Emil Jannings

An Estimate of the Great German Screen Actor Recently Imported to Hollywood

JIM TULLY

HE is an immense man. He thrusts the middle of his body forward as He walks. His frame is awkward and heavy.

His face is bland, round as the full moon, and save for the eyes, expressionless. The years have written neither agony nor mirth on it. As pliable as putty, it is one of the chief secrets of the man's great career in films. It reminds one of the rubber faces which children buy for toys. A pressure of the finger can make it turn old, wrinkled, full of laughter, or sad. It is more mobile than any face I have ever seen.

Whether or not Emil Jannings is a greater film actor than his chief contemporary, Wallace Beery, is a moot question. His background has been more extensive and his theatrical training more rigid than the American's. But with a face carved in softer material, Jannings has a distinct advantage over Mr. Beery.

The German actor was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1886. His parents returned to Europe when He was about a year old.

The elder Jannings had been a manufacturer of kitchen utensils in Brooklyn. He settled in Zurich, Switzerland, and remained there during the first ten years of his son's life. He later moved to Gorlitz. The Jannings familv and antecedents are German middle class.

A brother is an exporter in Shanghai. A sister is the wife of a judge in Silesia. A younger brother is a scenario writer with the UEA in Berlin.

Emil Jannings is the accidental branch which bore fine fruit on an ordinary family tree. His face is his fortune.

A poor student as a youth, he was often put in the "school jail" for infractions of rules and routine.

AT fourteen he ran away to become a sailor. In two days He arrived at Hamburg and signed as cabin boy on a tramp steamer. He had brought three books with him. The crew, no doubt feeling that young Jannings was destined for a motion picture career, threw two of the volumes overboard.

It was apparently a groping crew, intellectuallv. They soon became intoxicated and forced the fourteen year old boy to read the third volume. It was all about a Mr. William Tell by a Mr. Friedrich von Schiller. Before the youth had finished reading the first act, a sailor grabbed the Messrs. Tell and Schiller, and threw them overboard.

Deeply disillusioned with his environment, the future screen star deserted the ship in London, where, penniless, he was scarcely able to eke out a living.

One day he met a friend of his father, Albert Ballin. Mr. Ballin, an employee of the Hamburg-American Steamship Line, sent the hoy home. Years later, when Jannings came to America as a world famous actor, he traveled on the S. S. Albert Ballin.

Jannings was then entered in an Engineering School—to no purpose.

He soon became interested in the local theatre at Gorlitz. A stage employee became his friend and admitted him behind the scenes occasionally. As a result he soon ran away with a traveling stock company, He served as property boy and bill passer.

Never in funds, the troupe traveled about in the heavy wagons in which they lived. The owner cooked for the company. His wife supervised the wardrobes and curled the hair of the artists. The strolling theatrical vagabonds played in empty store rooms, rundown theatres, cafes, wherever possible.

Years later, Jannings was to draw upon his experience when playing the part of Stephen Heller in Variety.

His first opportunity came when the leading man was ill. The play was Sudermann's Honour. As Jannings knew the words of most parts in the entire repertoire he was allowed to make his first stage appearance.

His other duties with the company did not abate. He remained boy of all work with the troupe.

This company was known as the "Schmieren Theatre." .Tannings' wage wras approximately Si.00 a week.

He is still an able carpenter and property man.

Many of the leading artists of the German stage and screen received their early training as members of wagon troupes. Max Reinhardt is a famous example.

Jannings later became a juvenile at Gardelegen. Leipzig, Bremen and Mainz. He met two young players at Gardelegen who later became well known and who preceded him to America as film directors. Lothar Mendes and Ernst Lubitsch.

For more than a dozen years Jannings lived the hard routine of the provincial player, alternating between work as stage carpenter and property man. It was rigorous and juiceless schooling to a youth of Jannings' capacity. Artists may be born but they are shaped by the chisels of experience.

He attracted the attention of the Duke of Hesse and was engaged by that gentleman to play at his theatre in Darmstadt. He soon met all the leading jdayers of Germany.

Max Reinhardt first saw Jannings at Darmstadt and engaged him for the ojiening of the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin.

It was with the Reinhardt company that Jannings jdaved in all the Se.hlegel translations of Shakespeare. These were followed with plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Schiller, Goethe and Gerhart Hauptmann. Jannings has played a variety of idles, and is, perhaps, the most thoroughly trained actor in the world.

When the war came Germany ordered all theatres to remain open. The salary of Jannings during this period was $20.00 per month.

HE held the films in contempt. But the low wage offered on the stage made him turn to the screen for a means of earning a better livelihood.

Ernst Lubitsch was a fellow player with Jannings at the Deutsches Theatre. Lubitsch knew a director who was about to film a story. He helped Jannings secure a part in it.

The film was called When We Four Do The Same. Jannings next received $10.00 a day for appearing in a film which was directed by Robert Wiene, later famous as the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and one of the few leading gentlemen of the films who has not yielded to the lure of American money.

Of this period of his career Jannings said, regarding films: "I hated the work. I was disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul. This feeling holds true today and that is why I cannot play a motion pueture role that I do not live and feel. I thought it was a stupid business and I despised doing the scenes in snatches at a time."

During all this time Jannings remained with Max Reinhardt.

His first screen success was Passion. This film brought Pola Negri and Lubitsch to a high commercial (and subsequent low artistic) success in America.

Not until years later did Jannings consent to sign an American contract. The filming of Passion cost about twenty thousand dollars. The extras received fifty cents a day. Jannings salary was S20.00 a day.

Until Passion was made, Jannings played on the stage and screen simultaneously. When Max Reinhardt first staged that fairy tale concocted for German Lutherans and Iowa Methodists, The Miracle, Jannings played an important role.

Jannings was approaching middle life when cast for the role of Louis XV in Madame Du Barry. Miss Negri player! the lovely mistress, He followed with Louis XIV in Deception, Pharaoh in The Loves of Pharaoh, Peter the Great, Danton, and Othello in films hearing those names.

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While building an international screen reputation he did not entirely neglect his stage career. But the strain became too great even for a man of his tremendous vitality. He gave up the stage.

Superb in all his screen performances, his greatest role was still before him.

It was that of the porter in The Last Laugh. In this film, the bluff and kindly German climbed the highest artistic mountain ever discovered on the screen, He gave majesty, for once, to the films.

But The Last Laugh was too heavily burdened with humanity to float successfully on the commercial sea of American moronia. It was not, as one gentleman of Judea would say to another, a "box office success."

His more recent films have been Faust and Variety. They were made in Germany.

Now in America his career will be watched with interest. He has a powerful personality and a deeper artistic sense than the other foreign invaders, many of whom are merely motion picture people who speak another language.

Upon arriving in America he had the courage to quarrel with Paramount officials over the selection of future film stories. That, however, I was assured, has been happily patched up.

"All my stories now have unhappy endings," boomed the giant German through a giant interpreter. Over his moon-like face passed a cloud. He raised his powerful hand. "I do not insist on the unhappy ending if it be not logical—in keeping," he waved the hand—"with the story." He watched me closely while the interpreter translated the words.

"Do you think," T asked, "that you will he poured into a screen mould in this country—that you'll end up like—" naming several of his countrymen.

He shook his immense head violently when the words penetrated. . . .

"No—no—no—no—no—no—I have now make agreement I select my own stories, my own director—everything. Nobody to blame now—but me." The last two words were said wistfully.

Time will tell.

Jannings is self-assured. The insidious net is being woven and he cannot see the gossamer threads.

He lives in an ugly yellow house on noisy Hollywood Boulevard. As a host he is charming, naive, gracious, genial. His manner is that of a kindly German saloon keeper in that happy day before the ugly name of Volstead was known.

Emil Jannings looks the connoisseur of life. He radiates good living. It is not hard to picture him with a stein—and a look of benevolence for all fanatics.

"Have you read Mencken?"

"Yes, yes, a great philosopher."

Still thinking of Mencken and lager, I asked—

"Your opinion of prohibition, Mr. Jannings?"

The giant interpreter threw the words in the giant actor's face.

Both German gentlemen laughed heartily. The mirth brought Mr. Jannings' hands to his waist, which shook violently. He might have been posing for a picture of FalstafJ. His heavy voice boomed happily.

"My opinion of American prohibition is not for prohibition."

Then laughing even louder than his secretary he exclaimed, "I have not seen such a thing yet."

I thought for a moment that if Germany could develop men like Jannings and his secretary . . . making the world safe for Democracy was a sad job. Surely Mr. Wilson and even Mr. Volstead could acquire the genius of joyous living from such men.

The real Jannings is quite a man. He is simple, unaffected, without guile.

A sudden sound veered us quickly.

A parrot, noisier than a female cinema magazine interviewer, made a terrific chatter.

I hope that no cataclysm takes place in the soul of Emil Jannings while he is in America.

One wonders how so kindly a man climbed so far among so many potential brigands. He will need a layer of steel beneath his velvety exterior. But perhaps He has it.

To an eye long trained in Hollywood there is evidence of a beginning debacle in the gentle Mr. Jannings. lago was not more subtle than the American sycophants of the films who surround him always.

A thoroughly civilized man, his interviews in the newspapers contain the naive mouthings of a cowboy cinema actor at a Rotary club.

Perhaps He will acquire dignity in time. His talents are worthy of it.

His first American film story was concocted for him by the notorious Jules Furthman. Samuel Butler's title The Way of All Flesh has been unforgivably "borrowed."

Jannings is the first great man to he "absolutely happy" in Hollywood.

When the gods would destroy an artist—they first make him absolutely happy.