‘Spotlight Saturday’ - Conrad Veidt
(Conrad Veidt, the formidable German thespian, graced more than a hundred motion pictures, carving out a reputation as one of the most arresting presences of the silent & early sound eras. One of his earliest triumphs came in Robert Wiene’s ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1920), that utterly cracking cornerstone of German Expressionism, wherein Veidt embodied the murderous somnambulist Cesare with a spectral intensity that fairly knocked audiences for six. Sharing the screen with Werner Krauss & Lil Dagover, he became synonymous with the eerie, stylised chiaroscuro of Weimar cinema.
Veidt delivered another astonishing turn in ‘The Man Who Laughs’ (1928), portraying the disfigured, misunderstood, young outcast known as Gwynplaine whose mouth had been carved into a perpetual grin. This haunting visage would later give rise to the visual conception of the Joker in the ‘Batman’ mythos, though Veidt himself never lived to see the caped crusader’s cultural ascendancy. He likewise headlined a string of silent Gothic treasures, ‘The Hands of Orlac’ (1924), again under Wiene’s direction; ‘The Student of Prague’ (1926); & ‘Waxworks’ (1924), in which he took on the role of Ivan the Terrible with characteristic ferocity.
Notably, Veidt appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld’s pioneering ‘Anders als die Andern’ (‘Different from the Others’, 1919), one of the earliest sympathetic cinematic treatments of homosexuality—brave stuff for its time, though the characters themselves meet no cheery resolution.
Veidt, a staunch opponent of the burgeoning Nazi movement, later contributed funds to aid Britons during the Blitz, long before it became fashionable on the Continent to stand in solidarity with the United Kingdom.
By March of 1933, with the Nazi Party tightening its grip, Joseph Goebbels had begun purging German film of Jewish artists & political dissenters. Recognising which way the wind was blowing, Veidt, having just married Ilona “Lilli” Prager, a Jewish woman—legged it from Germany in April of that year, the pair slipping away to Britain before the authorities could make an example of them. By 1941, they had decamped to Hollywood, determined to bolster the British war effort by shaping American cinema in ways that might coax the still-neutral United States into standing against the Reich, which by then held the whole of Europe in a stranglehold & continued to batter the United Kingdom from the skies.
Before leaving Britain, the Veidts relinquished a substantial portion of their savings to aid the war effort, & later offered their American home as refuge for an English child throughout the conflict, a rather smashing act of generosity. Veidt, ever practical, anticipated that Hollywood would typecast him as a Nazi officer, & so had the presence of mind to stipulate in his contract that, if he must play such rôles, they should invariably be villains. His most celebrated American performance came as the sinister Major Heinrich Strasser in ‘Casablanca’ (1942), a picture that entered pre-production before America had formally entered the war. Veidt himself remarked, with a sort of wry, almost weary amusement, that it was a queer twist of fate to be applauded for portraying precisely the type of black-hearted fellow who had driven him from his homeland.
An intriguing rivulet of near forgotten film lore holds that Veidt had originally been considered for ‘Dracula’ (1931) at Universal. Had his schedule not clashed, compounded by his need to return to Germany, the rôle might never have passed to Bela Lugosi. Given Veidt’s formidable presence in silent horror & his flair for uncanny, villainous personae, he would have been an absolutely first-rate fit for Stoker’s vampiric aristocrat. Fate, however, had other ideas, & the mantle of Dracula slipped to Lugosi, who immortalised it henceforth)
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