Portrait of Jennie

William Dieterle was the youngest of nine children of parents Jacob and Berthe Dieterle. They lived in poverty, and when he was old enough, William earned money as a carpenter and a scrap dealer. But he dreamed of better things. Theater caught his eye as a teen, and by the age of sixteen, he had joined a traveling theater company. He was ambitious and handsome, both of which opened the door to leading romantic roles in theater productions. Though he had acted in his first movie by 1913, not until 1919 did he move back into film. In that year, he was noticed by producer/director/designer/impresario Max Reinhardt, the most influential proponent of expressionism in theater; while in Berlin, Reinhardt hired him as an actor for his productions. Dieterle resumed German film acting in 1920, becoming a popular and successful romantic lead and featured character actor in the mix of German expressionist/Gothic and nature/romanticism genres that imbued much of the German cinema in the silent era. But he was interested in directing even more than acting — with a professor like Reinhardt to provide inspiration. He had acted in nearly 20 movies before he also began directing in 1923, his first female lead being a young Marlene Dietrich.

With his wife Charlotte Hagenbruch,he started his own production company for filming. Though he was said to have tired of acting; he acted in nearly fifty more films during the course of his directing career, most being with regularity through the 1920s (where he was sometimes director and star). As an actor, he worked with some of the greatest names in German film, such as directors Paul Leni (in Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924) [Waxworks]) and F.W. Murnau (in Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926)) and actors Conrad Veidt and Emil Jannings.

By 1930, he immigrated to the US with the offer of directing in Hollywood for Warner Bros. and their series of German-language versions of released films, including: Those Who Dance (1930), The Way of All Men (1930), and Die heilige Flamme (1931) (aka The Holy Flames). He even stood before the camera for another of these, Dämon des Meeres (1931) (aka Demon of the Sea, a version of “Moby Dick”) in 1931, where he played Captain Ahad with another European doing the directing, the soon-to-be Warner staple, Hungarian Michael Curtiz.

Having taken to the Hollywood brand of filmmaking with ease — helped by his own brilliance in defining and executing the telling of a story — into 1931, Dieterle began directing some of Warner’s American output (his first, The Last Flight (1931), is now regarded as a masterwork) which would ramp up to his being at the helm of six pictures a year through 1934. In that year, Reinhardt finally came to the US — the Nazi threat having become overwhelming. He came with a flourish, ready to stage William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummers Night’s Dream” — an extravaganza at the Hollywood Bowl that would become legend. It was impressive enough to interest the pocketbook of Warner Bros. They opted for a film version in 1935 with the great Reinhardt — even Jack L. Warner had heard of him — reunited with his disciple, Dieterle, as co-director. Reinhardt knew nothing about Hollywood and had to learn via Dieterle’s diplomacy the differences between the overemphasis of stage and the subtlety of the camera. He learned from other directions as well about other film realities, particularly, staging restraint. It was a flop at the box office, but it was one of the great moments in the evolution of film. Dieterle would direct Paul Muni for Warner’s in three first-rate bio movies: The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and Juarez (1939) — Oscar nominations in all of them. After that Dieterle moved on to do The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) at RKO with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. This was one of Dieterle’s best efforts, both in its romantic style and the great dark scenes of the Parisian medieval underworld with dramatic minimal lighting that breathed his expressionist roots. Through the 1940s, Dieterle moved around among the studios executing always vigorously wrought film work, such as, two 1940 bios with Edward G. Robinson at Warner’s. He became associated with independent producer David O. Selznick and actor Joseph Cotten first with his direction of I’ll Be Seeing You (1944).

His romantic fires as a director had been restoked, as it were, and kept burning in the subsequent series of films with them which included the wonderful acting talents of Selznick’s soon-to-be-wife (1949), actress Jennifer Jones: Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946), for which he shared directing but not credit with King Vidor, and Portrait of Jennie (1948). “Jennie” was one of Dieterle’s masterpieces, bringing into play a fusion of all his artistic fonts. The romantic fantasy with edges of darkness from the novel by Robert Nathan was just the vehicle to challenge Dieterle. His use of light and dark and gauzed — at one point the textured field of a painting canvas — backdrops conveyed the dreamlike state and netherworld atmosphere of the story of lovers from different times. Certainly, the film influenced others to follow with similar themes.

Through the 1950s ,Dieterle’s work — two more with Joseph Cotten — though sturdily in the director’s hands, came off like good Hollywood fare — crime dramas and adventures — but nothing but film schedules for inspiration. His output during that decade was small, and that was partly to do with the bane of McCarthyism. He was never blacklisted as such, but his film Blockade (1938) was too libertarian to keep him completely from the shadow of suspicion as a socialist sympathizer. About 1958, he returned to Germany and directed a scant few films there and in Italy before retiring in 1965. Though regrettably not as well known as his German and European directorial compatriots in Hollywood, he had great artistic style and worked with much energy in providing some of Hollywood’s and the world’s crown jewels of cinematic art.