Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Curt Siodmak

 
Writer: Curt Siodmak
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Actors
  • Born: Aug 10, 1902 in Dresden, Germany
  • Died: Sep 02, 2000 in Three Rivers, California
  • Occupation: Writer, Director, Actor
  • Active: '30s-'60s
  • Major Genres: Horror, Adventure
  • Career Highlights: I Walked with a Zombie, The Wolf Man, The Beast with Five Fingers
  • First Major Screen Credit: Mascottchen (1929)

Biography

The younger brother of director Robert Siodmak, Dresden-born author, screenwriter, and director Curt Siodmak broke into the film business as an extra in Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis (1926). Siodmak was a newspaper reporter at the time and was mainly interested in writing a story about Lang and his film. But screen work appealed to Siodmak's sense of adventure and in 1929, he and Billy Wilder co-wrote Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) directed by brother Robert and the young Edgar C. Ulmer. Curt Siodmak enjoyed some success with the German science fiction thriller F.P. 1 Antwortet Nicht (Platform 1 Does Not Answer), but like so many of his contemporaries, he was forced to flee Nazi Germany in favor of first Great Britain and then Hollywood, where he finally arrived in 1937. Through a friend, German expatriate director Joe May, Siodmak landed with Universal where he wrote or co-wrote screenplays for a series of genre films that included The Invisible Man Returns (1940), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1942), the intelligent Son of Dracula (1942), and I Walked With a Zombie (1944). The last, written for producer Val Lewton, contains perhaps Siodmak's most haunting work and remains a classic of the horror genre. In 1942, Siodmak published the influential science fiction novel Donovan's Brain in which a scientist manages to keep alive the brain of a tyrannical industrialist with unexpected and horrifying results. Based in part on Siodmak's screenplay for Black Friday (1940) in which benign college professor Boris Karloff turns into a vicious gangster after a brain transplant, Donovan's Brain itself was filmed in 1944 as The Monster and the Lady, in 1953 under its original title, and in England in 1965 as simply The Brain. In the 1950s, Siodmak began a brief directorial career that included the dreadful but still eminently watchable voodoo "epic" The Bride of the Gorilla (1951); The Magnetic Monster (1953), which had special effects "borrowed" from the 1934 German Gold; and The Devil's Messenger (1961) starring Lon Chaney Jr. The last was made on nearly no budget at all and was mostly recycled footage from a 1950s Swedish television series No. 13 Demon Street. Siodmak returned to Europe in the 1960s, but his work there was mediocre at best. His last assignment as a director was the German Liebesspiel im Schnee (1967) released in America in 1969 as Ski Fever and mainly of interest for the appearances of Dean Martin's daughter Claudia and European television stars Vivi Bach and Dietmar Schoenherr. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
Search unanswered questions...

Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics

Wikipedia: Curt Siodmak
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia

Curt Siodmak (August 10, 1902–September 2, 2000) was a novelist and screenwriter, author of the novel Donovan's Brain, which was made into a number of films. He also wrote the novels Hauser's Memory and Gabriel's Body. He made a name for himself in Hollywood with horror and science fiction films. He is the brother of noir director Robert Siodmak.[1]

Contents

Biography

Born Kurt Siodmak in Dresden, Germany to a Polish Jewish family, Curt Siodmak acquired a degree in mathematics before beginning to write novels. He invested early royalties earned by his first books in the movie Menschen am Sonntag (1929) a documentary-style chronicle of the lives of four Berliners on a Sunday based on their own lives. The movie was co-directed by Curt Siodmak's older brother Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with a script by Billy Wilder in collaboration with Fred Zinneman and cameraman Eugen Schüfftan.[1]

In the following years Curt Siodmak wrote many novels, screenplays and short stories including the novel F.P.1 Antwortet Nicht (F.P.1 Doesn't Answer) (1933) which became a popular movie starring Hans Albers and Peter Lorre.

Siodmak decided to emigrate after hearing an anti-semitic tirade by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and departed for England where he made a living as a screenwriter before travelling to the USA in 1937.

His big break came with the screenplay for The Wolf Man (1941), starring Lon Chaney Jr., which established this fictional creature as the most popular movie monster after Dracula and Frankenstein's monster.[1] In the film, Siodmak made reference to many werewolf legends: being marked by a pentagram; being practically immortal apart from being struck/shot by silver implements/bullets; and the famous verse:

"Even a man who is pure in heart,
And says his prayers by night
May become a Wolf when the Wolfbane blooms
And the autumn Moon is bright"

(the last line was changed in the sequels to "The Moon is full and bright").

Siodmak's science-fiction novel Donovan's Brain (1942) was a bestseller that was translated into many languages and was adapted for the cinema several times. Other notable films he wrote include Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, I Walked With a Zombie and The Beast With Five Fingers. There is an extensive interview with Siodmak about his career in both Germany and Hollywood in Eric Leif Davin's Pioneers of Wonder. In the plots of his work, Siodmak utilised the latest scientific findings combining those with pseudo-scientific motifs like the Jekyll and Hyde complex, the Nazi trauma and the East-West dichotomy.

Curt died in sleep September 2, 2000, at his home in Three Rivers, California.

Works

Novels

  • F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1933)
  • Black Friday (1939)
  • Donovan's Brain (1942)
  • The Beast with Five Fingers (1945)
  • Whomsoever I Shall Kiss (1952)
  • Riders to the Stars (1954)
  • Skyport (1959)
  • For Kings Only (1964)
  • Hauser's Memory (1968)
  • The Third Ear (1971)
  • City in the Sky (1974)
  • Frankenstein Meets Wolfman (1981)
  • Gabriel's Body (1992)

Short stories

  • The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika (1926)
  • Variation of a Theme (1972)
  • The P Factor (1976)
  • Experiment with Evil (1985)

Non fiction

  • Even a Man Who Is Pure in Heart: The Life of a Writer, Not Always to His Liking (1997)
  • Wolf Man's Maker (2001) (Posthumous autobiography)

Partial filmography

References

  1. ^ a b c "Wettbewerb/In Competition". Moving Pictures, Berlinale Extra (Berlin): 85. 11-22 February 1998. 

External links

Video-x-generic.svg Film portal

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 
Learn More
Dane Lussier (Writer, Comedy/Romance)
The Brain (1962 Horror Film)
Bride of the Gorilla (1951 Thriller Film)

Curt schilling born in which state? Read answer...
How do you use curtly in a sentence? Read answer...
What is curt hawkins' real name? Read answer...

Help us answer these
Were is curt hawkings?
What is a sentence for curtly?
How old is curt dougless?

Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:

 

Copyrights:

Writer. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Curt Siodmak".  Read more

Related answers
» More
 
Answer these
» More

Mentioned in

» More» More