Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} F.P.1 Fails to Reply by Curt Siodmak F.P.1 Fails to Reply by Curt Siodmak. Известность за Сценарий. Известно авторство 60. Пол Мужской. Дата рождения 1902-08-10. Дата смерти 2000-09-02 (98 лет) Место рождения Dresden, Germany. Также известность как. Kurt Siodmak Curtis Siodmak. Войти для для отчёта о проблеме. Curt Siodmak. Биография. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Curt Siodmak (August 10, 1902–September 2, 2000) was a novelist and screenwriter. He made a name for himself in Hollywood with horror and science fiction films, most notably The Wolf Man and Donovan's Brain (the latter adapted from his novel of the same name). He was the brother of noir director Robert Siodmak. Description above from the Wikipedia article Curt Siodmak, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia. F.P.1 Fails to Reply by Curt Siodmak. Under the cherry moon/grafitti bridge question. At which point in each movie did you realise they were gonna suck? For me it was the Bella legosi thing in utcm and the elephants n flowers scene in gb. UTCM is Gone with the Wind compared to Graffiti Bridge. The high-school quality sets, cheesey dialogue. it never had a chance. Sure, parts of UTCM are cheesey and campy, but it also didn't take itself nearly as seriously as Graffiti Bridge did. This movie suuuuuuuuuucks! UTCM is a beautiful movie to watch, if you just put aside some expectations. The production values are high, the B&W is stunning, and of course the Parade music is great. And, even though you've put aside some acting/story expectations, I challenge you not to enjoy watching it. GB somewhat fails on all those accounts. Sure, the music is great (at least the Prince songs) but they can't save the movie. If this were to ever see a Blu-Ray release, it would be great to watch a version sans-storyline (just videos). [Edited 6/5/15 16:30pm] I love Under The Cherry Moon as well. Funny and stylish. I saw the movie in a theater in Copenhagen back in 1986. very nice. Graffiti Bridge on the other hand.. this isn't more than a bunch of good music videos, with a very strange dialogue.. I have no idea about what the "plot" is about something about ownership and angels.. UTCM is Gone with the Wind compared to Graffiti Bridge. The high-school quality sets, cheesey dialogue. it never had a chance. Sure, parts of UTCM are cheesey and campy, but it also didn't take itself nearly as seriously as Graffiti Bridge did. This movie suuuuucks! train23 said: What year was UTC supposed to be set in? I'm sure they didn't have boomboxes. The movie starts out with the French kids boasting about cable TV, so the boombox was obviously released before cable TV was. I think it's not really a "specific" time. Months before UTCM was released,I was reading reports that it would be set in the 40s. lol. but,like someone said,they didn't have boomboxes in the 40s.The movie was set in the present day (1986),it was just inspired by those old,black and white movies from the 40s. Doozer said: UTCM is Gone with the Wind compared to Graffiti Bridge. The high-school quality sets, cheesey dialogue. it never had a chance. Sure, parts of UTCM are cheesey and campy, but it also didn't take itself nearly as seriously as Graffiti Bridge did. . . This movie suuuuuuuuuucks! ^^that pic is hilarious. In that scene,The Kid thinks he can beat The Time. really. With that ridiculous performance?! LMAO. just one of the many 'wtf' scenes in that movie. OMG, I knew from the title that this would be about something like "which movie sucked the most" or something about them sucking. Under The Cherry Moon was ok (for Prince-directing-a-movie standard)I gave it 4.5/10 (1.5 for Prince attempting, 2 for the laughs, 1 for the scene where Prince is driving fast trying to get the girl with the song "Anotherloverholenyohead".. Then later on after they made up, "Kiss". And Graffiti Bridge just sucked. It was atrocious. You can't even give it a point for trying because his attempt at trying was so bad. *sighs* that rant is over. To answer the question, at the beginning, I think. I was just going through DVDs this weekend and found my DVD of GB from 10 years ago. I don't believe I ever played the DVD, but I bought it when the other re-issues came out after 2004. I mentioned to my wife that I would not force her to watch it, and that I don't even watch it as a devoted fan. KingSausage said: Under the Cherry Moon takes place sometime after 1941. Tricky says "Cuz it's a full moon and I'm a werewolf, bitch!" People first associated werewolves and full moons after 1941's classic The Wolf Man. The screenwriter Curt Siodmak invented that shit. Look it up. So unless we accept that UTCM takes place in an alternate universe with no Wolf Man OR in which Tricky and not legendary Hollywood screenwriter Curt Siodmak creates the werewolf full moon link, then it must be after 1941. Evidence, muthafuckas. Talk about evidence, what about the Shelia E Sister Fate 12" vinyl seen in Christopher and Tricky's room? The movie must be set in 1985. Seriously, I think it was intended to have a classic 1930s/40s film "feel", not actually set during that era. "Planet Rock, U just can't stop!" Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths. (Jeremiah 6:16) www.ancientfaithradio.com. dezinonac eb lliw noitulove ehT. SoulAlive said: Months before UTCM was released,I was reading reports that it would be set in the 40s. lol. but,like someone said,they didn't have boomboxes in the 40s.The movie was set in the present day (1986),it was just inspired by those old,black and white movies from the 40s. Under the Cherry moon was set in 1986, South of France. It paid homage to old Hollywood snuff movies. Hence Prince getting his acting career slowly tortured throughout until at the end they just snuff him and his career acting out. UTCM is awesome! Prince's BEST movie (I said it). GB is a bad movie, but, it doesn't suck because it's HILARIOUS! Morris & Jerome steal the show, it's worth watching just for them (and the music, of course). With a DVD & a remote control you can watch just their scenes. It's a much shorter (better) flick this way and will leave you wondering if they didn't miss their calling as a comedy team. In my not-so-humble opinion. ^^Morris and Jerome are always fun to watch.They were hilarious in Purple Rain,too.I'm surprised that someone didn't come up with the idea of a TV show for them. a sitcom. Personally, I think UTCM doesn´t suck at all. I find it a very enjoyable watch, although I must say it is not a film I´d recommend to or watch with a non-fan. I gave my VHS tape to one of my teachers at uni whose girlfriend happened to be a huge Prince fan, and while she enjoyed watching it, he did not like it at all. The expression in his face when he returned the tape was priceless. He said that watching Prince being in love with himself for the duration of a whole movie was just unbeareable, and that it is one of the most narcicisstic films he´d ever seen. But I still like it. Wish it had more scenes with Prince playing the piano. SoulAlive said: ^^Morris and Jerome are always fun to watch.They were hilarious in Purple Rain,too.I'm surprised that someone didn't come up with the idea of a TV show for them. a sitcom. Would have been better than New Attitude, for sure: I have shown UTCM to several non-Prince fans, and every one of them has liked it better than Purple Rain. Me? I loved it from the first viewing. Grafitti Bridge? I try to pretend it doesnt exist. To be honest, I knew the movie would suck when I bought the soundtrack in the summer of 1990. I still went to the theater on opening night, and walked out embarrassed to be a fan. UncleJam said: I have shown UTCM to several non-Prince fans, and every one of them has liked it better than Purple Rain. Me? I loved it from the first viewing. - Grafitti Bridge? I try to pretend it doesnt exist. To be honest, I knew the movie would suck when I bought the soundtrack in the summer of 1990. I still went to the theater on opening night, and walked out embarrassed to be a fan. A lot of people say they've done this. I've never walked out of a theatre half way through a movie. Mind you, theatres are bloody expensive these days, I want my full film at £8 a crack. SoulAlive said: ^^Morris and Jerome are always fun to watch.They were hilarious in Purple Rain,too.I'm surprised that someone didn't come up with the idea of a TV show for them. a sitcom. Would have been better than New Attitude, for sure: I remember that show it wasn't very good. UncleJam said: I have shown UTCM to several non-Prince fans, and every one of them has liked it better than Purple Rain. Me? I loved it from the first viewing. - Grafitti Bridge? I try to pretend it doesnt exist. To be honest, I knew the movie would suck when I bought the soundtrack in the summer of 1990. I still went to the theater on opening night, and walked out embarrassed to be a fan. A lot of people say they've done this. I've never walked out of a theatre half way through a movie. Mind you, theatres are bloody expensive these days, I want my full film at £8 a crack. Had I watched Graffiti Bridge in the cinema, I would have watched the whole thing, but cringing hard through several scenes. Especially when Melody Cool comes on. aaargh I can still feel it.. Only time I out of a film was 'The Wicker Man' remake when Nicholas Cage comandeered a nun's bicycle by punching her in the face. Curt Siodmak - Writer. Writer and Director. Nationality: American. Born: Kurt Siodmak in Dresden, Germany, 10 August 1902; brother of the director Robert Siodmak. Education: Attended the University of Zurich, Ph.D. 1927. Family: Married Henrietta de Perrot, 1931, one son. Career: Reporter, freelance writer, and railway engineer; 1929—first film as writer, People on Sunday ; 1930—first novel published; 1934–37—writer for Gaumont-British; 1937—moved to the United States, and writer for Paramount, 1938–40, and Universal, 1940–46; 1951—first film as director, Bride of the Gorilla ; 1952—formed production company with Ivan Tors. Films as Writer: Menschen am Sonntag ( People on Sunday ) (R. Siodmak and Ulmer—doc) Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht ( Looking for His Murderer ) (R. Siodmak); Le Bal (Thiele) F.P.1 antwortet nicht ( F.P.1 ; F.P.1 Does Not Answer ; F.P.1 Does Not Reply ) (Hartl) La Crise est finie ( The Slump Is Over ) (R. Siodmak); Girls Will Be Boys (Varnel) Transatlantic Tunnel ( The Tunnel ) (Elvey); It's a Bet (Esway) I Give My Heart ( The Loves of Madame Du Barry ) (Varnel) Non-Stop New York (Stevenson) Her Jungle Love (Archainbaud) The Invisible Man Returns (May); Black Friday (Lubin); The Ape (Nigh) Pacific Blackout (Murphy); The Invisible Woman (Sutherland); Aloma of the South Seas (Santell); Midnight Angel (Murphy) Invisible Agent (Marin); London Black-Out Murders ( Secret Motive ) (G. Sherman); The Wolf Man (Waggner) Son of Dracula (R. Siodmak); Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill); I Walked with a Zombie (J. Tourneur); The Purple V (G. Sherman); The Mantrap (G. Sherman); False Faces (G. Sherman) House of Frankenstein (Kenton); The Climax (Waggner) Shady Lady (Waggner); Frisco Sal (Waggner) The Return of Monte Cristo (Levin) The Beast with Five Fingers (Florey) Berlin Express (J. Tourneur) Tarzan's Magic Fountain (Sholem); Four Days' Leave ( Swiss Tour ) (Lindtberg) Riders to the Stars (Carlson) Creature with the Atom Brain (Cahn) Earth vs. Flying Saucers (Sear) Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes ( Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace ) (Fisher) Hauser's Memory (Sagal—for TV) Films as Writer and Director: Bride of the Gorilla. The Magnetic Monster. Curucu, Beast of the Amazon. Love Slaves of the Amazon (+ pr) The Devil's Messenger (Strock) (co-d) Liebespiele im Schnee ( Ski Fever ) Custer of the West. Publications. By SIODMAK: fiction— Schlüss in Tonfilmatelier , Berlin, 1930. F.P.1 antwortet nicht , Berlin, 1931, as F.P.1 Does Not Reply , Boston, Massachusetts, 1933, as F.P.1 Fails to Reply , London, 1933. Stadt hinter Nebeln , Salzburg, 1931. Die Madonna aus der Markusstrasse , Leipzig, 1932. Rache im Ather , Leipzig, 1932. Bis ans Ende der Welt , Leipzig, 1933. Die Macht im Dunkeln , Zurich, 1937. Donovan's Brain , New York, 1943. Whomsoever I Shall Kiss , New York, 1952. Skyport , 1959. For Kings Only , New York, 1961. Hauser's Memory , New York, 1968. The Third Ear , New York, 1971. City in the Sky , New York, 1974. By SIODMAK: articles— Films and Filming (London), November 1968. American Film (Washington, D.C.), August 1990. Filmfax (Evanston), March-April 1996. On SIODMAK: articles— Kino Lehti (Helsinki), no. 4, 1972. Cinéma (Paris), October 1978. Ecran Fantastique (Paris), April, May, and June 1983. Mace, Kevin, in American Screenwriters, 2nd series , edited by Randall Clark, Detroit, Michigan, 1986. Segnocinema (Vicenza), January 1988. EPD Film (Frankfurt/Main), October 1996. Filmbulletin (Winterthur), January 1998. Curt Siodmak was almost single-handedly responsible for the flowering of the second horror-film cycle. He wrote the best of Universal's 1940s horror films and influenced all the others. While by no means a great writer, Siodmak is a gifted, sometimes inspired hack, who, in the course of a prolific career, has created many striking and enduring characters and concepts. He has described himself as an idea man, and he has certainly come up with ideas on which he and others have rung variations, time and again. One of Siodmak's first horror-film scripts was Black Friday , a story about a gangster's brain tissue being injected into a normal man, causing criminal tendencies in the recipient. The idea was like The Hands of Orlac , only more "cerebral." It probably inspired Siodmak's own Donovan's Brain (published two years later and filmed three times since), whose plot concerns an industrialist's disembodied brain exerting influence over the scientist who keeps it alive. Siodmak returned to the theme in Hauser's Memory , his later, semi-sequel to Donovan's Brain and his last screen credit, filmed as a television movie, in which a scientist injects himself with a colleague's brain fluid and relives the man's World War II experiences. (In between, Siodmak scripted another "head" film, Creature with the Atom Brain , adding a contemporary nuclear touch to his frequent subject.) Siodmak began screenwriting as a practitioner of the fantastic mundane . His early science-fiction work in Germany is patterned after Fritz Lang's pedestrian Frau im Mond rather than Lang's more fabulous Metropolis ; Siodmak took one futuristic or fantastic idea (a floating air strip, a subterranean link between Europe and America, a supersonic flight across the Atlantic) and wove an ordinary melodrama around it. This approach served him well when he began writing in the United States, where for a long time audiences seemed to resist outright fantasy and wanted it couched in "reality." So Siodmak used invisibility as the gimmick in his story of a wronged man proving his innocence in The Invisible Man Returns . He then used invisibility in a war film ( Invisible Agent ) and a comedy ( The Invisible Woman ). Universal's subsequent Invisible Man films ( The Invisible Man's Revenge , Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man ), though not written by Siodmak, followed the pattern he had established. Siodmak's most effective realization of the fantastic mundane (and also his best picture as director) is the science-fiction film The Magnetic Monster , about a radioactive isotope that implodes every 11 hours, increasing in size as it does. His heroes are a couple of workmanlike, Dragnet- style scientists, yet—despite the nondramatic nature of his "monster" and the drab personalities of his protagonists—he manages to generate quite a bit of suspense and to make skillful use in the film's exciting climax of the laboratory sequence from a 1934 fantastic mundane German film, Gold . Siodmak was one of numerous science-fiction film practitioners in the 1950s, but in the 1940s he was the horror-film practitioner. He gave new life to all of Universal's famous monsters. His story for Son of Dracula gave a film noir twist to the vampire legend. It was a sort of supernatural Double Indemnity , featuring a superbly icy femme fatale who manipulates, for her own devices, both the man and monster who love her. Despite its title, the film was about a true daughter of Dracula, and head and shoulders above the anemic Dracula's Daughter made nine years earlier. Siodmak's greatest creation during this period was The Wolf Man , a movie that exhibits a purity and economy of structure and a unity of action, time, and place similar to Greek tragedy. The script abounds with subtle nuances: Larry Talbot comes on like a wolf to Gwenn Conliff, then becomes an actual wolf, attacking her at the picture's end; Larry's brother, John, has died in a hunting accident—perhaps at the hands of their father, Sir John, who favored John and whose wrongheaded, strained attempts to get close to his second son ultimately lead to wolf man Larry's death in another "hunting accident" at the hands of Sir John. Most of what is today considered standard werewolf lore actually originated with Siodmak in this picture and its two sequels. He invented the famous four-line verse ("Even a man who is pure in heart") and the business about silver bullets and full moons, and provided Lon Chaney, Jr., with his second-best (after Lennie) and most enduring film role. Siodmak continued to develop the personality of the unfortunate lycanthrope in the sequel, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man , which began the practice of teaming Universal's monsters (a practice initiated because of a chance remark Siodmak jokingly made to Universal producer George Waggner). Under Roy William Neill's direction, the first half of the film is atmospheric and exciting, but the second half is less successful because of meddling by the studio. Siodmak had followed the continuity from the earlier Ghost of Frankenstein , which had left the monster blind, with the brain (and voice) of Ygor (Bela Lugosi). Universal cut the monster's (Lugosi's) dialogue and all references to the creature's blindness, rendering his actions incomprehensible, and destroying the effect of a moment near the end where the monster is recharged, opens his eyes, and smiles malevolently: he can see again. House of Frankenstein , based on Siodmak's story "The Devil's Brood," adds Dracula to the group, and takes Larry Talbot to his romantic-tragic end: as the wolf man, he is killed by a silver bullet, shot from the hand of "one who loves enough to understand"—his Gypsy girlfriend. Once again, Universal's subsequent films in this series, House of Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein , though not written by Siodmak, followed the pattern he had established. When Siodmak turned to directing (usually his own scripts), the overall quality of his writing suffered, as the titles of those films, from Bride of the Gorilla to Ski Fever , indicate. And his direction (except for Magnetic Monster ) was weak. But (even discounting his work on two films which some critics rate highly: I Walked with a Zombie —a voodoo Jane Eyre , one of Val Lewton's pseudo-horror follow-ups to Cat People —and The Beast with Five Fingers , a hoax horror picture—the disembodied Hand of Orlac ), he had already left a rich genre-film legacy that makes up for a dozen films such as Curucu, Beast of the Amazon and Love Slaves of the Amazon . shadowplay. I’ve been known to mock Curt Siodmak, to refer to him as the great Robert Siodmak’s idiot brother. “Is he your favourite idiot brother?” my friend Alex asked the other day. He isn’t even that, I was forced to admit — W. Lee Wilder is a still more remarkable specimen of the breed. But I was really impressed by TV movie Hauser’s Memory — teleplay by Adrian Spies, based fairly faithfully I think on Siodmak’s novel. And then I stumbled on a copy of Donovan’s Brain , young Curt’s best-known book. It was filmed three times officially — as THE LADY AND THE MONSTER with Erich Von Stroheim and Vera Hruba Ralston, as DONOVAN’S BRAIN with Lew Ayres and Nancy Reagan (wouldn’t they make a houseful) and as THE BRAIN, by Freddie Francis with Peter Van Eyck, but Curt hated all three versions. The radio production with Orson Welles is better — probably. I’ve been saving it for last. The book is really enjoyable, with memorable characters in its cold-fish narrator, a rather inhuman scientist who steals the brain of a dying millionaire, and various sleazy types he meets once the brain starts to telepathically force him to do its bidding. The formula is similar to Hauser’s Memory — a dead character possesses a live one, so while there’s a battle to maintain personhood by a character invaded by a foreign mind, there’s also a kind of investigation/puzzle where we want to find out the secret motivation of the mental invader. Siodmak had the unenviable task of retraining himself to write in English after he fled Hitler. Other filmmakers managed to adapt readily, but for a writer the challenge was far greater. Language was Siodmak’s instrument. Like his former collaborator Billy Wilder, he never quite got the American idiom down pat, but Wilder always worked with brilliant co-writers to smooth out any linguistic kinks. In his novels, Curt has to struggle along by himself. He would write sentences like “The moon leaped like a giant in the porthole,” which possibly plays better in German, though I’m not wholly convinced of that. Donovan’s Brain has sentences like “I woke at a very early morning hour,” which is weirdly OFF. In German, “very early morning hour” is probably one word, some beautiful compound noun a foot long. He gets his commas wrong here: “It might like a blind man, feel the light or, like a deaf one perceive sound.” I had to read that a couple of times to make sense of it, did you? And then there are bits where he reaches for an effect and his awkwardness with English makes him fall flat on his face: “Even the fact of our marriage had been dissolved in my work’s acid domination.” But despite this, the book is a really good read! And it has bizarre stuff in it that’s never made it into any screen version. At one point, disoriented by the brain’s long-range control, the hero falls into a ditch and gets his vertebrae compressed by a steam shovel. He has to wear a full torso plaster cast that makes him look like a turtle for thirty pages. And this has no real impact on the plot at all. But it’s something I’d love to see in a film. It would particularly suit Von Stroheim, I feel. Young Curt was scathing about the changes inflicted on his book by filmmakers. In the Stroheim atrocity, directed by the sometimes skilled George Sherman, the mad scientist lives in a castle — in Arizona! — and the plot stops for a Spanish speciality dance before the brain has even been hatched. The novel goes like a train, but there’s no chance of zip with Erich setting the pace. The filmmakers supply him with a limp, just to slow things down even further, and instead of being an antihero he’s made a straight villain, with Richard Arlen as one of those useless heroes whose only purpose is to protest each new plot development. Ralston is fabulously bad, flashing her eyelashes with every other line to give “significant” looks. Felix Feist’s fifties fiasco is a lot closer to the letter of the book, but while Siodmak’s protagonist was somewhere between autism and Camus’ L’Etranger , Lew Ayres plays it repulsively HEARTY, and says things like “C’mon, get with it, baby!” I wanted to slap his brain. The more the script tries to render him likable, the creepier he gets. But I liked Gene Evans, who doesn’t seem like a movie surgeon at all, and who therefore may resemble a real one, I’m prepared to believe. And the future first lady vivisecting a monkey makes it kind of worthwhile. SIODMAK, Curt. Writer and Director. Nationality: American. Born: Kurt Siodmak in Dresden, Germany, 10 August 1902; brother of the director Robert Siodmak. Education: Attended the University of Zurich, Ph.D. 1927. Family: Married Henrietta de Perrot, 1931, one son. Career: Reporter, freelance writer, and railway engineer; 1929—first film as writer, People on Sunday ; 1930—first novel published; 1934–37—writer for Gaumont-British; 1937—moved to the United States, and writer for Paramount, 1938–40, and Universal, 1940–46; 1951—first film as director, Bride of the Gorilla ; 1952—formed production company with Ivan Tors. Films as Writer: Menschen am Sonntag ( People on Sunday ) (R. Siodmak and Ulmer—doc) Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht ( Looking for His Murderer ) (R. Siodmak); Le Bal (Thiele) F.P.1 antwortet nicht ( F.P.1 ; F.P.1 Does Not Answer ; F.P.1 Does Not Reply ) (Hartl) La Crise est finie ( The Slump Is Over ) (R. Siodmak); Girls Will Be Boys (Varnel) Transatlantic Tunnel ( The Tunnel ) (Elvey); It's a Bet (Esway) I Give My Heart ( The Loves of Madame Du Barry ) (Varnel) Non-Stop New York (Stevenson) Her Jungle Love (Archainbaud) The Invisible Man Returns (May); Black Friday (Lubin); The Ape (Nigh) Pacific Blackout (Murphy); The Invisible Woman (Sutherland); Aloma of the South Seas (Santell); Midnight Angel (Murphy) Invisible Agent (Marin); London Black-Out Murders ( Secret Motive ) (G. Sherman); The Wolf Man (Waggner) Son of Dracula (R. Siodmak); Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill); I Walked with a Zombie (J. Tourneur); The Purple V (G. Sherman); The Mantrap (G. Sherman); False Faces (G. Sherman) House of Frankenstein (Kenton); The Climax (Waggner) Shady Lady (Waggner); Frisco Sal (Waggner) The Return of Monte Cristo (Levin) The Beast with Five Fingers (Florey) Berlin Express (J. Tourneur) Tarzan's Magic Fountain (Sholem); Four Days' Leave ( Swiss Tour ) (Lindtberg) Riders to the Stars (Carlson) Creature with the Atom Brain (Cahn) Earth vs. Flying Saucers (Sear) Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes ( Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace ) (Fisher) Hauser's Memory (Sagal—for TV) Films as Writer and Director: Bride of the Gorilla. The Magnetic Monster. Curucu, Beast of the Amazon. Love Slaves of the Amazon (+ pr) The Devil's Messenger (Strock) (co-d) Liebespiele im Schnee ( Ski Fever ) Custer of the West. Publications. By SIODMAK: fiction— Schlüss in Tonfilmatelier , Berlin, 1930. F.P.1 antwortet nicht , Berlin, 1931, as F.P.1 Does Not Reply , Boston, Massachusetts, 1933, as F.P.1 Fails to Reply , London, 1933. Stadt hinter Nebeln , Salzburg, 1931. Die Madonna aus der Markusstrasse , Leipzig, 1932. Rache im Ather , Leipzig, 1932. Bis ans Ende der Welt , Leipzig, 1933. Die Macht im Dunkeln , Zurich, 1937. Donovan's Brain , New York, 1943. Whomsoever I Shall Kiss , New York, 1952. Skyport , 1959. For Kings Only , New York, 1961. Hauser's Memory , New York, 1968. The Third Ear , New York, 1971. City in the Sky , New York, 1974. By SIODMAK: articles— Films and Filming (London), November 1968. American Film (Washington, D.C.), August 1990. Filmfax (Evanston), March-April 1996. On SIODMAK: articles— Kino Lehti (Helsinki), no. 4, 1972. Cinéma (Paris), October 1978. Ecran Fantastique (Paris), April, May, and June 1983. Mace, Kevin, in American Screenwriters, 2nd series , edited by Randall Clark, Detroit, Michigan, 1986. Segnocinema (Vicenza), January 1988. EPD Film (Frankfurt/Main), October 1996. Filmbulletin (Winterthur), January 1998. Curt Siodmak was almost single-handedly responsible for the flowering of the second horror-film cycle. He wrote the best of Universal's 1940s horror films and influenced all the others. While by no means a great writer, Siodmak is a gifted, sometimes inspired hack, who, in the course of a prolific career, has created many striking and enduring characters and concepts. He has described himself as an idea man, and he has certainly come up with ideas on which he and others have rung variations, time and again. One of Siodmak's first horror-film scripts was Black Friday , a story about a gangster's brain tissue being injected into a normal man, causing criminal tendencies in the recipient. The idea was like The Hands of Orlac , only more "cerebral." It probably inspired Siodmak's own Donovan's Brain (published two years later and filmed three times since), whose plot concerns an industrialist's disembodied brain exerting influence over the scientist who keeps it alive. Siodmak returned to the theme in Hauser's Memory , his later, semi-sequel to Donovan's Brain and his last screen credit, filmed as a television movie, in which a scientist injects himself with a colleague's brain fluid and relives the man's World War II experiences. (In between, Siodmak scripted another "head" film, Creature with the Atom Brain , adding a contemporary nuclear touch to his frequent subject.) Siodmak began screenwriting as a practitioner of the fantastic mundane . His early science-fiction work in Germany is patterned after Fritz Lang's pedestrian Frau im Mond rather than Lang's more fabulous Metropolis ; Siodmak took one futuristic or fantastic idea (a floating air strip, a subterranean link between Europe and America, a supersonic flight across the Atlantic) and wove an ordinary melodrama around it. This approach served him well when he began writing in the United States, where for a long time audiences seemed to resist outright fantasy and wanted it couched in "reality." So Siodmak used invisibility as the gimmick in his story of a wronged man proving his innocence in The Invisible Man Returns . He then used invisibility in a war film ( Invisible Agent ) and a comedy ( The Invisible Woman ). Universal's subsequent Invisible Man films ( The Invisible Man's Revenge , Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man ), though not written by Siodmak, followed the pattern he had established. Siodmak's most effective realization of the fantastic mundane (and also his best picture as director) is the science-fiction film The Magnetic Monster , about a radioactive isotope that implodes every 11 hours, increasing in size as it does. His heroes are a couple of workmanlike, Dragnet- style scientists, yet—despite the nondramatic nature of his "monster" and the drab personalities of his protagonists—he manages to generate quite a bit of suspense and to make skillful use in the film's exciting climax of the laboratory sequence from a 1934 fantastic mundane German film, Gold . Siodmak was one of numerous science-fiction film practitioners in the 1950s, but in the 1940s he was the horror-film practitioner. He gave new life to all of Universal's famous monsters. His story for Son of Dracula gave a film noir twist to the vampire legend. It was a sort of supernatural Double Indemnity , featuring a superbly icy femme fatale who manipulates, for her own devices, both the man and monster who love her. Despite its title, the film was about a true daughter of Dracula, and head and shoulders above the anemic Dracula's Daughter made nine years earlier. Siodmak's greatest creation during this period was The Wolf Man , a movie that exhibits a purity and economy of structure and a unity of action, time, and place similar to Greek tragedy. The script abounds with subtle nuances: Larry Talbot comes on like a wolf to Gwenn Conliff, then becomes an actual wolf, attacking her at the picture's end; Larry's brother, John, has died in a hunting accident—perhaps at the hands of their father, Sir John, who favored John and whose wrongheaded, strained attempts to get close to his second son ultimately lead to wolf man Larry's death in another "hunting accident" at the hands of Sir John. Most of what is today considered standard werewolf lore actually originated with Siodmak in this picture and its two sequels. He invented the famous four-line verse ("Even a man who is pure in heart") and the business about silver bullets and full moons, and provided Lon Chaney, Jr., with his second-best (after Lennie) and most enduring film role. Siodmak continued to develop the personality of the unfortunate lycanthrope in the sequel, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man , which began the practice of teaming Universal's monsters (a practice initiated because of a chance remark Siodmak jokingly made to Universal producer George Waggner). Under Roy William Neill's direction, the first half of the film is atmospheric and exciting, but the second half is less successful because of meddling by the studio. Siodmak had followed the continuity from the earlier Ghost of Frankenstein , which had left the monster blind, with the brain (and voice) of Ygor (Bela Lugosi). Universal cut the monster's (Lugosi's) dialogue and all references to the creature's blindness, rendering his actions incomprehensible, and destroying the effect of a moment near the end where the monster is recharged, opens his eyes, and smiles malevolently: he can see again. House of Frankenstein , based on Siodmak's story "The Devil's Brood," adds Dracula to the group, and takes Larry Talbot to his romantic-tragic end: as the wolf man, he is killed by a silver bullet, shot from the hand of "one who loves enough to understand"—his Gypsy girlfriend. Once again, Universal's subsequent films in this series, House of Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein , though not written by Siodmak, followed the pattern he had established. When Siodmak turned to directing (usually his own scripts), the overall quality of his writing suffered, as the titles of those films, from Bride of the Gorilla to Ski Fever , indicate. And his direction (except for Magnetic Monster ) was weak. But (even discounting his work on two films which some critics rate highly: I Walked with a Zombie —a voodoo Jane Eyre , one of Val Lewton's pseudo-horror follow-ups to Cat People —and The Beast with Five Fingers , a hoax horror picture—the disembodied Hand of Orlac ), he had already left a rich genre-film legacy that makes up for a dozen films such as Curucu, Beast of the Amazon and Love Slaves of the Amazon .