Emil und die Detektive
Gerhard Lamprecht (1931)
Erich Kästner’s famous children’s novel was published in 1929 – this was the first screen adaptation of Emil and the Detectives and also one of the first sound films made in Germany, by UFA. Kästner’s story is fairly simple and straightforward; Gerhard Lamprecht’s version runs a brisk seventy-three minutes. As well as being very enjoyable, it’s visually impressive in various ways.
The young hero Emil Tischbein (Rolf Wenkhaus) travels on his own from his home town of Neustadt to Berlin, to visit his grandmother and cousin. His widowed mother (Käthe Haack), who works as a hairdresser, has saved 140 marks for Emil to deliver to grandma (Olga Engl). He’s excited about the expedition but conscientious about his mission. On the train journey, Emil’s compartment empties out and he’s left alone with a (highly) suspicious-looking man (Fritz Rasp), who introduces himself as Herr Grundeis. Emil nervously leaves the compartment to see to an extra precaution: he pins the money into the inside pocket of his jacket. When he returns to his seat, however, he succumbs to an offer of sweets from his sinisterly smiling fellow passenger. The sweets are drugged; Emil falls asleep – and into a nightmare, in which a shape-changing Grundeis stars, to alarming effect. The dream has potent flavours of the German expressionist cinema that one thinks of as echt Weimar. This sequence alone is enough to justify Lamprecht’s film’s place in BFI’s current Weimar season, different though it is in many ways from the classics of the period.
Emil wakes to find the money in his jacket pocket gone, along with Grundeis, but catches sight of the thief as the train arrives in Berlin and resolves to follow him. On the street outside the railway station, Emil meets a boy called Gustav (Hans Joachim Schaufuss), who offers to help and is the start of the gradually accumulating pack of children ‘detectives’. They also include, as an honorary girl member and semi-humorous romantic interest, Emil’s cousin Pony Hütchen (Inge Landgut: in the same year, she also played the little girl murdered by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M). Posing as a bellboy at the hotel where the villain checks in, Emil eventually works out that the stolen money is hidden in the bowler hat the thief so seldom removes. Next morning, Emil slips soporific sweets into his breakfast coffee and, when Grundeis says he wants just water, into his glass. Emil can only watch in dismay as Grundeis starts to use the water for gargling – it’s the film’s most graceful sight gag. ‘Operation Emil’ soon succeeds, nevertheless. Not only does Emil recover the money, which a bank manager (Georg H Schnell) identifies as the boy’s through the pinholes in the notes. The massed ranks of junior detectives pursue Grundeis as he tries to escape; he’s arrested and identified as a notorious bank robber whom the police have long been pursuing. Emil receives a thousand mark reward – more than enough to buy his mother the hairdryer she so badly needs for her work. He returns to Neustadt in triumph, along with his hordes of helpers. Lamprecht and the cinematographer Werner Brandes capture splendidly this chaotic, happy crowd scene.
Two problems watching – one minor, one major. Opening titles explain and apologise that, although the film has benefited from restoration, some technical flaws remain. These flaws aren’t a major problem but the grey English subtitles, which aren’t a consequence of antiquity, are – a tiring challenge to read. It’s as well there are plenty of stretches with little or no dialogue. As a 1931 release with a cast dominated by children and young teenagers, Emil and the Detectives is also inevitably shadowed by what was about to happen in Germany. There are several reminders of this, thanks to the location filming in Berlin and to the personnel involved. The screenplay is by Billy (credited as Billie) Wilder, who left Germany for Paris, then Hollywood, when Hitler came to power. Although uncredited, Emeric Pressburger also had a hand in the screenplay; he moved to Britain two years later. In May 1933, the works of Erich Kästner, a pacifist and vocal opponent of the Nazis, were among those judged ‘contrary to the German spirit’ and destroyed in book burnings.
It was striking to see the film at BFI then go home and watch a couple more episodes of the television serial Babylon Berlin (2017). Another crime story set in the last years of the Weimar Republic, it has themes and tone as dark as Kästner’s children’s victory story is optimistic but Babylon Berlin doesn’t leave the same aftertaste. Its Berlin is a reconstruction; those on camera and behind it aren’t part of the actual Weimar. Rolf Wenkhaus, whose blend of exuberance and nous as the ‘rascal’ Emil is delightful, has impeccably Aryan colouring. He was fourteen when the film was released but his features are already shaping into those of a young man. (The two things are particularly noticeable in a newspaper photograph of Emil, introducing the story of his and his new friends’ heroism, which appears briefly on the screen.) In comparison, Hans Joachim Schaufuss’s Gustav is more of a child. Both Wenkhaus and Schaufuss were killed in action during World War II.
11 June 2019
