Anecdotes

Son of Adolf and Cäcilia Franziska Meister. The parents were from the working class.

Austrian director, who began as a production manager and assistant to Alexander Korda in 1919. He was under contract to Ufa Studios from 1930, turning out both popular entertainments and more off-beat films (F.P.1 antwortet nicht (1932), Gold (1934)). After the war, he set up the Neue Wiener Filmproduktionsgesellschaft, featuring Austrian stars in productions like Der Engel mit der Posaune (1948).

Karl Hartl's flight was stopped by the outbreak of the war. In the wartime he only realised the movies "Operette" (1940) and "Wen die Götter lieben" (1942), afterwards he could not continue his work till the end of war.

As a production manager, he in the 1920s accompanied Korda to Berlin, until in 1926 he returned to Vienna to work for his former class-mate director Gustav Ucicky.

He was also a member of the Advisory Council (Präsidialrat) of the president of the Reichsfilmkammer.

When he worked together with the greatest actors of the 30's - Heinz Rühmann and Hans Albers - and directed the movie "Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war" (1937), it exceeded all expectations. Rühmann and Albers complemented one another perfectly and goad on to top performances.

With the rise of the sound film he could realise his first movie as a director and made his direction debut with "Ein Burschenlied aus Heidelberg" (1930) and with young Billy Wilder as a screenwriter.

With "F.P.1 antwortet nicht" (1932) he captured one of the greatest adventure movies with science fiction elements on the big screen and became a star.

Born in Vienna, Hartl began his film career at the Austrian Sascha-Film company of Alexander Kolowrat and from 1919 was assistant to the Hungarian director Alexander Korda.

After most of the talented directors, technicians, actors had been forced to leave in the course of the 1938 Anschluss annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Hartl became director of production for Wien-Film, the newly created and indirectly[sic] stated-owned body through which the UFA, and beyond them the Nazi government represented by Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels, controlled the Austrian film industry. In this role, which he retained until the end of the war, Hartl seldom undertook work on individual films himself but was nevertheless involved at a senior level with some of the most significant entertainment films of the Nazi period.

The director Karl Hartl directed some of the most popular German productions in the 30's which erected a monument to him.

In the post-war cinema he wasn't able to go on from his earlier successes.

His film career already began in 1918 when he worked as a director assistant for Alexander Korda, at the same time he was also active as an editor.