(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 1880 – d. Hollywood 1954)

Born Josef Mandel. Director. A businessman and operetta director, Joe May can be considered one of the founders of the German cinema. He began directing films in 1911 and started his own production company a few years later. He gave famous German director Fritz Lang his start in films by employing him as a screenwriter in his early films. May visited Hollywood in 1929 while working with Erich Pommer on Asphalt (1929) and returned to Germany with valuable information on the techniques of sound film. He was forced to emigrate in 1934, however, and arrived in California to make films for Paramount.

May’s first two films, Music in the Air (produced by Pommer and scripted by Billy Wilder and Robert Liebmann, 1934) and Confession (1937) were flops. After directing a handful of abysmal b-movies, May found himself bankrupt by the mid-1940s. He and his wife Mia, a former actress who starred in many of his early films, struggled to run a restaurant for much of the remainder of their lives; in a bittersweet tone of irony, they called their establishment “The Blue Danube.” One of Germany’s most celebrated early directors, May never regained the fame he had enjoyed in Weimar Germany.