Helmut Käutner

Helmut Käutner (born March 25, 1908, Düsseldorf, Germany—died April 20, 1980, Castellina, Italy) was a German film director, actor, and screenwriter who was acclaimed as one of the most intelligent and humanistic directors of the Third Reich. Although the quality of his work was uneven, attributed partially to poor working conditions, he remains a leading figure in German cinema.

Käutner studied architecture, philology, theatre, art history, graphic arts, poster design, and interior design while a university student in Munich. This diverse background in the humanities was later evident in the production design and painstaking attention to period detail in many of Käutner’s better films. He began his professional career in 1931 as a writer, director, and performer for the Munich Student Cabaret troupe Die vier Nachrichter (“The Four Executioners”) and pursued a career in the legitimate theatre beginning in 1936. As he was politically liberal and as many of his cabaret performances had raised the ire of the Nazis, he did not seek work in the German film industry—which, since 1927, had been largely under the control of Alfred Hugenberg, a conservative industrialist and future supporter of Hitler. Though he occasionally dabbled in films—as an actor in Kreuzer Emden (1932) and, beginning in 1938, as a scriptwriter—Käutner did not begin his directing career until 1939 with the lighthearted comedy Kitty und die Weltkonferenz (“Kitty and the World Conference”). The film, which gently satirized German-Italian relations and portrayed a British cleric in a sympathetic manner, did not sit well with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, and it was soon withdrawn from circulation. As a result, Käutner avoided political subject matter during Germany’s engagement in the war, although several of his films were subject to government tampering and censorship.

Most of Käutner’s wartime films can be categorized as musical or romantic fantasies. He was especially praised for his light, deft touch with romantic comedy and for the innovative, swirling camerawork he employed for grand-scale musical numbers. These can be seen to best effect in such films as Kleider machen Leute (1940; “Clothes Make the Man”), the tale of a humble tailor mistaken for a Russian prince, and Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska! (1941; “Goodbye, Franziska!”), which concerns the marital troubles between a reporter and his neglected wife. When the authorities forced Käutner to add an illogical upbeat ending to the latter film, he responded by making the enforced sequence deliberately contrived and farcical. Käutner typically circumvented such demands from the Nazis: in Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 (1945; Great Freedom No. 7), one of the last films funded by the Third Reich, he answered Goebbels’s demand for several shots of German ships proudly flying the Nazi flag by shooting such scenes through thick layers of fog.

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Käutner’s best film of this period was Romanze in Moll (1943; Romance in a Minor Key), an adaptation of Guy du Maupassant’s short story “Les Bijoux.” A somewhat traditional love-triangle story, the film was praised for its compositional perfection and technical virtuosity. Käutner’s last film of this period was the well-regarded Unter den Brücken (1945; Under the Bridges)—a movie made under the arduous conditions of the final days of the war, when filming was frequently interrupted by the noise of Allied bombers en route to Berlin. Perhaps Käutner’s most characteristic film of the period—as well as his most apolitical—it is considered one of the greatest love stories in the history of German cinema.

Käutner admirers are divided into two camps. For some, his greatest films are from the Third Reich period, when his deliberate avoidance of political issues forced him to adopt a highly personal approach to mainstream fare. For others, Käutner’s most important films were those he made during the postwar years, when he was free to explore political and social concerns. Many think he sacrificed his individuality in his later films, and others consider the subject matter of his earlier work comparatively trivial. Nevertheless, his detachment from politics during the war left his world reputation untainted, and his later films such as In jenen Tagen (1947; In Those Days), Des Teufels General (1954; The Devil’s General), Der Hauptmann von Kopenick (1956; The Captain from Kopenick), and Monpti (1957; Love from Paris) were the ones that brought him international acclaim. His most highly regarded and financially successful film from this period is Die letzte Brücke (1954; The Last Bridge), which won the International Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Käutner’s success during this period won him a contract with Universal Pictures in 1957. His two American-made films were the family melodrama The Restless Years (1958) and A Stranger in My Arms (1959), which features a memorably neurotic performance by Mary Astor.

Käutner then returned to Germany where he spent the rest of his career directing mostly undistinguished films, television programs, and stage productions. A notable exception to the mediocrity of his later efforts was Der Rest ist Schweigen (1959; The Rest Is Silence), a modern-day retelling of Hamlet. Käutner, who had periodically appeared in his own films throughout the years, ended his career as an actor. His performance in the title role of his final film, Karl May (1974), was particularly noteworthy.