Originally published in Pioneers of Wonder, Promethus Books.
Reprinted by kind permission of the author. © 1999 Eric Leif Davin.
Photograph courtesy of Curt Siomak.
Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers at night,
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon shines bright.
Curt Siodmak, The Wolf Man (1941)
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Curt Siodmak may have the longest professional career of any writer in the science fiction field. Not counting a fairy tale he published at the age of eight in a children’s magazine, he has been writing and publishing for over three-quarters of a century, with his first “professional” sale in 1919. And he is still writing and publishing.
Like that of his older brother, Robert, his career began in Berlin in the days of the Weimar Republic. He has written short stories, novels, and plays, but it is as a Hollywood screenwriter that he made his mark. For twenty years, from 1938 to 1957, he regularly churned out original and adapted screenplays, sometimes two or three per year. In all, including collaborations, he crafted approximately forty-eight screenplays for films in Germany, Great Britain, America, Sweden, France, and Switzerland. Meanwhile, he produced approximately fifteen novels in Germany, America, and France, and his total number of short stories is unknown even to himself. Later in his career, Siodmak also directed a handful of Hollywood films, although it was his brother, Robert, who went on to become celebrated for directing such classics as The Spiral Staircase and The Crimson Pirate.1
Robert and Curt were the sons of a well-to-do Jewish banker in Leipzig, Germany (although Robert was actually born in 1900 in Memphis, Tenn., during a business trip by his father and Curt was born in Dresden two years later). Robert graduated from the University of Marburg and began acting in repertory theater, but the hyperinflation of the Weimar years forced him to give that up and become, first, a bank clerk, and then a failed businessman in a series of unsuccessful ventures. In 1925 he managed to find a job in Berlin as a title writer for imported American films. In 1926 Robert became a film editor. In 1929 Robert and his brother, Curt, collaborated with Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann—both of whom later became prominent Hollywood directors—in creating the noted feature documentary People on Sunday, marking Robert’s directorial and Curt’s screenwriting debuts.
Curt had hoped to graduate from a German university, but the inflation of the years immediately after World War I again interfered. When his father was unable to finance his continued education in Germany, Curt went to Zurich, Switzerland, where he obtained his B.A. in engineering in 1924. He was already writing short stories, which appeared in top German magazines. One such story, “The Eggs From Lake Tanganyika,” was seen by Hugo Gernsback and reprinted in the fourth issue of his new science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories (July 1926).2 Thus, though he’d never heard of either Gernsback or his magazine, Siodmak became a “Gernsback author,” a reputation he has retained ever since.
Upon graduation from the University of Zurich, Curt joined his brother in Berlin. There, the vagaries of the financial situation made it impossible to pursue his engineering career. Instead, he drifted into his brother’s film circle and wrote scripts for several of Robert’s films. Both brothers fled the Nazis in the early thirties and eventually ended up in Hollywood. Curt was quickly given a job writing a sarong picture for Dorothy Lamour and a succession of such assignments followed for the next two decades. A number of his assignments for Universal Pictures— The Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Son of Dracula, and others—have since become horror classics. This, as he makes clear in the following conversation, was entirely accidental. He had no particular affection for or interest in either horror or science fiction—indeed, he never read the stuff. It was merely a job.
This unfamiliarity with the field may explain why Siodmak’s output—though prodigious—is also so derivative. Siodmak never displayed much feeling for or understanding of the field. Even his most noted novel and film, Donovan’s Brain, a 1943 story about a disembodied brain kept alive in a vat, was a crude science fiction cliche at the time. The August 1926 issue of Amazing Stores, for instance, the very next issue after the one that introduced Siodmak to America, featured a cover of two scientists recoiling in horror from a still-living head in a lab vat.3
Nor, though Siodmak claims credit for creating the Wolf Man character in 1941, was his werewolf creation without precedent. The Wolf Man was Lon Chaney Jr.’s second horror film and the role for which he is most remembered. Indeed, he was honored with his in-character Wolf Man portrait on a U.S. postage stamp. Werewolves, however, were not new to cinema. As early as 1913 Bison Films had made a silent film, The Werewolf. In 1933 Guy Endore’s classic novel, The Werewolf of Paris, burst upon the world and Endore was quickly snapped up by MGM as a screenwriter to turn his novel into a screenplay. Universal Studios rushed to beat MGM to the screen with their own werewolf story. In 1935 they turned out The Werewolf of London with, not one, but two werewolves, one of them an Oriental werewolf played by Warner Oland, of later Charlie Chan fame. Thus, when Universal Studios returned to the werewolf theme in 1941 with an assignment to Siodmak to write a screenplay, the ground was well-trodden—although now-integral parts of the werewolf legend, such as Gypsy curses and silver bullets, made their first appearance in this film and might have been Siodmak’s ideas. In addition, the script was unusually literate for both a B film—and for Siodmak.
In 1943 Siodmak coscripted I Walked with a Zombie, a true horror classic from the team of producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, who also brought us 1942’s Cat People. This was perhaps Tourneur’s best work, almost poetic, complemented by the haunting camera work of J. Roy Hunt and the dialogue of Ardel Wray, based upon an original story by Inez Wallace. Here, also, however, the film, though nightmarishly beautiful, was basically the well-known story of Jane Eyre transposed to the West Indies and it is unclear what, or how much, Siodmak contributed to the film.
Even at the time, Siodmak’s films were recognized as plodding and predictable, if not outright ridiculous, confirming that his talents were of the stolid workmanlike variety which welded worn-out SF conventions onto mundane formulas. For example, of Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, shot on location in Brazil, Variety said, “Curt Siodmak’s screenplay and direction make formula thriller use of the settings.”4 Of Siodmak’s Love Slaves of the Amazon, based upon an unpublished short story of his, Variety said it was:
. . . a simple-minded, poorly-made adventure film of which everyone says, “there must be a market for them somewhere.” It’s being coupled by Universal with Monolith Monsters, and, as part of such a package, probably will sneak by. If there’s anything good to be said about it it’s that the Eastman color is vivid and impressive, picking up some interesting landscapes in Brazil, where this was produced by Curt Siodmak . . . .
Siodmak’s script is so clumsy, the temptation is great to consider the whole thing a takeoff on jungle pix that have gone before. His direction isn’t any much better, judging by the performances. . . . Siodmak should have to answer to someone why nothing better came out.5
Meanwhile, Damon Knight has pointed to Siodmak’s screenplay for 1954’s Riders to the Stars as, “a splendid example of all that is silliest and most unscientific in SF cinema.”6
Nevertheless, Siodmak has had the last laugh—all the way to the bank. His novels are still in print, at least in Europe, he is financially comfortable, and he now “lives like a king” on a sixty-acre ranch in the wilds of the California outback. If nothing else, the long-distance career of Curt Siodmak proves that there is always a lucrative market for formula.
The great virtue of oral history, such as in the following conversation, is that it gives a first-person “eyewitness” account of events by someone who was there. The great flaw of oral history, however, is that memory is exceedingly fallible, especially about events which happened decades past. Oral testimony, therefore, always has to be verified, as much as possible, by comparison with the record. This is true of the following conversation, where both the great virtue and great flaw of oral history are both on display. This conversation with Curt Siodmak took place on June 11, 1991. Siodmak was eighty-eight years old at the time.
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Eric Leif Davin: You were born August 10, 1902, correct?
Curt Siodmak: Ja, I didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose my family and I didn’t choose Dresden, where I was born. If I’d had a choice, I’d have been born two thousand years ago in Greece during the time of Aristotle, not during the time of Hitler.
Are you Jewish?
My father says so and I am his child.
In Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut described Dresden before the firebombing. Was that an accurate description ?
I don’t remember. That was over fifty years ago. In your memory things are so different. I had a lovely big palazzo in Italy with a big staircase. I saw it thirty years later and it was a small house with a small staircase. We’re used to big spaces in America. Now I live in California on a ranch. Sometimes we see a jeep on the fire roads and my wife says, “Let’s move out, it’s getting crowded.”
I’ve been back to Europe a few times. I was invited recently by the head of the film museum in Berlin, who was a house guest here on my ranch a few weeks ago. I’m also a new writer they’ve just discovered over there. All my books are being republished and I had a new book out two weeks ago entitled The Riches of Paris. Only published in France. A historical novel about Louis XIV.
All my books have been continually in print. My book Donovan’s Brain has been published five or six times in Germany. I was published by Bertelsmann, one of the largest European publishers. I was in Munich about two years ago with a book manuscript. They took it away and gave me cash!
I think the 1953 film version of Donovan’s Brain was the first film I saw based on your work.
They didn’t want me to direct that. I had a contract to direct it, but it didn’t happen.
Were you satisfied with what they did?
I don’t look at those pictures. They changed too much, especially adding references to God, so I didn’t look at it. Another version was called The Brain, made by an English company in 1962. They had a cancer cure in it. What is a cancer cure doing in that picture?7
But, the book is still in print; sold about five million copies. I just had three of my books come out in one volume. It’s written from the shifting viewpoint of a young man in the first story, middle aged in the second, and an old man in the third.
So, you’re still active?
What do you mean still active? Of course! They just had a big parade for me in Austria. I’m also a lyricist and song writer. I just wrote a play, The Song of Frankenstein. It’s a comedy. It’s huge over there. It’s in Vienna, then it goes to Berlin, then it goes to London.
I have also written about five hundred pages of my autobiography, which I’ve been working on for some time. I threw the first draft away and started from scratch. There was a lady photographer visiting me from Zurich about three years ago. She was interviewing all the people of my circle from the thirties who are still alive. That started me thinking that I should write about my life and about those people, too.8
Can we talk about those early days? I think you must have the longest professional career—wasn’t your first professional sale in 1909? When you were eight years old you published a fairy tale in a magazine called Kinderwelt, ‘‘Children’s World.”
Well, I wrote that fairy tale as a child and I wrote lots of science fiction. I remember one story, it was a long time ago, 1922. I described a telephone booth which would disassemble people into atoms and transmit them to another booth which would reassemble them into people—a matter transmitter.
What would you say your earliest influences were?
I studied engineering in Zurich, Switzerland, and in Stuttgart Hochschule, which was similar to a community college. I developed a car engine in ’22, similar to the Wankel engine. I studied lasers in the thirties. My father refused to pay for my education because of the tremendous inflation at that time, so I lost my education. But, I had two friends who invited me to Switzerland, where I met my wife, Henrietta.9 She was an architect in Zurich. I met her at a fancy dress ball. I was then a student at the University of Zurich, from which I graduated.
Do you credit that engineering education with your ability to think up science fiction ideas?
Not at all. It’s like a shoeshine boy asking you if you want a shine. How does he know? He looked at your shoes! I go through life and I see things others don’t see because it’s my profession. If you have the talent and you do it often enough, it becomes second nature. You don’t need an engineering background to do that. And you don’t need to read science fiction! I never did read science fiction. I think it’s gibberish. I don’t understand all the technical words they use.
But, you’ve written technical stories about outer space like City in the Sky!
City in the Sky is possible! But Star Wars is not possible.
I see. Did you always think science fiction was gibberish?
Of course, it was always gibberish. You know, the human mind is so limited. We write about societies on other worlds, and they resemble us so much. You look at the paintings of Brueghel or Bosch10 and all those demons look like men with two eyes and two arms—hard to think of a new shape. The same with societies. You go into outer space and you find fascism or communism or the Roman Empire or feudal Europe. We don’t have much in our brains.
I wrote a few books about space, Skyport and City in the Sky.11 A friend took me to visit engineers at Lockheed because he thought talking with them would help give me ideas. They got their ideas from reading my books!
For instance, instead of launching rockets from the ground to reach orbit, why not have a huge elevator into space, miles high? Launch things from the top and they save so much on fuel!
Didn’t Arthur C. Clarke already write about that in The Fountains of Paradise?12
Who? I don’t know. I never read that.
How did you go from being an engineer to being a reporter and a writer?
I was always a writer. When I went to Berlin in 1924, the inflation made it impossible to make a living as an engineer, so I wrote for the newspapers. My education helped me a lot in my science fiction writing. I didn’t know very much, but I knew a little.
But, while my education helped with my science fiction, I also wrote love stories, all kinds of novels. My last one is a historical novel. If the idea is interesting, it doesn’t matter if it’s science fiction, or not. I’m a writer. I can write about anything.
Was there an active German science fiction community in the twenties?
I wrote a short story called “The Eggs from Tanganyika.” It was published in a German magazine and then I got some money from Hugo Gernsback when he republished it. I found an article in The Smithsonian about four weeks ago which said he wanted stories which used a lot of scientific research.13 But, I didn’t do any research for that story! I’d never heard of Gernsback before he published my story.
Were there any American science fiction magazines republished in Germany?
It took six weeks for the boat to come over! An exchange didn’t exist. Sometimes you got a hardback, but nothing from magazines. How much do you know about German publications? Why should I know what was published in America?
How did you first become interested in film in Germany?
I just got a letter from a friend of mine who’s my age. He reminded me that I made my first film in 1926. Then I wrote books. I wrote Antwortet Nicht.14 Then I wrote something called The Studio Murder Mystery. In those days, newspapers still published novels in serial form. These were reprinted in smaller and smaller papers, until you got to the village papers, each paying less money. But, you were paid for each publication. The Germans paid very well, not like in America. Here, five weeks after publication your book is forgotten.
Did you have much input into the making of F.P. 1 Does Not Answer?
No, not at all. Someone said, “The writer is the most important person in Hollywood. Don’t give him any power!”
And that was true in Germany, too?
No, in Germany a writer had standing.
But, F. P. One was made in Germany!
It was made in Germany, but it was shot simultaneously in three languages. It was the studio’s idea. They wanted an international market. The producer for that film had imagination. He worked with Billy Wilder. He protected writers. But I didn’t go onto sets. I didn’t like actors. My brother, Robert, was the one who did that. He discovered Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis, he picked them out of the crowd. He was a star-maker. He did Spiral Staircase and The Crimson Pirate, which was Lancaster’s first big film. He wanted me to change my name so there wouldn’t be two Siodmaks.
It’s strange to hear you say you don’t like actors, since you went on to become a director.
I went where the money was. How much money does a writer get? I never made money from my writing. A director made lots more money. Now I live like a king and I own sixty acres in the wilds of California. Not because of my writing!
Is that why you don’t like actors? Because they make more money than writers?
What is an actor? Someone found in a drugstore! And if they become successful, they become a son-of-a-bitch! Who are the great actors through the ages? You know only when you know who directed them! And how many films do you remember? But, you know Shakespeare, don’t you? Who acted in his plays? Books you remember! Books go through the ages. Plays go through the ages. But who remembers the actors of yesterday? Hitchcock was right. Actors should be treated like cattle.
I knew Hitchcock. He came to my office in London and said to me, “Siodmak, write me a story about a woman who is a deaf and dumb detective.” That was a very good idea, but unfortunately, I couldn’t do it for him, because I left for America.
What was the first film you worked on?
I worked for a small German newspaper in ’26 and was sent to do a story on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. He didn’t allow reporters on his set, so I and my wife got jobs as extras in the movie. We didn’t get much money for it, and we ate up whatever we got.
I never did like that movie. The thing I remember most about it was Brigitte Helm’s costume catching fire during one of the disaster scenes. Helm was very pretty and very young. But, she was more hysterical than talented.15
In 1929 we made a film, we five young men in Berlin. Robert Siodmak, myself, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Edgar Ulmer. We wrote a film called People on Sunday. The British stole it and it was made into a film called Bank Holiday. This picture is a classic, it’s in every film museum, including the county museum here in Los Angeles. It was our first picture. It was the first money I made. We just took people on the street and turned them into actors, very cheap. It was the same style as what the French later called “New Wave,” pictures like The Bicycle Thief.16 We did the same kind of film twenty years earlier, but we didn’t get the credit. Truffaut got the credit.
If you didn’t like Metropolis, why are you writing a sequel to it?
A sequel? I’m not writing a sequel to it. Who told you anything as silly as that?
Forrest J. Ackerman said so.
Well, it might be because I have a friend who reads scripts in Hollywood and he mentioned the possibility of a sequel. I wrote him back some ideas of how a sequel might go, but that was all.
Did you know Thea von Harbou, the coauthor with Lang of Metropolis?
I never met her. I saw her once. There was a split between her and Lang. He left Germany in the thirties, while she stayed. They were going to make Lang an “Honorary Aryan” and he said he’d think it over. But, he was out of the country immediately after that.
It was a nightmare time, the thirties. I don’t like to think about it. I don’t think the Germans have changed in their attitudes toward Jews, even today. In 1985 I went back to Berlin to see how the people behaved, what Germany was like. I stayed in the best hotel in Berlin. I saw what kind of pictures they were showing. My name was still known. It was good for the ego. But the memories made me sick. There I was, standing on the same sidewalk in front of the same theater where I’d stood sixty years before for a screening of my science fiction film The Invisible Agent.17 In the meantime, there’d been a world war, they’d killed my family. It made me feel sick. You Americans don’t know what it was like to live through those times.
But every country’s the same. Here we had the Vietnam War. But we faced it. We have the Vietnam Memorial, we write books about it, we make pictures about it. But the Germans don’t face it. You can’t make a picture today in Germany and show the Nazis.
I met so many people who said they were anti-Nazi. I asked, “Was that in 1945 or in 1942?” They don’t say anything. But this isn’t about politics here.
You left Germany in 1933, correct?
No, I didn’t leave Germany. They threw me out! I got a letter from the German writers’ union telling me I wasn’t permitted to work in Germany anymore because I’m Jewish. In 1936 I received a letter in England from my publisher in Leipzig, Bertelsmann, now framed and hanging on my wall. It says, “Dear Mr. Siodmak: This is to inform you that all your books have been confiscated by the Gestapo. So sorry. Heil Hitler!” This is the same publisher who published my latest book last week!
Why did you leave England in 1937?
My wife wanted to go to America. She couldn’t explain what it was. She was afraid of the Nazis coming. We tried moving to Switzerland but came back because she was pregnant and wanted to give birth to a British child. So, we moved to Los Angeles. Now we live in the country because she doesn’t like the city anymore. I don’t fight it; she’s always right.
How did you make contacts so quickly when you moved to Hollywood in ’37?
Somebody took me to Paramount. I got a job the first week. My first assignment was writing a picture for Dorothy Lamour, Jungle Princess.18 It was standard in those days for old alcoholic screenwriters to be kept on and they’d assign younger writers to work with them and do the writing. I was given such an assignment of writing Aloma of the South Seas.19 I made twenty-eight pictures for Universal. That was another time when you had to really work! My brother also had no job. So, Preston Sturges said he’d get him a job. He called the head of Paramount and said, “I have the most important director in Europe in my office.” So, he was hired.20
How long did it take you to write a screenplay when you were working for Universal?
About ten weeks from scratch.
How long for The Invisible Woman, in 1941, John Barrymore’s last picture?
He was an absolute mess. Couldn’t remember one line. So, I was on the set all the time. I wrote his dialog for him as he walked up and down the staircase and he could read it as he walked up and down. You had to be careful or he’d walk out of camera range. I could tell you stories, but this is on tape.
How about The Son of Dracula?21
It was an interesting idea. Here was a woman in love with a man who would live forever, a vampire.
Was that your idea?
Of course, of course. The directors had no ideas. Actors have no ideas.
Did you come up with the idea for The House of Frankenstein?
Well, of course. I had a little altar in my room. I’d say to it, “My weekly check, my weekly check,” and I’d go back to my typewriter. You have to write a lot of jobs to feed a family. I didn’t want to make art! By chance the times have caught up with me and some people think the things are interesting. But, it was just a job. You didn’t get much money for writing these things, $400 or $500, perhaps $1,000. That was good money in those days, but you had to keep working.
And you originated the idea for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, didn’t you?
Of course! And I created the character of The Wolf Man. I wish I had the copyright on him, but Universal owns it. Originally it was just entitled The Wolf Man, and would have had Boris Karloff in it, but he had to make another picture, so we had Lon Chaney Jr. I had two hours to come up with the idea for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. I was told, “Here are your actors: Claude Rains, Ralph Bellamy, Lon Chaney.22 You’ll have a budget of $80,000. You begin shooting in two weeks. Goodbye!” So, I quickly wrote a script and was working on it right up to the last moment. I didn’t have the money to hire another writer, so I had to write it myself. There’s a book coming out on the classic Universal monster movies and it publishes my original shooting script for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
You know, I never made the big pictures. In those days, there was something called “Block Booking.” A theater had to buy three hours of entertainment from the studio, okay? So, most of my films were made just to fill out the block. They’ve become “horror classics,” but that was not of my doing. I was just making a living, that’s all. I wrote sixty producible film scripts. I have two which have never been filmed.
Why were so many of your films horror stories?
They were just assignments given to me.
Did you respect the things you were writing, or did you just consider it trash?
I respected it. If you spit at your work, it will spit back at you. In your life, you are merely the echo of your own energies. I put all my energy into every job I had. I took them all seriously. I did a picture in England called Transatlantic Tunnel. It was the first time the British engaged American actors. Richard Dix, others. It opened up the whole English film industry. It was based on a famous novel by a German, Bernhard Kellerman, Der Tunnel.
Napoleon came up with the idea first, though. I got the job because I could read the original. They asked, “Can you write a script for it in three days?” I said, “Oh, sure.” However, it took six months.23
What’s your method for so much productivity?
I write twenty-four hours a day. When I’m on the phone, walking around, I’m writing in my mind. Basically, you’re like a lighthouse keeper; you’re married to the thing. Writing becomes the world, and the world becomes a dream. I’ve never had a problem with ideas, they just come. I have in my garage two hundred books with my stories, and that’s only a third of my output. A young man came to me and said, “I want to be a writer. How do I get an agent? How much money can I make?” I took him to the garage and told him, “When you have that many books, come back.”
What should I do to reach the age of ninety and still be active, like you?
Be curious. The brain is a muscle. As long as you work with it constantly, it stays young. ●
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1. Robert Siodmak died in Switzerland on May 10, 1973.
2. This was the story—with a Frank R. Paul illustration for the magazine’s cover showing a giant fly attacking a warship—which captured the young Raymond Z. Gallun’s eye and moved him to purchase his very first science fiction magazine. He was an instant convert to the genre. It has been reprinted in Forrest J. Ackerman, ed., The Gernsback Awards I, 1926 (London: Turret, 1982).
3. Siodmak turned his novel into the original screenplay for the 1953 film of the same name. The film starred Nancy Davis (the future First Lady, Nancy Reagan) and Lew Ayres, World War II pacifist who briefly served time with pacifist SF editor Charles D. Hornig.
4. Variety, Nov. 7, 1956.
5. Variety, Dec. 4, 1957.
6. Quoted in Peter Nicholls, ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1979), p. 548.
A small selection of other films for which Siodmak wrote the original screenplays include: House of Frankenstein (1944), in which all the Universal monsters were thrown together to revive the flagging series; Bride of the Gorilla (1951), also directed by Siodmak, in which Raymond Burr is a were-gorilla killed by cops Lon Chaney Jr. and black actor Woody Strode in his debut; and The Magnetic Monster (1953), cowritten with Ivan Tors and directed by Siodmak. The latter film starred Richard Carlson, omnipresent actor in 1950s’ Grade B science fiction films. Siodmak and Tors wrote the screenplay in hopes of creating a TV series based on Carlson’s character, who was an agent of the Office of Scientific Investigations. Sounds like X-Files.
Some of Siodmak’s adapted screenplays include: Black Friday (1940), cowritten with Eric Taylor, in which Boris Karloff performs a brain transplant; The Invisible Man Returns (1940), cowritten with Lester Cole and Joe May, who directed it. This was Vincent Price’s first starring vehicle; Tarzan’s Magic Fountain (1949), cowritten with Harry Chandlee. Basically Lost Horizon in the jungle, this was the first Tarzan movie to star Lex Barker, who made several sequels; and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), cowritten with George Worthing Yates and Raymond T. Marcus [Bernard Gordon], with special effects by Ray Harryhausen. Based on Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe’s 1953 book, Flying Saucers From Outer Space, although greatly influenced by George Pal’s 1953 film, War of the Worlds. Indeed, except for War of the Worlds, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is the only 1950s’ SF film to feature a mass invasion of aliens. It contains the famous Harryhausen-engineered scene of a flying saucer crashing into the dome of the U.S. Capitol Building, a scene later spoofed in the TV cartoon series The Simpsons.
7. A British-West German production, it is also known as Vengeance and Ein Toter Sucht Seinen Moerder.
8. Unable to find a publisher, Siodmak self-published his completed autobiography on August 10, 1997, in a signed and boxed edition. Its title, Even A Man Who Is Pure in Heart. . . , comes from the opening lines of The Wolf Man. The publication date coincided with the U.S. Post Office release of the commemorative Lon Chaney “Wolf Man” stamp.
9. Henrietta De Perrot, whom he married in 1931. They had one child, a son, Peter, born in Great Britain and now a well-to-do American businessman.
10. Pieter Brueghal (1564?-?1638), Flemish painter known for his paintings of demons and infernal regions. Hieronymus Bosch (1450?—1516), Dutch painter of devils, monstrosities, and other gruesome subjects.
11. Skyport (New York: Crown, 1959). Basically Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead—in the sky. City in the Sky (New York: Putnam, 1974). Basically Grand Hotel—in the sky.
12. Published in 1979, it won the Hugo in 1980 as Best Novel.
13. Daniel Stashower, “A Dreamer Who Made Us Fall In Love With The Future,” The Smithsonian 21, no. 5 (August 1990).
14. F. P. 1 Antwortet Nicht (Berlin: Keils, 1931). Published in America as F. P. 1 Does Not Reply (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933). Filmed in Germany in 1933, for which Siodmak wrote the screenplay. An English version was released in 1938 in Great Britain by Gaumont. It is about floating airports—”Flight Platforms”—in the middle of the ocean.
15. Talented or not, Brigitte Helm—only a teenager when she portrayed both the heroine and the evil robot-vamp in Lang’s classic silent SF film Metropolis—went on to make a string of films in which she almost always had the starring role. She easily made the transition to sound and starred as the Queen of Atlantis in G. W. Pabst’s excellent 1932 film, L’ Atlantide. As with the filming of Siodmak’s F. P. 1, Pabst’s film was shot simultaneously in German, French, and English with different casts, except for Helm, who starred in all three. According to Nicholls, Pabst’s film, “is generally regarded as superior, not only because of its visual flair, but also for Brigitte Helm’s striking performance as the queen” (p. 49). Brigitte Helm’s last film was Ein Idealer Gatte (An Ideal Spouse), in 1935. She died in Switzerland on June 11, 1996, at the age of ninety.
16. In fact, this was a 1947 Italian film directed by Vittorio de Sica, which won a special Academy Award before foreign films had their own category.
17. Invisible Agent was made in Hollywood in 1942 as an espionage thriller in which the son of the original Invisible Man volunteers to spy on the Nazis and Japanese for the Allies. Highly unlikely that this war propaganda film would have been screened in Berlin anytime before 1945.
18. Actually, Her Jungle Love, 1938. Starring Lamour and Ray Milland as her lover, this South Seas sarong-film was essentially a remake of Lamour’s sarong-debut, Jungle Princess, which paired her with Milland in 1936, before Siodmak left England.
19. 1941, another Dorothy Lamour sarong film.
20. Robert Siodmak settled in Paris after being expelled from Germany in 1933. He left Paris for Hollywood in 1940, just ahead of the German army.
21. Released in 1943, it was cowritten with Eric Taylor and directed by Siodmak’s brother, Robert. It starred Lon Chaney Jr. as “Count Alucard” (“Dracula” spelled backward).
22. Actually, these were the actors in The Wolf Man (1941). Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) starred Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, Ilona Massey, and Maria Ouspenskaya. Siodmak is obviously thinking about The Wolf Man (cowritten with Gordon Kann, which brings into question Siodmak’s claim to have created the character) all the while he is talking about Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, for which he was, indeed, the sole screenwriter.
23. The Tunnel (aka Transatlantic Tunnel) was actually cowritten with L. Du Garde Peach and Clemence Dane, a well-known British author. It was released in 1935 and told the story of the construction of a tunnel beneath the Atlantic linking Britain and America. There was a previous 1933 German film, Der Tunnel, based upon the same novel, which linked America with the Continent, bypassing England. The epic grandeur of the German film was lost in Siodmak’s cowritten screenplay, which turned the construction of the Tunnel into a love-story triangle centered around the master engineer, his wife, and a vamp.
Napoleon’s idea for a tunnel, which Siodmak mentions, was for an undersea link between England and the rest of Europe—which now exists as the “Chunnel.” This is yet another science fiction idea which has become reality! ●
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Eric Leif Davin is a history lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of many books, including:
Pioneers of Wonder (Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com), Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 (Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com), and a new novel The Great Strike of 1877 (Lulu.com).
More information is available at his ISFDB page, Amazon.com page, and website.
