I like the concept of the idiot brother — maybe I am one — and Curt Siodmak always seemed a good example, though not so much as Billy Wilder’s older sibling William Lee Wilder (their mom really liked that name. Billy’s pithy biography of W. Lee — “He was an idiot. He made pictures, each worse than the last. Then he died.”)
Robert Siodmak’s career contains only one COBRA WOMAN, whereas Curt’s is largely composed of such nonsense, only more badly executed. Weirdly, when he finally got to direct, he was actually quite imaginative, and it’s his silly scripts that let him down. One could understand Robert being a little embarrassed about him. But Curt was sensitive and intelligent when he wasn’t making dopey films, as is seen in the interview he gave in Screenwriter, Words Become Pictures by Lee Server, a fine tome I picked up in Toronto (full list here).
Curt Siodmak: Robert and me, we had a sibling rivalry. He loved me and when I needed something he was there, and we were the best of friends. But there should only be one Siodmak, not two Siodmaks. Like when you have two dogs, one bites the other dog. Robert was two years and two days older than me, and the story goes that father took Robert to the crib and said, “Here’s your new brother.” And Robert said, “I don’t want your new brother.” And that lasted until he died seventy-one years later.
Siodmak talks about his short time in England, which I knew nothing about. He was working at Gaumont-British, and tried to interest them in a remake of his brother’s film, DER MANN, DER SEINEN MORDER SUCHT (A MAN, LOOKING FOR HIS MURDERER) which he had co-scripted in 1931 with Billy Wilder and a couple of other guys. Warning: this story is grim.
Curt Siodmak: The story, actually, was stolen from a book by Jules Verne, The Trials of a Chinaman in China, or something. (See here for another theft of the same source. A depressed man hires a hitman to kill him, but when his luck changes, he can’t find the assassin to call off the hit.)
And there was a producer working at the same studio named Felner [sic]. He was a German, and he didn’t like any other Germans working at Gaumont-British. He hated the Germans. And I showed him my story. He said, “How can we do a picture about a man who commits suicide?” But he came back and asked me how people hanged themselves. I told him about that. And a day later he hanged himself. He had been waiting for his labor permit, to stay in England, and it was late–it didn’t come through. And some of them played a practical joke. They told him that he’d been rejected for his permit, that he’d be deported. It wasn’t true. A joke. But they didn’t tell him. He hanged himself.
Lee Server: Who did it?
Curt Siodmak: That Hitchcock crowd. One of those cold people.
Depressing. And Wikipedia at least confirms Hermann Fellner’s cause of death.
Here’s that cold person Hitch, trying to warm up, in the company of his dog, Mr. Jenkins. Image by Peter Stackpole, from a book of his amazing photographs loaned to me by the bountiful Nicola Hay.
Siodmak the younger’s most famous creation, Lawrence Talbot AKA The Wolf Man, is celebrated in verse over at Limerwrecks, by Hilary “Surly Hack” Barta and myself. Here.
The photo makes me think of another story in Server’s book, in his Charles Bennett interview.
Charles Bennett: I remember one occasion Brian Aherne gave a huge cocktail party at his house at the beach at Malibu. Hitch was there, and I talked with him about three-quarters of an hour, along with Charlies Brackett. And the three of us chatted by the fire for nearly an hour. The next day a case of gloriously expensive champagne turned up here at the house with a note from Hitch saying, “From that stupid man, Hitchcock.” So I called him up and said, “What’s this stupid man business?” He said, “That’s what you called me, isn’t it?” I said, “When did I say that? We were talking by the fire for an hour.” He said, “No, we didn’t talk. You didn’t say a word.” He didn’t remember any of it.
Server: You don’t think it was some sort of practical joke?
Bennett: He seemed to have no idea that we were talking the night before, or that I hadn’t called him “stupid.” But it was certainly some of the most beautiful champagne I ever drank in my life.
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