(b. Sucha, Austria 1906 – d. West Los Angeles 2002)

Born as Samuel Wilder. Writer and director. Called ‘Billie’ by his mother, a fan of William Cody, Wilder became a reporter for the yellow press when his father moved his family from rural Galicia to Vienna just before World War I. Following the American band leader Paul Whiteman to Berlin, Wilder worked for seven years as a free journalist for a number of newspapers and as ghostwriter for several film scripts. His first success in the film industry was the collaborative Menschen am Sonntag (1928, with Robert and Curt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Fred Zinnemann). Scripts for Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht (1931), Emil und die Detektive (1932) and Ein blonder Traum (1932) followed.

One day after the Reichstag fire in February of 1933, Wilder left for France where he directed his first film, the low-budget Mauvaise Graine (1934). Under contract at Paramount as of 1936, he teamed up with Charles Brackett to write a series of highly successful films, including Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) and Ninotchka (1939) for Ernst Lubitsch, a filmmaker whom Wilder always considered a role model.

His US debut as director was The Major and the Minor (1942); already his third feature, the noir Double Indemnity (1944) established him as a major director. In his master piece, Sunset Boulevard (1950), which was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won three, Wilder offers a harsh look at the star system of the US glamour industry. His films combine comedy and cynicism, without claiming a moral high ground. The Lost Weekend (1957) is a somber investigation of alcoholism, while The Seven Year Itch (1955, with Marilyn Monroe) takes an ironic look at adultery. With A Foreign Affair (1948) Wilder revisits Berlin to show up German and American hypocrisy alike. Also set in a yet undivided Berlin is One, Two, Three (1961), a hilarious spoof on Cold War hysteria.

Photo from Waxman’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

Franz Waxman led a variety of musical lives as composer, conductor and impresario. He was born in Konigshutte, Upper Silesia, Germany, on December 24, 1906, and was the youngest of six children. No one in the family was musical except Franz, who started piano lessons at the age of seven. His father was an industrialist, and not believing his son could earn a living in music, encouraged him in a banking career. He worked for two and a half years as a teller and used his salary to pay for lessons in piano, harmony and composition. He then quit the bank and moved to Dresden and then to Berlin to study music.

During this period he paid for his musical education by playing piano in nightclubs and with the Weintraub Syncopaters, a popular jazz band of the late 1920s. While with the band he began to do their arrangements, and this led to orchestrating some early German musical films. Frederick Hollander, who had written some music for the Weintraubs, gave Waxman his first important movie assignment: orchestrating and conducting Hollander’s score for Josef von Sternberg’s classic film, “The Blue Angel.” The film’s producer, Erich Pommer, who was also head of the UFA Studios in Berlin, was so pleased with the orchestration of the score that he gave Waxman his first major composing assignment: Fritz Lang’s version of “Liliom” (1933) which was filmed in Paris after their exodus from Germany. Pommer’s next assignment, Jerome Kern’s “Music in the Air” (Fox Films, 1934), took him to the United States, and he brought Waxman with him to arrange the music.

Waxman’s first original Hollywood score was James Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), which led to a two-year contract with Universal as head of the music department. He scored a dozen of the more than 50 Universal films on which he worked as music director. Among the best known are “Magnificent Obsession, “Diamond Jim” and “The Invisible Ray.”

Two years after he went to Hollywood, Waxman, then 30, signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to compose. He averaged about seven pictures a year, and it was during this period that he scored such famous Spencer Tracy films as “Captains Courageous,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Woman of the Year.” In 1937, he was loaned by M-G-M to David O. Selznick for “The Young at Heart” and was nominated for both Best Original Music and Best Score – the first two of 12 Academy Award nominations he was to receive for the 144 films he scored in his 32 years in Hollywood. In 1940 he was again loaned to Selznick, this time for “Rebecca,” and was nominated for his third Academy Award.

Waxman left M-G-M in 1943 and began a long association with Warner Brothers. “Old Acquaintance” is from this period. (Selections from three more of his Warner Brothers scores can be heard on RCA albums: “Mr. Skeffington” is included in “Classic Film Scores for Bette Davis,” “To Have and Have Not,”  and “The Two Mrs. Carrolls” are included in “Casablanca – Classic Film Scores for Humphrey Bogart, and “Objective, Burma!” are on “Captive Blood” – Classic Film Scores for Errol Flynn)

In 1947 Waxman founded the Los Angeles International Music Festival, which he was to head for 20 years. World and American premieres of 80 major works by composers such as Stravinsky, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovitch and Schoenberg were given at the festival.

By 1947 Waxman had a busy schedule indeed. In addition to devoting a great deal of time to the festival, he was in demand at all the major studios, was guest conducting symphony orchestras in Europe as well as in the United States and was composing concert music. For the film “Humoresque” he wrote a special piece based on themes from Bizet’s “Carmen,” which was played by Isaac Stern on the soundtrack. The “Carmen Fantasie” has become standard repertoire and was recorded by Jascha Heifetz for RCA. Among Waxman’s other concert works are “Overture for Trumpet and Orchestra,” based on themes from “The Horn Blows at Midnight;” “Sinfonietta for String Orchestra and Timpani;” a dramatic song cycle “The Song of Terezin,” and an oratorio, “Joshua.”

Waxman won the Academy Award in 1950 for Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” and in 1951 for George Stevens’ “A Place in the Sun.” For over half a century, he was the only composer to have won the award for Best Score in two successive years. It was during the ’50s and ’60s that he composed some of his most important and varied scores. These are represented by the above two Academy Award winners as well as by “Prince Valiant” and “Taras Bulba.” He had usually been associated with romantic films, but now he progressed to epic and jazz-oriented scores. “Crime in the Streets,” “The Spirit of St. Louis,” “Sayonara,” “Peyton Place” and “The Nun’s Story” are also from this period and the complete scores were issued on soundtrack albums. Franz Waxman received many honors during his lifetime, including the Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of West Germany, honorary memberships in the Mahler Society and the International Society of Arts and Letters, and an honorary doctorate of letters and humanities from Columbia College. He died February 24, 1967, in Los Angeles at the age of 60.

Together with Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman a United States postage stamp was issued in 1999. During the recent Waxman centenary a street in his birthplace was named Franz Waxmanstrasse. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and Turner Classic Movies held tributes. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a 24 picture retrospective; this was the first time that MoMA honored a composer. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra recently performed the complete score THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN live to film.

(b. Brünn, Moravia 1897 – d. Hollywood 1957)

Photo from Korngold’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

Composer. Along with fellow Europeans Max Steiner and Franz Waxman, Korngold elevated the status of film music from incidental accompaniment to a new art form. A successful composer on the Continent and protégé of impresario Max Reinhardt before emigrating to the United States, Korngold was a child prodigy who began composing at age 13. Reinhardt brought him to Hollywood when the director made his ambitious film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). Korngold’s beautiful adaptation of Mendelssohn’s music themes so impressed Warner Bros. that the studio hired him to score Captain Blood (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1935) and Anthony Adverse (1936, which won Korngold his first Oscar). He returned to Austria to stage an opera, but a postponement brought him back to Hollywood to work on The Adventures of Robin Hood (dir. Curtiz, 1938). The “Anschluss” of his native Austria forced him to remain in the US, becoming a citizen in 1943. Many Korngold aficionados consider Kings Row (1942) to be his greatest work. Other scores include Juarez (dir. William Dieterle, 1939), The Sea Wolf (dir. Curtiz, 1941), The Constant Nymph (1943), Devotion (dir. Curtis Bernhardt), Deception, Of Human Bondage (all 1946), Escape Me Never (1947), and Magic Fire (dir. Dieterle, 1956, his last). He worked in all areas of musical composition, never limiting himself to film scores alone; his operas, symphonies, chamber music, and concertos are still performed today.

Photo from Hollaender’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

Frederick Hollander (a.k.a Friedrich Hollaender) was born to German parents in London on October 18, 1896. His father Victor was a widely acclaimed composer of revues, operettas and popular songs, still known today for his “Kirschen in Nachbars Garten” and “Schaukellied.” Frederick grew up in Berlin, surrounded by an exceptional musical family, including uncles Gustav Hollaender, head of the famous Stern Conservatory, and Felix Hollaender, writer and dramatist with Max Reinhardt.

Young Frederick studied composition at the Stern Conservatory, and was one of Engelbert Humperdinck’s master students. During World War I, Hollander served in the military as musical director, entertaining troops on the front lines in France. Soon after the war, he began his theatrical career writing stage music for Max Reinhardt’s productions and was a house composer for such avant-garde literary cabarets as “Sound and Smoke” (”Schall und Rauch”), “Wild Stage” (”Wilde Bühne”) and “Megalomania” (”Größenwahn”). In addition to writing his own popular music and lyrics, Hollander collaborated with many famous authors including Kurt Tucholsky, Klabund and Walter Mehring. It was during this prolific period that Hollander garnered fame and recognition for his series of “Songs of a Poor Girl” (”Lieder eines armen Mädchens”), written for his first wife, singer Blandine Ebinger. In the following years he went on to write numerous hit songs and over a dozen popular revues (often in conjunction with Rudolf Nelson and Marcellus Schiffer), including “Laterna Magica,” “Das bist Du!,” “Bei uns um die Gedächtniskirche rum” and “Der rote Faden.” Hollander also worked with the sensational jazz band, Weintraub Syncopators.

Hollander’s long and successful film career began auspiciously in 1929, when he was hired to compose the music for Joseph Von Sternberg’s landmark film “The Blue Angel” (”Der blaue Engel”). Marlene Dietrich’s sultry rendition of “Falling In Love Again” (”Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt”) propelled both the actress and the song to international success and legendary status. “Falling In Love Again” remains Hollander’s signature piece and has been interpreted by recording artists as diverse as Brian Ferry, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Dionne Warwick, Petula Clark, Greta Keller, Linda Ronstadt, Jean Sablon, Udo Lindenberg, Nana Mouskouri, Leontyne Price, Ute Lemper, Sammy Davis Jr. and the Beatles. The unprecedented success of “The Blue Angel” ensured Hollander a place as featured film composer with UFA, Germany’s premier film studio. Prior to his emigration to the U.S., Hollander’s work with UFA produced a succession of classic hit films, such as: “Einbrecher,” “Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht,” “Stürme der Leidenschaft” and “Ich und die Kaiserin,” which was also his directorial debut. Hollander shot three different versions of the film simultaneously, in French, German and in English, each using three separate sets of actors.

Caught up in the cultural and artistic maelstrom of Weimar Germany, in 1931 Hollander opened his own highly successful cabaret-style theater, “Tingel Tangel,” ensconced beneath Berlin’s “Theater des Westens.” His shows were among the top attractions of the day, hailed for their jazzy music, witty lyrics, and daring political satire. Hollander’s courageous and openly anti-Hitler revues, such as “Spuk in der Villa Stern,” made him an early Nazi target and nearly cost him his life. Within two years, Hitler’s unrelenting rise to power would force Hollander and his second wife, Hedi Schoop, to flee Germany for the United States.

[Frederick Hollander working with Marlene Dietrich in Hollywood] In 1933, Hollander arrived in Hollywood to discover that his “Blue Angel” reputation had preceded him – as did Marlene Dietrich – and he continued writing songs for the actress, including “Boys In The Back Room,” “You’ve Got That Look,” “Illusions,” “Black Market” and “I’ve Been In Love Before.” Hollander’s Hollywood career spanned twenty-three years and included songs and musical scores for hundreds of films, among them “Sabrina,” “Destry Rides Again,” “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” “A Foreign Affair” (in which Hollander also appears as Dietrich’s night club piano player), “Desire,” and the cult musical “The Five Thousand Fingers Of Dr. T.” He garnered four Academy Award nominations: 1937 for Best Song “Whispers In The Dark” (from “Artists And Models”); 1942 for Best Score (from “Talk Of The Town”); 1948 for Best Song “This Is The Moment,” (from “That Lady In Ermine”) and in 1953 for Best Musical Score (from “The Five Thousand Fingers Of Dr. T”).

Hollander returned to Germany in 1956, where his music enjoyed a revival, presented in sprightly cabaret revues in Munich and Berlin. He continued to compose for musicals and wrote the score to the 1959 film, “Das Spukschloss im Spessart.” Although best known for his musical work, Hollander also wrote several books: his autobiography “Von Kopf bis Fuss: mein Leben mit Text und Music” (1965); “Ich starb an einem Dienstag” (1972); “Ärger mit dem Echo” (1972); and “Die Witzbombe und wie man sie legt” (1972). Notably, his first novel, “Those Torn From Earth” (1941, written in English) was posthumously translated and published in Germany (by the Weidle Verlag) in 1995 as “Menchliches Treibgut.”

For Hollander’s lasting contributions to German Culture, he was awarded the Schwabinger Kunstpreis and in 1959 the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany).

Art imitated life for Hollander once again when director Billy Wilder (for whom Hollander had scored the 1948 classic “A Foreign Affair”) nostalgically cast his longtime friend as the singer/bandleader in an East German night club in the 1961 film “One, Two, Three.” Later in life he remarried two more times. Hollander passed away in Munich, Germany on January 18th, 1976, just short of his 80th birthday. His timeless music continues to be performed and recorded around the world.

(b. Rózsahegy, Hungary 1904 – d. Hollywood 1964)

Photo from Lorre’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

Born as Ladislav Loewenstein. Actor. Interested in the theater from early on, Lorre acted on various stages in Breslau, Zurich and Vienna before coming to Berlin in 1929 when Bertolt Brecht invited him to play the role of Fabian in his production of Marieluise Fleißer’s Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Performances in Dantons Tod and Frühlings Erwachen followed. 1931 proved to be the year of Lorre’s breakthrough. Playing Gala Gay in Brecht’s own production of Mann ist Mann at night, Lorre would stand in front of the cameras of Fritz Lang during the day in the role of the child murderer Hans Beckert in the director’s first sound feature, M. The success of the film turned Lorre into an international film star; after M he appeared in eight more German films, often in smaller comical roles.

In 1933, Lorre emigrated via the much-traveled route first to Vienna, then Paris, then London, before reaching the US through a contract with Columbia Pictures. Known in the United States primarily for his performances as the child murderer in M and as the anarchist in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Lorre was typecast from the beginning of his U.S. career as a menacing and enigmatic presence, often as a sexual threat or outsider. His most successful period was at Warner Bros. where he appeared next to Humphey Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet in numerous films of the 1940s, most notably Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942). In the 1950s his career declined, and he returned to Germany to make his only film as director, Der Verlorene (1951). Disillusioned by the lack of success he returned to Hollywood where he would appear in endless self-parodies on film and television.

(b. Hildesheim 1889 – d. Los Angeles 1966)

Photo from Pommer’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

Producer. A genius producer and businessman on both sides of the Atlantic, Erich Pommer is the driving force of fifty years of German film history. In 1915, he founded Deutsche Eclair (Decla), a production company that was eventually absorbed by UFA. As a member of UFA’s directorial board, Pommer was able to produce some of Weimar Germany’s most impressive contributions to film: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Last Laugh (1924), Variety (1925), Faust (1926), and The Blue Angel (1930). In 1926, he started working in Hollywood, but returned to Germany on loan from his American employers just a year later. After the Nazi takeover, Pommer emigrated first to Paris (1933), then to Hollywood (1934), then to London (1937), and finally back to Hollywood (1940). He returned to Europe as an officer in the U.S. army, supervising the licensing of the first production companies in the post-Nazi film industry. He did not return to California until 1956.

(b. Berlin 1892 – d. Hollywood 1947)

Ernst Lubitsch and crew on the set of One Hour With You

Director, actor, and producer. One of the great geniuses of comedy in the cinema, Lubitsch was the most successful of the many émigrés and exiles in his transition from Weimar Germany to Hollywood. As a member of Max Reinhardt’s theatrical ensemble, he had supporting and smaller roles in numerous productions before turning to film in 1913. He was admired for his comic portrayals of wily and fun-loving characters through much of the Weimar era. But it was not until 1919 that Lubitsch got his first big directorial break with a string of European hits: Die Austernprinzessin, Madame Dubarry, and Die Puppe. Based on the success of Madame Dubarry, he was invited to America by Mary Pickford. Through a series of social satires he created the cinematic genre of the sophisticated comedy, and his trademark became ‘the Lubitsch touch’—a combination of sharp socio-psychological analysis and indirect comment. Unlike few directors, he was able to transform his international acclaim for silent film into the era of sound, directing such movies as The Love Parade (1929) and Monte Carlo (1930).

Lubitsch briefly assumed the position of director of production at Paramount in 1935, and it was for this studio that he made the features by which most people know him today: Ninotchka (1939, with Greta Garbo and in supporting roles Felix Bressart, Alexander Granach, and Sig Ruman), The Shop Around the Corner (1940, with James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan and again Bressart), To Be or Not to Be (1942, with Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Bressart, and Ruman), and Heaven Can Wait (1943, with Don Ameche and Gene Tierney).

(b. Dresden 1900 – d. Locarno, Switzerland 1973)

Director. Robert Siodmak’s directorial debut was the famous Berlin film Menschen am Sonntag (1930), which establishes him as serious filmmaker. Yet the subsequent productions do not return to the neo-realism of his first feature. Abschied (1929), an early exploration into sound, is a Kammerspiel set in a boarding house; Voruntersuchung (1931) probes the corruption of the legal system, while Brennendes Geheimnis (1932) is a melodrama after a novella by Stefan Zweig. Forced into exile in 1933, Siodmak becomes a seminal émigré director in France. In this second career, which lasts until 1938, he shoots eleven features, including the much-lauded Pièges (1939).

The transition to the Hollywood studio system proves harder and his first assignments as director remain conventional. When he collaborates with his brother Curt on Son of Dracula (1943) he can score a popular and critical success. Yet it is only with three films made for Universal that he establishes himself as the master of noir as which he is remembered today: Phantom Lady (1944), The Spiral Staircase (1945), and The Killers (1946). His first film in technicolor and his last US film is The Crimson Pirate (1952). In Germany, he tries to build on his Hollywood and Weimar reputation. Die Ratten (1955), after Gerhart Hauptmann’s play and produced by Arthur Brauner, and particularly Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957) gain him huge critical success, but are followed up by disappointing fare. He concludes his long career with Karl May adaptations and the monumental Kampf um Rom (1968).

(b. Vienna 1907 – d. Los Angeles 1997)

Photo from Zinnemann’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

Born as Alfred Zinnemann. Cameramen and director. Trained as both a violinist and a lawyer, Zinnemann moved to America in 1937 after working on Menschen am Sonntag (1929), in Germany and The Wave (1934) in Mexico. At MGM the young Austrian directed short subjects for several years, winning his first Academy Award for That Mothers Might Live (1938), as well as directing a series of b-features (Little Mr. Jim and My Brother Talks to Horses, both 1946). His 1944 anti-Nazi film The Seventh Cross, after Anna Seghers’ novel, stands out as one of the better films in that popular wartime gene. After his contract expired in 1948, he became a free director, working with producers such as Stanley Kramer, Buddy Adler, and Henry Blanke. With The Search (1948), largely shot on location in Germany, Zinnemann used a neo-realist style to probe the aftermath of war. Other films from this period also investigate post-war trauma: the noir Act of Violence (1949) and The Men (1950, with Marlon Brando in his cinematic debut) deal with the alienation experienced by crippled war veterans.

Zinnemann’s lasting fame rests on two extraordinary films— High Noon (1952), the now classic western starring Gary Cooper as a soon-to-be-retired marshal, and From Here to Eternity (1953), which won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, direction, supporting actor (Frank Sinatra), supporting actress (Donna Reed), screenplay, and cinematography. His later work includes Oklahoma! (1955), The Nun’s Story (1959), The Sundowners (1960), and A Man for All Seasons (1966) which won Oscars for best picture, actor, screenplay, and direction. A trained cameraman, Zinnemann’s films are remarkable for their effective use of visual composition, yet he never developed a personal style and was therefore largely ignored by the auteur-dominated criticism of the 1960s and 70s. Instead, his films share a focus on how people behave in difficult situations, and how their character becomes their destiny.

(b. Vienna 1890 – d. Beverly Hills 1976)

Director. One of the most renown and accomplished directors of the 20th century, Lang’s exceptional career began as scriptwriter for Joe May’s company where he met his future wife Thea von Harbou. Working with Erich Pommer as of 1917, Lang applied a style at once austere and lyrical to romantic, sentimental, sensationalist and fantastic story material: Der müde Tod (1921), Die Nibelungen (1921, two parts), Metropolis (1927), Spione (1928). Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922, two parts) is notable for its attempt to represent psychological processes filmically; Metropolis, the futuristic tale of a repressive technocratic society, is renown for its special effects, its extravagant sets and even more extravagant budget, which caused financial difficulties for UFA, while M (1931) subverts the conventional detective thriller by developing a deep psychological portrait of a serial killer and child molester.

Photo from Lang’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

In 1933, Lang emigrated to France, and then on to the U.S., where he had the classic difficulties of a European director in the Hollywood studio system. Thus it took him several years of being idle before realizing his first project, Fury (1936), which met with both critical and popular success. While trying his hand at virtually every genre—including Westerns such as The Return of Frank James (1940), Western Union (1941), and Rancho Notorious (1952, with Marlene Dietrich), costume drama such as Moon Fleet (1955), and anti-Nazi films such as Hangmen Also Die (1943), Man Hunt (1941) Ministry of Fear (1944), and Cloak and Dagger (1946)—Lang’s most astounding achievements in Hollywood are in film noir. Scarlet Street (1947) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947), made for his own Diana Productions, are dark thrillers about the entanglement of love and murder; later famous noirs include The Blue Gardenia (1953), The Big Heat (1953), and Human Desire (1954). In 1956, Lang returned to Germany for the first time after the war; hired by producer Arthur Brauner, he directs a remake of Das indische Grabmal (1959) and Die tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960)—both of which fail miserably in their attempt to revive his earlier success, and a disappointed Lang returns to Beverly Hills.