PATRIOTISM FIRST

Evening Star, Issue 22458, 1 October 1936, Page 9

PATRIOTISM FIRST

FILM STAR GIVES UP FAME Emil Jannings, three years ago the most famous actor in the world, has, for the sake of an ideal, disappeared from the view of millions of film fans in Britain and the United States. “What has happened to Jannings?” This question has been asked over and over again by cinema-goers, who have never forgotten his brilliant work in ‘ The Blue Angel,’ Marlene Dietrich’s first famous film, and in ‘ The Last Command,’ a picture which brought him the Motion Picture Academy’s award. I have pieced together the whole story of Jannings’s disappearance from the world cinema scene, says an English writer. I rang up some of the people who knew him and worked with him in his heyday—Conrad Veidt, director Paul Czinner, producer Erich. Pommer, Paul Rotha. They did not know where he was or what he was doing. As a last hope I telephoned Miss Elsie Cohen, an authority on Continental films. “ Jannings,” she told me, “ has just made a picture called ‘ Traumulus ’ in Germany But you won’t be able to see it. The British Board of Film Censors refused to pass it.” This scrap of information was the duo which enabled me to piece together the mystery of Jannings’s disappearance. Ho has sacrificed fame for an ideal. He preferred to work for Germany, the country he loves, than to earn a fabulous salary in Hollywood. The German Government appealed to Jannings to stay in his own country, because he was in sympathy with the new Nazi regime. Offers poured in from all the American companies, but he remained firm. Fame, he thought, was a poor thing compared with patriotism.

So he faded almost voluntarily out of the picture.

Jannings remains the world’s greatest actor—his performance in ‘ The Old and the Young King ’ showed that—but he is no longer box office.