Word: veidt
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was originally, a weird, ferocious melodrama about a power-mad hypnotist (Werner Krauss) and his tool, a murderous somnambulist (Conrad Veidt). It was intended as an attack on authoritarianism. But the director cooked up a story "frame" (i.e., he had the main story told by an asylum inmate) which made the heroes (and the authors) seem mad. Authority emerged as a benign force, and the whole point of the original story was sidetracked. The popular device of the "framing story," Dr. Kracauer explains, shows the German mind introversively withdrawing into a shell...
...about twice as American as the average U.S. screen heroine. James Mason, an English matinee idol new to U.S. cinemaddicts, suggests a welterweight Clark Gable. Walter Rilla, once popular on the German stage and screen, is perhaps the most satisfying portrayer of suave continental menace since the late Conrad Veidt...
...prewar Germany, but not on anything so innocent as a honeymoon. In quest of a secret which Great Britain needs to know they get involved in disguises, a Liszt-accompanied murder, battles with the Gestapo. They also run afoul of such suspicious figures as Basil Rathbone and Conrad Veidt. Strangely enough, it all adds up to a better-than-average summertime melodrama...
...Conrad Veidt Above Suspicion is also a milestone: his last picture for anybody. He died last spring (TIME, April 12), age 50, of a heart attack, on a Hollywood golf course. Often regarded as Eric von Stroheim's most formidable rival as a fondler of monocles, German-born Veidt first came to fame in Robert Wiene's bizarre fantasy, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Other weirdies, like The Hands of Mr. Orlac, followed. Women fainted, men screamed, children chortled when they were shown. By 1926, when Veidt went to Hollywood, audiences had got hold of themselves pretty well...
Died. Conrad Veidt, 50, cinemephis-topheles; of a heart attack during a golf game; in Hollywood. He nearly always played the bemonocled villain, in recent years had been notably villainous in A Woman's Face, Escape, Casablanca...