Continental Films was a German-controlled French film production company. It stood as the sole authorized film production organization in Nazi-occupied France. [1]
Established in October 1940, it was entirely bankrolled by the German government, and headed by Alfred Greven in Paris, with its finances, production and distribution tightly integrated with the German film industry. [2] Continental's first production was Who Killed Santa Claus? (L'Assassinat du père Noël, 1941). The firm gave Henri-Georges Clouzot his first directoral job for the comic thriller The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (L'Assassin habite au 21, 1942), which Clouzot also co-wrote. [3] Continental released 30 features before ending production four years later. Its last release was Majestic Hotel Cellars (1944).
The film Safe Conduct (Laissez-passer, 2002) depicts life and work at Continental, based on the memoirs of director Jean Devaivre.
The director of Continental Film was the German producer Alfred Greven, who was born in 1897 in Elberfeld and died in 1973 in Cologne. After leaving the Gymnasium he volunteered in September 1914 for the German Army. He fought at the Western Front in the infantry and was severely wounded. In 1917, he fought in the Luftstreitkräfte and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class.
After the war he started to work in the movie business in 1920, joining the Nazi Party in 1931. In 1934, he was head of the committee for film production in the Reichsfilmkammer. Some of the films he produced were The Old and the Young King , The Green Domino and The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes . In 1940, Goebbels appointed him managing director of the newly established Continental Film, his direct superior being Max Winkler. Films Greven produced after the war include Bonjour Kathrin .
The film industry in Germany can be traced back to the late 19th century. German cinema made major technical and artistic contributions to early film, broadcasting and television technology. Babelsberg became a household synonym for the early 20th century film industry in Europe, similar to Hollywood later.
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-German-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute.
Henri-Georges Clouzot was a French film director, screenwriter and producer. He is best remembered for his work in the thriller film genre, having directed The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques, which are critically recognized as among the greatest films from the 1950s. Clouzot also directed documentary films, including The Mystery of Picasso, which was declared a national treasure by the government of France.
UFA GmbH, shortened to UFA, is a film and television production company that unites all production activities of Bertelsmann in Germany. Its name derives from Universum Film AG, which was a major German film company headquartered in Babelsberg, producing and distributing motion pictures from 1917 through to the end of the Nazi era. The name UFA was revived by Bertelsmann for an otherwise unrelated film and television outfit, UFA GmbH.
Danielle Yvonne Marie Antoinette Darrieux was a French actress of stage, television and film, as well as a singer and dancer.
William Dieterle was a German-born actor and film director who emigrated to the United States in 1930 to leave a worsening political situation. He worked in Hollywood primarily as a director for much of his career, becoming a United States citizen in 1937. He moved back to Germany in the late 1950s.
Pierre Fresnay was a French stage and film actor.
Quai des Orfèvres is a 1947 French police procedural drama film based on the book Légitime défense by Stanislas-Andre Steeman. Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot the film stars Suzy Delair as Jenny Lamour, Bernard Blier as Maurice Martineau, Louis Jouvet as Inspector Antoine and Simone Renant as Dora.
Le Corbeau is a 1943 French film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring Pierre Fresnay, Micheline Francey and Pierre Larquey. The film is about a French town where a number of citizens receive anonymous letters containing libelous information, particularly targeting a doctor accused of being an abortionist. The mystery surrounding the letters eventually escalates into violence.
Joe May was an Austrian film director and film producer and one of the pioneers of German cinema.
Fritz Hippler was a German filmmaker who ran the film department in the Propaganda Ministry of Nazi Germany, under Joseph Goebbels. He is best known as the director of the propaganda film Der Ewige Jude .
André Andrejew was one of the most important art directors of the international cinema of the twentieth century. He had a distinctive, innovative style. His décors were both expressive and realistic. French writer Lucie Derain described Andrejew at the peak of his career as "an artist of the grand style, blessed with a vision of lyrical quality." Edith C. Lee wrote recently: "Believing in creative freedom rather than academic reconstruction, André Andrejew fulfilled the 20th century's notion of the romantic, individualistic artist. The unusual titillated his imagination."
Cinema of Austria refers to the film industry based in Austria. Austria has had an active cinema industry since the early 20th century when it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that has continued to the present day. Producer Sascha Kolowrat-Krakowsky, producer-director-writer Luise Kolm and the Austro-Hungarian directors Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda were among the pioneers of early Austrian cinema. Several Austrian directors pursued careers in Weimar Germany and later in the United States, among them Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, Josef von Sternberg, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and Otto Preminger.
Véra Gibson-Amado, known professionally as Véra Clouzot, was a Brazilian-French film actress and screenwriter. She is known for playing Linda in The Wages of Fear (1953), Christina Delassalle in Les Diaboliques (1955), and Lucie in Les Espions (1957). Clouzot also co-wrote the screenplay for La Vérité (1960). Her husband, director Henri-Georges Clouzot, named his production company after her, Véra Films.
Erich Pommer was a German-born film producer and executive. Pommer was perhaps the most powerful person in the German and European Film Industries in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Charles Spaak was a Belgian screenwriter who was noted particularly for his work in the French cinema during the 1930s. He was the son of the dramatist and poet Paul Spaak, the brother of the politician Paul-Henri Spaak, and the father of the actresses Catherine Spaak and Agnès Spaak.
The Murderer Lives at Number 21 is a 1942 French comedy thriller film by director Henri-Georges Clouzot. Adapted by Belgian writer Stanislas-André Steeman and Clouzot from Steeman's 1939 book of the same title, it was Clouzot's debut feature film. The film is about the hunt by detective Wens for the murderer Monsieur Durand, who leaves calling cards and manages to be everywhere at once. With the aspiring actress Mila Malou, Wens follows clues to a seedy boarding house where he hopes to find the murderer.
Dallas Bower was a British director and producer active during the early development of mass media communication. Throughout his career Bower’s work spanned radio plays, television shows, propaganda shorts, animations and feature films, with his most notable projects consisting of Alfred Hitchcock’s first film in sound Blackmail (1929), the British Broadcasting Company’s radio play Julius Caesar (1938), the Dunkirk evacuation propaganda short Channel Incident (1940), the feature film Henry V (1944), and an Anglo-French adaptation of Lewis Carroll's children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland entitled Alice au pays des merveilles (1949). He later produced some of the earliest British television commercials.
Tobis Film was a German film production and film distribution company. Founded in the late 1920s as a merger of several companies involved in the switch from silent to sound films, the organisation emerged as a leading German sound studio. Tobis used the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film system under the Tobis-Klang trade name. The Ufa production company had separate rights to the Tobis system, which it used under the trade name of Ufa-Klang. Some Tobis films were released in Germany by the subsidiary Europa Film.
Karl Julius Fritzsche (1883–1954) was a German film producer. He is best known for his role as managing director of the German major studio Tobis Film during the Nazi era.