Word: voigt
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Challenger I, the flashiest hot-rod of them all. To get ready for his run, Thompson quit his job as a pressman for the Los Angeles Times seven months ago, spent up to 20 hours a day -and most of his savings-working with an engineering friend named Fritz Voigt on the long (20 ft.), low (30 in. at the hood) monster...
...that seemed to howl with speed just standing still. For push-pull power, Thompson remade two 1957 Chrysler engines and geared the first to the front wheels and the second to the back. To soup up the engines to a total of 850 h.p., Thompson and his buddy, Fred Voigt, added a magneto to each for hot-spark firing (standard ignition gradually weakens as engine speed increases), lengthened the piston strokes by five-eighths of an inch, rebored the cylinders and boosted the compression ratio from 8 to 1 to 12 to 1. At the heart of the retooled engines...
...Slowly Voigt caught on to the fact that in militaristic Prussia the badge of authority was invariably accepted as the real thing. Once free, he bought a captain's uniform and commandeered a squad of soldiers by the simple method of walking up to them and ordering them to follow him. Barking "Los" with all the crisp confidence of a drill instructor, he led his band on a raid of Koepenick's town hall, arrested the bumbling mayor and treasurer, walked off with the contents of the town till. Later, after Voigt gave himself up in return...
Berlin. As a young man, Voigt forged 300 marks worth of postal money orders to buy trinkets for his girl, and got a 15-year sentence for the crime. Once out of stir, he could not get a job without papers, and could not get papers without a job. Back in the jug he went, this time for breaking into a police station to try to forge a passport for himself...
...viewers may chuckle less heartily than the Kaiser. In reworking Voigt's escapade, Scriptwriter Zuckmayer dillydallies interminably in the soupy background of the hoax, gets down to the actual romp only in the last third of the film. And where The Captain calls for gusts of high-velocity satire, Zuckmayer gives it only windy philosophizing ("We're just entries on paper," mourns Voigt. "We're not human beings"). Chief honors for giving The Captain the moderate amount of appeal it has go to Veteran Heinz Rühmann, whose shuffling, beagle-faced portrayal of Voigt...