Film War in Germany

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 270, 4 February 1928, Page 25

Film War in Germany

Grave Scandal is Being Investigated I GERMANY is in the throes a film war. The Americans, it is asserted, have given the Germans a serious rebuff. The desperate attempts of Germany to fight the American film has led to a scandal at Reichswehr headquarters, which is now being investigated by a special committee appointed by the Government.

Several high officers in the administrative department of the Reichswehr are accused of having paid out very large sums of money from the funds at their disposal to prevent the Phoebus Film Company, which ranks as second in importance to the big Ufa concern, from showing American and other foreign films at the various picture theatres controlled by the company. Instead of the money which such films might be expected to bring in, funds were granted for the production of German films of avowedly Nationalist tendency, says a special dispatch to the “Morning Post.” It is true that the most sensational refusal to the Phoebus Company’s credit was the handling of the “Potemkin” film, but several American propositions were refused at a time when the films were already in Germany, having fulfilled the regulations of the “quota” system. The sums granted for a stirring picture, “Frisian Blood,” were more or less thrown away, as the German public evinced no particular interest in the type of Frisians portrayed. A second long-promised film, “Proud Waves the Pennant Black-White-Red,” is still awaiting a release which, it is rumoured, will never take place. This is the first time that any subvention of the German film by the process of suppression has been made public, and the fullest details are demanded by the Press, which is careful to point out that Reichswehr money comes out of the taxpayers’ pockets. The information has been made public at the same time that news comes that the delegates of the Ufa Company, who were sent to America to negotiate for better conditions for imported German films, have been unsuccessful. America refuses to commit herself to any definite reciprocity in the matter of showing German films, no matter how many she may be obliged to buy on the quota system in order to import her own.

The new film season has begun in Berlin, earlier than that of the theatres. There is a boom in Heidelberg pictures, of student life and love, equal to that of two years ago in screen stories written about Vienna.

In one, a revue film of rollicking tempo, “The Prettiest Legs in Berlin,” the heroine owe* Iter success to losing an undergarment generally considered necessary even by the extremely emancipated. The other, a cabaret picture, “Heaven and Earth,” can be more easily shorn of jts vulgarity*