Ich war Jack Mortimer

Anton Walbrook -- still credited as "Adolph" -- is driving his taxicab for his last shift in Budapest before taking a better-paying job. He picks up a fare at the train station, but when he asks which hotel, he discovers that his passenger has been shot.

This sort of thriller was becoming popular in the movies. Hitchcock's efforts like THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and LADY ON A TRAIN set the standard. This German variation, co-written by Thea von Harbau, is much more gloomy and Teutonic than Hitchcock's saturnine works and the answer to the mystery is clear before it is offered. It's seventy-five minutes of bombastic anger and fear. If that's your taste, you'll enjoy it. Me, I grew up with Hitchcock's works and I prefer his vicious comic relief.

I've seen some of Walbrook's movies shot in in Vienna in the early 1930s. Soon after this, he moved to England, where he worked under the name of Anton -- Adolf wasn't that popular name in Britain starting in 1939 -- where he specialized in kindly, cynical, world-weary Germans and resumed a wider range when he returned to Continental work after the War. He's good here, but it's a role that a lot of actors could have played well.

Ich War Jack Mortimer was originally a novel written by Austrian author Alexander Lernet-Holenia in 1933. This is the German film adaptation of the novel.

Ferdinand Sponer is a cab driver who one day picks up a man from the train depot and by the time he arrives at the man's hotel he is dead. Now Sponer doesn't know what to do. Should he tell the police or will they just arrest him for the murder? Should he dispose of the body? Is there anything he can do to clear his name? Well, watch this German classic from 1935 starting Anton Walbrook and you can find out. Fun film. True to the book. On YouTube too!

This is a fascinating and well-made film ICH WAR JACK MORTIMER (I WAS JACK MORTIMER) comes from Austria prior to the Anschluss. The Austrian actor Anton Walbrook, later to become famous for THE RED SHOES (1948) and other films made in English, here has the lead role as a young taxi driver who finds that his passenger in the back seat is dead, having been mysteriously shot since being picked up at the train station and on his way to the hotel. The film is based upon a novel ICH WAR JACK MORTIMER by Alexander Lernet-Holenia, an Austrian friend and protégé of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It was published in 1933 and an English translation of it appeared in 2015. A disc of this film with English subtitles is available from Zoetropemixtures on Ebay, but apparently nowhere else. Another version of the film was made in German in 1952, under the original title of GEFAEHRLICHES ABENTEUER (DANGEROUS ADVENTURE), later changed to ABENTEUER IN WIEN (ADVENTURE IN VIENNA). This later film was directed by Émile Edwin Reinert (1903-1953). Although I have a disc of it, there is no subtitled version. I watched a bit of it and it seems not as good as the original. So back to the 1935 film. It is imaginatively directed by Carl Froelich (1875-1953), a highly talented director who made 83 films, including one starring Ingrid Bergman in 1938. (It is remarkable that the two film directors both died in the same year.) One reason why one hears so little about Froelich is that he was a member of the Nazi Party, having joined in 1933. After the War he was "de-Nazified" and made a couple more films before his death. In this film it is clear that he had the ability to make very powerful and dramatic films using expressionist and even experimental "power-editing" and excellent, moody cinematography. He is also not afraid to dwell on a silent brooding face, which reminds one of Carl Theodor Dreyer. By far the most powerful and haunting performance in this film is by the enigmatic beauty, Sybille Schmitz (1909-1955). She is well known from her earlier appearances in Dreyer's famous film VAMPYR (1932) and Pabst's DIARY OF A LOST GIRL (1929). When the Nazis came to power, Schmitz was considered unsuitable to appear in German films because of her dark hair and slightly "Jewish appearance". She took to drink and died of either suicide or murder at the age of only 46. But in this film she is mesmerising, and Froelich lets the camera stare at her and become infatuated. She looks like the ultimate "woman of mystery", with secrets and passions clearly swirling under an imperturbable expression. With her, silence really speaks. Schmitz raises this film to a higher level by being an enigma. The film is excellent and deserves to be better known.

If anybody would like to hear Anton Walbrook speaking in (his native ?!) Austrian accent I recommend this movie. Here Anton Walbrook very convincingly portrays the Budapest taxi driver Fred Sponer. He is a mischievous,ill-humoured, bad-tempered (granteln), sometimes too simple minded almost stupid member of the lower classes, toiling his day away, having high aspirations but with no hope of changing his situation. This character gets tangled up in a jealousy drama involving the famous conductor Montemayor, his wife and of course Jack Mortimer, who gets murdered on the backseat of Sponer's taxi on his arrival in Budapest. How his simple mindedness gets Fred Sponer ever deeper into a fix is shown in this very delicious movie I highly recommend. The script is very well-done and written by Thea von Harbou. A very deserved ten out of ten from me!!!