The German Genius

is that Lang, as a Jew, left Germany for Hollywood soon after, while his wife, Thea von Harbou, stayed behind, and joined the Nazi Party.
    In America, Lang was employed by MGM and is held to have been at least partly responsible for the emergence of film noir (despite its French name), his most famous work of this kind being The Big Heat , starring Glenn Ford and Lee Marvin. But he worked with many stars, including Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Tyrone Power, and Edward G. Robinson, in films such as You and Me , 1938, with songs by Kurt Weill, and Hangmen Also Die! , cowritten with Bertolt Brecht. Toward the end of his life he returned to Germany.
    Billy Wilder, born Samuel Wilder (1906–2002) was brought up in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now Poland but studied at the University of Vienna, where he dropped out to become a journalist in Berlin. He started on the sports pages, changed to film reviewing, and acquired a taste for screenwriting. He collaborated with Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Eugen Schüfften, and Fred Zinnemann on the 1929 film Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), but left Germany via Paris (with $1,000 in his hatband) for Hollywood, in 1933 (traveling on a British ship, to learn English). In Los Angeles he shared an apartment with Peter Lorre. His family who remained in Germany—his mother, grandmother and stepfather—all died in Auschwitz. 41
    Wilder’s first success was Ninotchka , written with Ernst Lubitsch, but he then went on to have the most illustrious career of all the golden generation, or at least, for most people, the most remembered. Among his films, we may mention Double Indemnity (1944), a murder plotted for the insurance money, The Lost Weekend (1946), an examination of alcoholism, Sunset Boulevard (1950), about an aging film star dreaming of a comeback, Ace in the Hole (1951), an attack on gutter journalism, The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960), which are all so well known as to need no further comment. What is worth adding is that, in the course of these films, Wilder coaxed Oscar-winning performances out of leading actors in unlikely roles—William Holden, Fred MacMurray, and James Cagney as comedians. It was Wilder who paired Jack Lemmon with Walter Matthau, notably in The Front Page , 1974. Credited with breaking the bonds of Hollywood censorship in several of his films, he won six Oscars and was nominated another fifteen times. When he died a French newspaper titled its front-page obituary: “B ILLY W ILDER I S D EAD . N OBODY’S P ERFECT .”
    Erich Korngold (1897–1957) was not a director, but a composer, the son of a Jewish music critic from Brno in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now the Czech Republic. He studied music under Alexander von Zemlinsky, and both Strauss and Mahler liked his work—the latter referring to him as a “musical genius.” Korngold moved to the United States in 1934 and composed many film scores, beginning with an adaptation of Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream , which he wrote for Max Reinhardt’s 1935 version of the Shakespeare classic. In 1938 he was asked to compose the music for an Errol Flynn film, The Adventures of Robin Hood ; and while he was in Hollywood the Anschluss took place, so he stayed in California. His film credits include the music for Deception , starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains, Anthony Adverse , The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex , The Constant Nymph , and Of Human Bondage . He also composed a piano, violin, and cello concerto and a symphony and arranged operettas by Strauss and Offenbach. His oeuvre—very rich chromatically—is at last being treated seriously in the history of twentieth-century music, and his opera, Die tote Stadt ( The Dead City ; 1920), a big hit in the 1920s, has recently been revived in Bonn, Vienna, San Francisco, and London. 42
    And then there was The Blue Angel . Besides being, according to some, the first masterpiece of sound cinema and the first major German sound film, it brought together four unusual talents. The plot, it will be recalled from Chapter 27, was based on Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat , the schoolteacher who is ruined by his charges even as he tries to expose them, as he falls hopelessly in love with a nightclub singer. The film, released in 1930, was directed by Josef von Sternberg, cowritten with Carl Zuckmayer, and starred