiful gift, his jazz is sensual and hypnotic. Enjoy, jazz heads of NC!
Last minute jazz bonus: Miles Davis on Bill Evans
My introduction to Horst Buchholz was in a Jimmy Cagney film directed by Billy Wilder, One, Two, Three from 1961.
Apparently Mr. Cagney didn’t appreciate Horst’s talents, as in hated him.
Its a romp of a film and worthy of inclusion~
I look forward to today’s offering!
Yes, that’s a lot of laughs. “Capitalism is like a dead herring in the moonlight. It shines, but it stinks!”
Enjoy!
I would urge “1,2,3” as next week´s program but it´s not free on YT.
It still works as a fast paced 1960s comedy and one of Wilder´s best.
Fun fact: While they were shooting the Wall went up. So that changed the story…
p.s. There was a German remake of Felix Krull 2021 which I still have declined to watch:
German language trailer but its cut in a way that everybody gets the gist (which I assume the film itself doesn’t deliver.)
2 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etSgtliqfC8
p.s. Liselotte Pulver is in the Wilder too!!!
Reading through the fodder, sounds like he could become President of the US, 2X ?!
Sorry?
Regarding the clip about Bill Evans and what Miles said, a couple of things:
Firstly, it opens with an outtake from ‘Kind of Blue’ of either ‘Blue or Green’ or ‘Flamenco Sketches’ (I can’t recall which piece right now), which was essentially Miles taking an intro Evans had already worked up for an intro to his arrangement of ‘Some Other Time,’ a song from Leonard Bernstein’s musical On The Town.
What Evans did with that intro on his own became the solo ‘Peace Piece,’ which can be heard here —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv2GgV34qIg&list=RDNv2GgV34qIg&start_radio=1
And here’s a treat, an Evans trio version of the full song, ‘Some Other Time,’ done on Swedish TV in 1966, with a Swedish singer called Monica Zetterland —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR11v7IDNBo&list=RDVR11v7IDNBo&start_radio=1
It’s a great song. As you can hear the idea was radical simplicity. In this case, brought to us by a combination of Miles, Bill Evans, and Bernstein.
Secondly, in the clip Miles talks about it — radical simplicity, one can take him to mean — as ‘the next thing to do’ in jazz because advanced players then had predominantly been playing bebop.
Bebop, where players play over complex changes often with key modulations and at breakneck tempos, spelling them all out in their note choices, seems a virtuoso, amazing musical idiom when a musician can’t do it. But after one develops sufficient chops and knowledge of bebop methodology, and learns how to play it, it definitely can seem like a bag of tricks that can be applied almost automatically. A trap creatively, in short.
So one path out of that trap was radical simplicity and so-called modal playing.
There will be more jazz and jazz related items!
We watched it last weekend thanks to your advance notice, thank you semper.
It’s a real pleasure to watch. Buchholz as Felix is amazing, as though the film was written around his talent (idk if it was). The complete absence of cynicism in this film is striking and stands out against most comedies.
Yay, it worked!
Touchdown! ;)
I was trying to put my finger on something and that was it: no cynicism.
That is a great observation! The more I think about it, it’s that lack of cynicism—that sense of innocence—that makes the film so appealing and so refreshing. It’s not like Felix Krull is playing his lovers and paramours or the ones around them for fools and he’s not even seducing them—they just fall for him and he goes along with it, quite happily.
Having been the one who suggested that you give a heads-up for the featured film of the following week, I had to watch this week’s film. I found it really enjoyable but I didn’t love it.
The cinematography reminded me of the Ealing comedies of the late 1940s—it seemed a bit out of date for the late 1950s (maybe that’s how German cinema was at that time)—but, not only that, it reminded me very superficially of one of Ealing’s most famous films, Kind Hearts and Coronets. Both use the wraparound flashback as a narrative device where the charming main character recounts his various crimes and affairs, starting at the very beginning of his life and ending at the film’s present.
They’re very different films—Kind Hearts and Coronets is a (very) black comedy while The Confessions of Felix Krull is a broad farce and, as semper loquitor says, “sweetly innocent” (and, as he notes in the comments, there is zero cynicism)—practically everyone who finds out about Krull’s indiscretions cheerfully forgives him—but the difference in the films makes it clear why I didn’t like Felix Krull as much. Krull is charming—and able to think on his feet—but he’s not really much more than that. By contrast, in Kind Hearts and Coronets, the main character, the coolly elegant Louis Mazzini (played perfectly by Dennis Price) exacts revenge on his late mother’s family for their contempt of his late mother, dispatching one member after another, each one in line for the family dukedom (all played with relish by Alec Guinness)—and we’re on his side. Krull just moves from episode to episode—and it’s all very entertaining to watch—but we don’t have much of an idea of what’s behind any of it, aside from some very vague notion of “adventure.” Film critic Michael Sragow in a 1978 review noted that, in Thomas Mann’s book (on which the film is based), Felix is “an artistic, imaginative dreamer and a self-styled social critic,” in other words there’s something there but it’s not really there in the film.
Horst Buchholz makes the film work (and it was his breakout moment in cinema, apparently). He goes from one affair to to the next or, at least, attraction to attraction—or, rather, they present themselves to him: the wealthy wife of the owner of a paté de foie gras factory, the lover of a marquis who he ends up impersonating, the wife and daughter of professor of paleozoology that he meets on a train, and, in subtly gay-coded moment, an English count. And he is so good-looking and charming that it’s all somewhat believable. Paul Dahlke does a turn as the warmly affable, farcically named Professor Kuckuck whose work in paleozoology provides a suitably absurd plot point. It all adds up to enjoyable, lightweight entertainment.
Thanks for the recommendation, semper loquitor!
Sure thing! I looked up Kind Hearts and Coronets but it’s rent only…
If interested, check your local library. Ours has it.
I actually found it online for free here and here but you might not want to endorse (apparently) unofficially uploaded copies. (And, yes, it’s very likely one’s local library would have it—it’s a film classic.)
(I wasn’t subtly suggesting it, BTW—the comparison just occurred to me.)
A bit on crew::
Set designer here was Robert Herlth who had established himself working on most of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau´s movies (e.g. FAUST from last week) and became a household name in the pre-1933 Ufa era. Afterwards cut out because his wife was Jewish.
Back then he closely collaborated with Wilhelm Röhrig who was more of big stroke production designer, Herlth doing the smaller, more detailed work. They also teamed up for costumes.
Together with seminal Murnau DOP Carl Hoffmann (again FAUST) they were forming an invaluable “power trio” of historic significance. No Murnau era without them.
The director Kurt Hoffmann incidentally was the son of Carl Hoffmann.
As much Hoffmann had been the mass entertainment director in the FRG of the 1950s and early1960s (and even with some major success in the Third Reich) with the advent of auteurism and New Hollywood his fame quickly faded.
Another important art department member from FAUST is Arno Richter (here doing some paint work I believe). After the war working however mostly as painter abroad.
The cast it top. Even supporting cast were or would become well known later.
Karl Ludwig Lindt (here Venosta´s Dad) would appear as the German Valkyrie singing doctor in above mentioned Wilder´s Classic comedy “One, Two, Three”.
Susi Nicoletti (the older lover Madame Houpflé) was a major German-Austrian stage star.
Paul Dahlke (Prof. Kuckuck) one of the German icons who would have a constant career before 1933, after the war and throughout the war. Goebbels put him onto a special list of German artists who enjoyed special treatment and “safety” as part of the Gottbegnadetenliste – “God-gifted list”.
Ralf Wolter, Heinz Reincke or Heidi Brühl became national or international stars.
The two leads were world known stars I won´t get into their active time.
Lilo Pulver will be 100 in 4 years. Much of the second half of her life she suffered under major depressions.
Born in 1929 her serious career ended in the late 1960s. The last noteworthy entry might be Jacques Rivette´s THE NUN (1966) with an unusual role for Anna Karina as lead. (Remarkable attempt to adapt Diderot, recommended.)
Pulver became known to a younger audience as the anchor in the German version of Sesame Street in the early 1980s.
Pulver´s daughter died in 1989. Her husband in 1992.
Buchholz was bisexual a fact which he had held secret until shortly before his untimely death.
The producers Rolf Thiele and Hans Abich after establishing themselves successfully in German film business during the Third Reich as party members, became formative in producing major cinema hits after 1945, with founding the movie company Filmaufbau GmbH, Göttingen.
Thiele would do the creative producer part also writing and directing, while Abich was the executive guy who in the 1960s would exert much influence on German TV and become one of German State TV 1´s (ARD) directors. The fact that he had already worked for Goebbels controlling the press back during the war was meaningless.
So by name there was top notch craftsmanship on set.
Fascinating, very informative and illuminating comment (especially since I know almost nothing about German cinema except maybe a smattering about German expressionism, Nosferatu, and Metropolis). Thanks!