Here is an odd little cinematic short from 1928, titled The Fresh Lobster. It's an insane little celluloid nightmare in the vein of Winsor McCay's absurd cartoon strip Dreams Of The Rarebit Fiend. Only in this novel little short, the trigger for the hallucinatory adventure isn't a dinner of melted cheese on bread, but the late night snack of a plate of lobster and a pickle.
The film was supposedly released in theaters in 1928, then re-released twenty years later in 1948, this time with sound. All sources seem to agree that there isn't much known about the production of this oddity, nor the impetus for its creation; perhaps it was McCay's popular newspaper strip. The cinematographer is listed as Harry Forbes, who has camera credits for a number of shorts between 1915 and 1931, and quickie b-westerns and adventure films in the 1930s, before his passing in 1939. The producers credited in the title card are Harvey Pergament and Max Alexander. Pergament seems to have had a limited career in the industry, if his IMDB credits are indicative of his involvement, as he's only listed with one other producer credit, and that's co-producer of a 1954 UK title about South Africa titled Flame Of Africa. Max Alexander has quite the list of production credits to his name, largely b-grade crime and western pictures throughout the 1930s and 40s.
The star of this piece is Billie Bletcher, who started in vaudeville and worked his way steadily from 1914 through the early 1970s in silent films, shorts, voicing characters in Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons, 1960s television appearances in shows like Get Smart and Dennis The Menace, and even had a bit part in the 1940 Boris Karloff thriller The Ape.
Minnesota: Land Of 10,000 Lakes, if you believe the official license plate tagline. Actually there are more than 10,000; I don't have an actual hard total, that isn't really the point I'm going for. When you sate your need for fantastic fiction on the kinds of material Otto Penzler compiles into his wondrously weighty tomes, you find a lot of crime fiction taking place on the misty streets of San Francisco or the cloistered concrete jungle of New York, a lot of horror and supernatural shenaniganery going on in the old attics and alleys of New England or the swamps of the Deep South, but you very rarely get any kind of action here in the Midwest.
Particularly Minnesota.
Not a popular setting for pulp adventure or b-movie madness. If it weren't for Fredric Brown or Ray Bradbury, we wouldn't have any representation whatsoever. Of course there's always Chicago, popping up as the backdrop for a crime story or a horror tale, and I'm sure some human encyclopedia on film noir and pulp magazine minutiae could take me to task and point out some obscure so-and-so who appeared for a forgotten string of stories somewhere that was North Star State-based. Usually you get some vague, fictional small college town with a mad professor on staff at the local university that you can kind of relate to yours in its generalities. I understand the point of great escapist material is to transport us to foreign settings that pricey plane tickets likely will not, but every once in a while it's nice to see your environment depicted as the "scene of the crime" as it were.
I honestly can't say whether the 1951 Red Scare drama The Whip Hand takes place in Minnesota or not. A cursory search online gives both Wisconsin and Minnesota as the setting, though I guess initially it was supposed to take place in New England, and feature Nazis instead of communists. The only geographical reference we have in the film itself to the location of the fictional small town of Winnoga, is about an hour in, when our intrepid New York reporter protagonist gets word out to his publisher that the place is actually running as a front for Nazi scientist Wilhelm Bucholtz and his bacteriological experiments, and the publisher in question walks over to a large wall-sized map of the United States, pokes a finger into a non-specific spot in the Upper Midwest and says "Winnoga...Winnoga...ah here it is. That puts Bucholtz and Corbin within a couple of hours drive of our Duluth office."
Carla Balenda as Janet Keller, hostage of Bucholtz in The Whip Hand.
The story is a fine little suspense yarn that could have easily been an episode of the Boris Karloff-hosted NBC series Thriller. Matt Corbin, a magazine reporter, is on a fishing trip in the scenic but empty town of Winnoga. A storm breaks out, reporter slips and gashes his head on a rock in the stream while wading to safety, and tries to get medical attention. The first sign of civilization he comes across is a gated driveway to a hidden estate, and is turned away by the surly gatekeeper. He then heads to the town proper to see the local doctor and finds Raymond Burr (talking in a register two steps above Perry Mason and with a talcum-grayed wig on) holding court as a hotel operator and ringleader to a bunch of unfriendly, tight-lipped locals who don't care much for nosey interlopers. Of course the young man finds out what is really going on–that the empty town is a facade run by commies servicing a Nazi scientist working on deadly bacterial agents that will wipe out the population of the United States–and tries to get word to the outside world with the help of the attractive and naive sister of the town sawbones.
The film was based on a treatment by Roy Hamilton, who, while not having a lengthy career in Hollywood, did write a few episodes of The Adventures Of Superman and an episode of Dick Tracy, as well as contributing to the screenplay for the 1953 schlock classic Cat-Women of the Moon.
Carla Balenda c.1955
Our protagonist was radio drama superstar and impressionist Elliott Reid (who was apparently asked to do his Kennedy for J.F.K, an impression that garnered the President's stamp of approval), who appeared in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a slew of television shows, and co-starred with Fred MacMurray in some mid-60s Disney films (Son of Flubber and The Absent-Minded Professor). Of course we're all familiar with Godzilla-hunting, Hamilton Burger-thwarting Raymond Burr. Incidentally, if you've not seen his bonkers Bride Of The Gorilla of the same year, I highly recommend you do, because it's amazing. At least if you have tastes similar to my own. And the connection between Bride Of The Gorilla and The Whip Hand go beyond a mere set of production dates! The Whip Hand featured uncredited screenwriting work by Curt Siodmak, the writer of films like The Wolf Man (1941), The Invisible Man Returns (1940), Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943) and...you guessed it!...Bride Of The Gorilla, which he also directed! Our leading lady, Carla Balenda (born with the burlesque dancer-ready name Sally Bliss), doesn't have a lot of credits to her name, aside from being probably best known for her short stints as Mickey Rooney's girlfriend in the short-lived The Mickey Rooney Show (1954-55), and as little Timmy's teacher Miss Hazlit on Lassie (1958-1963).
William Cameron Menzies
The film has two director credits: William Cameron Menzies, the man who created the term "production designer" and director who directed Invaders From Mars and won the Academy Award for his production design on Gone With The Wind; and Stuart Gilmore, a noted editor who worked on films like Hatari!, The Alamo and The Andromeda Strain. Presumably Gilmore did the re-shoots that replaced the Nazis with surly Communist yokels.
The film is available on Warner Bros. Archive Collection series, meaning you can order it and they'll burn an on-demand, professionally produced DVD-R copy of the film for you. The Archive Collection is actually pretty ingenious; it allows film buffs to get their hands on older, more obscure films that wouldn't necessarily be lucratively marketable in mass production. The films I've ordered from the collection (The Great Gildersleeve movie set, the Hollywood Legends of Horror collection) have all arrived in slick professional cases with full-color labels and production and remastering that rival any of the more mainstream releases.
Otto Waldis as Bucholtz behind bulletproof glass, scoffing at the Feds before being struck down by his own human guinea pigs.
Kurt Weiler (a screen grab from the PAL only DVD release Kurt Weiler-Die Kunst De Puppenanimationsfilms;2012.)
Animation seems to hold an odd place in many cultures; it's ever-present, but generally regarded as children's fare, and hardly art. More like Bazooka Joe comics: fun to look at for a bit and then discard. When I was a kid in the 1980s and early 1990s, American cartoons were more or less a vehicle for advertising action figures and sugar-based breakfast cereals (oddly enough, today's animated commercials seem to be for food or anti-depression meds, however that's to be interpreted). Of course there were the oddly calming and sleep-inducing animations that ran on PBS programs like Sesame Street and The Electric Company, but those seemed more like some kind of alien folk art than the traditional Saturday Morning cartoons and were largely forgotten or unwatched by those who had transitioned from Big Bird to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
There is the stigma, of course, of enjoying such things after a certain age. In my family it was a crime against the family name to continue the "immature" practice of enjoying comic books and Vincent Price films once you'd breached the double digits, when there was football and firearms to "mature" into. But, for me, animation refused to die. It kept popping back up or sneakily creeping back in to remind me it was there; in the form of Terry Gilliam's humorous psychedelic cutout sequences in reruns of Monty Python's Flying Circus, the title sequences to favorite television shows like Batman and The Wild Wild West, in the newfound Japanese Anime I was inundated with on my first trip to a Wizard World Chicago Comic Con, in the educational films shown in classrooms. Not to mention, being a child whose most prominent parent was the television set in the era of the burgeoning basic cable market, I was a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen, Willis O'Brien and, while maybe tangential, the live action foam rubber cartooniness of Godzilla and the other creatures made by Eiji Tsuburaya, by the time I was twelve.
Kurt Weiler working on Der Apfel short.
One of the inspiring things about this troubled world we live in, is that you can find something you've been inundated with all your life interpreted through the eyes of a different culture, and have that thing reinvigorated for you. Whether it's surf music from Turkey, graphic design from Poland, candy from Japan, or in this case animation from Germany, it's nice to know that different cultures can reveal a different, previously unseen facet of something that's otherwise become reduced to wallpaper in its familiar form. It happens all of the time, the fascination with some outer-cultural phenomenon. There's a reason there's a massive rockabilly following in Japan and Europe, a soccer stadium being built down the interstate here in Minnesota, and loads of Bollywood films on Netflix. The same old can get tedious for those with interests and horizons broader than what's readily available, and there's plenty to find if one has the willingness to dig for it.
Could someone who grew up with Kurt Weiler's stop-motion shorts really lose interest in them? Undoubtedly. I grew up with the Rankin/Bass Productions and The Muppets, and with the exception of the amazing Mad Monster Party?, neither really hold any interest for me any longer (same with said 80s and 90s licensed property cartoon powerhouses that my generation has turned into a current nostalgia cash cow). I didn't even know about Fingerbobs until Trunk Records released the soundtrack a while back, and I'm not sure I'll ever understand the appeal.
Ein Gewisser Agathopulus (A Certain Agathopulus) 1980.
Kurt Weiler was born in Lehrte, Germany, on August 6th, 1921. His family, being Jewish, fled Germany in 1939 to escape the rise of Naziism. They settled in England, where Kurt would establish his interest in the arts, studying at the Oxford School of Arts and Crafts. By 1947 he was working for the British W.M. Larkin Studio, who produced a lot of animation for industrial shorts and educational films. One such can be seen here.
In 1950 Weiler returned to what was then East Germany, and worked for DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengeselleschaft), an animation studio that existed from 1946 through 1990 (though I've seen sources that state 1992; anything you could possibly want to know about the political aspects of pre-unification DEFA can be found here.) And it was here that Kurt Weiler grew bored with the same-old same-old. He wanted to create something new from something commonplace. He was working under DEFA stop-motion puppet animation writer/director Johannes Hempel, who was very much rooted in the naturalistic style utilized in those Rankin/Bass productions. People puppets, though very stylized, looked very much like people. Stage sets were detailed miniatures; excruciatingly, beautifully exact reproductions of actual living spaces (see image below).
A scene from Johannes Hempel's Der verschwundene Helm (The Missing
Helmet) 1960, gives you a taste of his naturalistic style.
Weiler wanted to loosen things up. He'd become a devotee of playwright Bertold Brecht's verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), distancing viewers from believing what they are seeing is a slice of real life. Weiler didn't necessarily want his viewers to have to believe the characters in his animated shorts were real people, he wanted abstraction.
In an attempt to break from tradition and start establishing his own style, Weiler left DEFA and started splitting his time between Berlin and Dresden, creating his own pieces. He was eventually rehired by DEFA in 1977, where he worked until his retirement in 1989*.
A 1958 DEFA farm equipment short RS09animated by Kurt Weiler
still utilizing the more naturalistic look under Johannes Hempel.
This isn't an exercise in choosing one over the other. The more traditional naturalistic animations are fabulous and, in my mind, are mini masterworks of craft and artistry; but imagine if Weiler hadn't strayed from the path! We wouldn't have the mind-boggling stream-of-consciousness wonder of shorts like Der Löwe Balthazar or Der Apfel (below). Beyond that, would we have the surreal oddness of Jan Swankmajer or the Brothers Quay?
Der Löwe Balthazar (The Lion Balthazar) 1970.
Der Apfel (The Apple) 1969.
Collected below are some later period Weiler animations. Of course there are too many for me to bother to link to on this page. The loading time alone for this post would become preposterous, so I've handpicked a few personal favorites. Many of the animations are interpretations of Grimm's Fairy Tales or Aesop's Fables, with a few originals thrown in, including the middle entry in the three episode Nörgal series.
Enjoy!
Heldensage (translated roughly to "Hero Legend") 1985
an animated interpretation of an Aesop's Fable.
Nörgel & Schonne, Teil 2 (Norgel and Sons, Part 2) 1968.
Heinrich der Verhinderte (Heinrich Prevented) 1965.
Floh im Ohr (Flea In The Ear) 1970.
*Many of the biographical details about Kurt Weiler were gleaned from "Animation: A World History: Volume II: The Birth Of A Style – The Three Markets" by Giannalberto Bendazzi; Focal Press, Nov. 2015.
