Word: werfel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Embezzled Heaven (Rhombus-Film; Louis de Rochemont) is a reasonably loyal German adaptation, dubbed in English, of the 1940 bestseller in which Franz (The Song of Bernadette) Werfel proposed a parable of modern man's fatal confusion, as he saw it, of the material and the spiritual worlds. The heroine is a dim-witted old peasant woman (Annie Rosar), who works as a cook in a wealthy Austrian family, saves all her pennies to educate her nephew (Kurt Meisel) for the priesthood. Actually the cook does not care a fig for the nephew. All she wants is a priest...
...nephew never became a priest at all. He makes his living as a smalltime photographer and petty swindler, and he curses the old cook for ruining his life by sending him to a seminary. Shattered, the old woman makes a pilgrimage to Rome to do penance for what Werfel conceived as the sin of the century: the attempt to substitute power for love, money for meaning...
...Time for Comedy, and the current Cold Wind and the Warm. When the motion picture version of Jacobowsky appeared last year, one New York critic commented that Nazism and anti-Semitism were not fit subjects for a humorous approach. "He was dead wrong," Behrman says, pointing out that Franz Werfel had told him the true story from which the play was taken at Max Reinhardt's Hollywood home. "Also present was the composer Arnold Schonberg; they were all refugees who had lost everything to the Nazis, but they all laughed themselves sick. The capacity to laugh is the strongest thing...
Behrman's 1940 play, Jacobowsky and the Colonel, written in conjunction with the Austrian Franz Werfel, was recently made into the successful motion picture, Me and the Colonel, starring Danny Kaye and Curt Jurgens...
...have a vivid memory of the horrors of World War II are able to laugh heartily and without uneasiness at this character is a curious phenomenon. If he were obviously a caracature, an unbelievable reductio ad absurdum of certain germanic traits, it would be easier to understand. But Werfel's Colonel, while perhaps exaggerated, is nevertheless real; and the qualities we all find so amusing were terrorizing the world for six years...