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THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM IN THE UNITED STATES
A SURVEY
Europe, a heterogenous state, found itself more sharply divided in 1928 than in any year since the end of the war. A new barrier of language had arisen between the dozen countries as a result of the invention of the talking film in America. The silent film, with its universally understood play of pantomime (and captions which could be translated into any language) was doomed to cinematic limbo before the onslaught of the talking film.
Tobis-Klangfilm Company, the first great sound system developed in Germany, produced Bride 68 with Conrad Veidt in two languages — German and English. Though containing a bare 10 per cent of dialogue, this was one of the very first attempts at the bi-lingual film, which was later to expand into the tri-lingual and even multi-lingual film. The first group of English versions of German language films were made primarily for English speaking countries other than America, since even in the silent days America was never very receptive to the German film and when allocating their expected revenue from various countries throughout the world, the German film makers counted America out — anything possibly emanating from that country in the way of revenue from their product was considered " something extra."
Since then, of course, Ufa* and other of the great German producting companies, have counted America " in " and have even gone so far as to produce spectacles with an eye towards possible return from the lucrative American box-office. Liebeswalzer, The White Devil, Drei von der Tankstelle, Ein Burschenlied Aus Hcidleberg, The Blue Angel, and the Congress Dances are cases in point. Only one of these has been a financial success as these things are measured by American box-office standards — The Blue Angel — and that was due principally to the presence of the exotic Marlene Dietrich (whom Paramount had already groomed and introduced as a star in Morocco) and in a lesser, though not unimportant degree to the direction of the American-assimilated Josef von Sternberg, who knew of the enormous reserve of sex appeal dormant in the hitherto angelic Dietrich-]with which he pervaded his film, and to the masterly supervision of Erich
* Ufa recently announced a large production-schedule of tri-lingual super films, including American versions, for which it secured a small circuit of theatres in America. These small theatres, however, did not turn out to be financial successes, and were gradually given up. Their failure was partly responsible for the dissolution of the Ufa offices in America.
t Vide the early Dietrich films produced in Germany in the silent era, " I Kiss Your Hand, Madame/' and Die Fran Nach Der Maun Sick Sehnt, released in America as Three Loves.
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