1. Robert Siodmak was a German Jewish film director.
22 Facts About Robert Siodmak
1. 2.
Robert Siodmak's career spanned some 40 years, working extensively in the United States and France, as well as in his native country.
3.
Robert Siodmak's parents were both from Jewish families in Leipzig.
4.
Robert Siodmak worked as a stage director and a banker before becoming editor and scenarist for Curtis Bernhardt in 1925.
5.
Robert Siodmak worked at this for two years before he persuaded Nebenzal to finance his first feature, the silent masterpiece, Menschen am Sonntag in 1929.
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Robert Siodmak's creativity flourished, as he worked for the next six years in a variety of film genres, from comedy to musical to drama.
7.
Robert Siodmak arrived in California in 1939, where he made 23 movies, many of them widely popular thrillers and crime melodramas, which critics today regard as classics of film noir.
8.
On Mark Hellinger's production Swell Guy, for instance, Robert Siodmak was brought in to replace Frank Tuttle only six days after completing work on The Killers.
9.
Robert Siodmak worked steadily while under contract, overshadowed by high-profile directors, like Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he had been often compared by the press.
10.
At Universal, Robert Siodmak made yet another B-film, Son of Dracula, the third in the studio's series of Dracula movies.
11.
For 20th Century Fox and producer Darryl F Zanuck, he directed, partly on location in New York City, the crime noir Cry of the City in 1948, and in 1949 for MGM he tackled its lux production The Great Sinner, but the prolix script proved unmanageable for Siodmak who relinquished direction to the dependable Mervyn LeRoy.
12.
Robert Siodmak immersed himself in the creative process and genuinely loved working with actors, acquiring a reputation as an actor's director for his work with many future stars, including Burt Lancaster, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis, Debra Paget, Maria Schell, Mario Adorf, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Dorothy McGuire, Yvonne de Carlo, Barbara Stanwyck, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Ella Raines.
13.
Robert Siodmak directed Charles Laughton and George Sanders, and got from both perhaps the unlikeliest, most natural and under-acted performances of their careers.
14.
Robert Siodmak managed with Lancaster to capture a youthful vulnerability in The Killers, despite the actor's age.
15.
Robert Siodmak was able to get a believable, dramatic performance from Gene Kelly.
16.
Robert Siodmak often expressed his desire to make pictures "of a different type and background" than the ones he had been making for ten years.
17.
Robert Siodmak had hoped Loretta Young would star, but settled for the Swedish actress Marta Toren.
18.
Robert Siodmak's return to Europe in 1954 with a Grand Prize nomination at the Cannes Film Festival for his remake of Jacques Feyder's Le grand jeu was a misstep, despite its stars, Gina Lollobrigida and Arletty in the role originated by Francoise Rosay, Feyder's wife.
19.
In 1955, Robert Siodmak returned to the Federal Republic of Germany to make Die Ratten, with Maria Schell and Curd Jurgens, winning the Golden Berlin Bear at the 1955 Berlin Film Festival.
20.
Robert Siodmak ended his career with a six-hour, two-part toga and chariot epic, Kampf um Rom, a more campy work than Cobra Woman had been.
21.
Robert Siodmak was last seen publicly in an interview for Swiss television at his home in Ascona in 1971.
22.
Robert Siodmak died alone in 1973 in Locarno of a heart attack, seven weeks after his wife's death.