Even the most ambitious film archive can’t ever achieve a full retrospective of Michael Curtiz (Mihály Kertész, born in Hungary in 1888, dead in Los Angeles in 1961). The present compromise will concentrate on two “periods”. First, Curtiz’s American silents are strangely less known than his Middle-European output, every last foot of which has probably been shown in Bologna. Noah’s Ark is a relatively known film, but mostly truncated according to the needs of its commercial sound release; we will see the restored original. A film called The Third Degree is known to some, but one of our films, called Good Time Charley, is a true find which nobody, not even a specialist of the caliber of Richard Koszarski, has seen. We can show it now thanks to the fantastic care the Library of Congress has taken in our cause.

The cream of Curtiz’s achievement in early sound cinema follows, meaning films like The Cabin in the Cotton (1932), The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932), Jimmy the Gent (1934), and The Case of the Curious Bride (1935), all of them relatively rare treats. By that time Curtiz was a respected and feared pro, working with the great cameramen Sol Polito and Tony Gaudio and the art director Anton Grot; his poor English was a standing joke. I found a revealing article from faraway Finland. A young Finnish poet, Henry Parland (1908-1930), regarded Noah’s Ark as the turning point where “the excess of directorial power” takes over the actors’ faces and star presence; the writer regretted to see the otherworldly, tasteless greatness of “the real film star” disappearing. Of course, that was exactly what did not happen, with Curtiz at the helm guiding the definitive, inspired interpretations of Cagney, Bette Davis, Kay Francis, William Powell, Spencer Tracy, Boris Karloff, Claude Rains, and of course Errol Flynn and John Garfield.

We could have chosen otherwise, and with equal justification: The Mad Genius (1931), Doctor X (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (those gruesome exercises of horror in two-color Technicolor), The Kennel Murder Case (1933), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1933), Female (1933), Mandalay (1934), Black Fury (1935)… In fact, the selection is not even the point, but rather the idea of the larger canvas of which four films reveal just a glimpse. The main themes are repeated: ambition, spectacle, sex – always with an extreme mastery of the genre (or any genre), and the simultaneous obsession to break all the rules. Curtiz’s visual world had more nuances than other workhorses of WB had, especially the American-born directors like Bacon or LeRoy, although William Dieterle shared his ambition and skill. “We don’t make art, Mike” the producer Hal Wallis kept saying, to which Curtiz eloquently replied: “I visualize”.

I’ll quote with pleasure John Baxter’s description of Curtiz: “His films have a ferocity about them which suggests he refused to allow the material he was given to dominate him. No one was more adept at forcing the pace of films, at hammering even the most intransigent star into submission. Hated by actors, remembered mainly for his heavily accented and mispronounced English, Curtiz seems the embodiment of a European tradition totally opposed to the elegance and sly wit of Lubitsch and his Paramount associates. Curtiz’s Germany is that of the Reeperbahn, the brothels of Berlin, the slums of Munich and Hamburg. It is not to be wondered at that his films are among the most pitiless, grotesque and erotic in the history of the cinema”.

Peter von Bagh