Key
Collaborators: Warren Low (Editor),
Hal
Wallis (Producer), Hans Dreier (Production
Designer), Victor Young (Composer), Henry O'Neill (Character
Player), Joseph Cotten (Leading Player), Henry Blanke (Producer), Joseph August (Cinematographer),
Franz Waxman (Composer), Franz Bachelin (Production Designer)
Recommended: Dr.
Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Love Letters (1945), The Accused (1948),
Portrait of Jennie (1948), Rope of Sand (1949), September Affair (1950), Dark City (1950)
"Considering
that the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is
just about my favourite film, it is a bitter pill to swallow
that its German director, William Dieterle, also made a fair
percentage of outright clinkers, especially in his later years,
his films from 1953 vying with each other for awfulness. But in
the Warners years Dieterle's dark, Germanic nature was in full
flight and he made some weird and wonderful variations on
standard genres there before becoming immersed in the studio's
passion for biopics." - David
Quinlan (Quinlan's Illustrated Guide to Film Directors, 1999)
"William Dieterle seemed less interesting than
Michael Curtiz in his (Dieterle's)
Warners period and less interesting than
Billy Wilder in his (Dieterle's)
Paramount period...But Dieterle was around on the set when many
interesting things happened over the years, and it is reasonable
to assume that he had something to do with them." - Andrew
Sarris (The American Cinema, 1968)
"Dieterle
proved a prolific workhorse, serving Paramount, Warners, and
David Selznick...By the mid-1940s Dieterle was under Selznick's
wing and his sense of almost supernatural atmosphere was not
unsuited to the producer's dreamy-mystical conception of
Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie - indication of how
often the women's picture encourages moderate talent into
abandoning caution." - David
Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
"Bosley Crowther referred to Dieterle as the "Plutarch of the
screen," in reference to the filmmaker's brilliant series of
cinema biographies throughout the 1930s. Dieterle was influenced
by expressionism, and his work is usually slow moving,
occasionally top-heavy, but more often penetrating." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)
Last
updated:
11/01/2008 01:31 AM.
Contact Us:
bill@theyshootpictures.com.
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