although she expressed herself mostly by rolling her eyes. Her vocal delivery, however, was hampered by a tendency to become shrill in long, heated speeches. Even in this early part, her character is no pushover and when Schmidt kisses her, she slaps him across the face. As was true throughout her career, the young Hedy Kiesler appears happiest when her character has ticked off a would-be lover and put him firmly in his place. She is also considerably taller than Rühmann, which only adds to the comic effect. In one scene, she appears rather startlingly in a bathing suit turning somersaults in her bedroom, an activity that emphasized her almost androgynous figure.
The film was an enormous success, which was attributed to the strong original script written by Karl Noti and Hans Wilhelm and led to its comparison with The Trunks; both films, it was said, were not just genre films but also expressed strong personal visions. We Don't Need Money, however, was credited as “livelier, funnier and less complicated” than Granowsky's production.27 The film managed, a Lichtbildbühne critic suggested, to stay topical without reminding audiences of the miseries of life. Not normally noted for his light touch, director Carl Boese had acquitted himself well.
Hedy Kiesler, the Lichtbildbühne critic added, looked good enough to eat (“zum Anbeißen hübsch”) and showed talent.28 This focus on the rising talent's looks over her acting skills foretold reviews to come. German Variety was in agreement: Hedy Kiesler was “enviably young and slim.”29 The Kinematograph critic was more circumspect: “Hedy Kiesler really has nothing to do other than show off a couple of pretty costumes. She will have to content herself with being part of the general praise for the film.”30 Der Film was even less encouraging, noting that Hedy's acting had “no dramatic appeal.”31 Thunderous applause greeted the final credits at the premiere in Berlin's Capitol cinema on 5 February 1932, and the film enjoyed a long run in both Vienna and Berlin. It also opened in the Hindenberg Theatre in New York in November 1932, where it played in a German version. The New York Times was as enthusiastic as the German press had been and welcomed the performance of the young Hedy Kiesler, “a charming Austrian girl.”32
In Vienna, the film premiered on 22 December 1931, in time for the holiday season. On opening night, the audience laughed long and loud and the closing titles were met by rounds of applause. Here was a film, most reviewers agreed, that treated the current economic crisis with wit and intelligence. The appearance of Hedy Kiesler, now inevitably referred to as Max Reinhardt's protégée, had been widely anticipated in advance. She looked charming, the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung noted, “but her acting is a little self-conscious.”33 Meanwhile, Viennese authorities realized that posters adorning the city walls declared, “We don't need money.” In a moment of humorlessness, they ordered them to be removed.
In Berlin, Hedy stayed with Joe and Mia May, whose lives were to become peculiarly entwined with hers. Joe May was born Julius Otto Mandl in Vienna in 1880, which made him a cousin of the equally wealthy Fritz Mandl, Hedy's future husband. Unlike Fritz, however, Julius frittered away his share of the family fortune before turning to filmmaking, an occupation that permitted him to exercise the autocratic character traits that he also shared with Fritz. In April 1902, Julius Mandl married the actress Mia May and took her surname, calling himself Joe May. In the same year, their daughter, Eva Maria, was born. As will be seen in the next chapter, Hedy would later suggest that Eva Maria committed suicide because of her cousin Fritz Mandl's attentions.
Joe May was at the peak of his career when Hedy met him, with a reputation as a director that put him on a par commercially, if less so artistically, with the big names of UFA studios, such as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. Later again, Hedy would be one of a number of people to help Joe when he fell on hard times. On this occasion, however, she only stayed with the Mays for a few months and by the time We Don't Need Money premiered in February 1932, she had left Berlin. Hedy planned to return, although she never would. The next year, Hitler's rise to power saw a mass exodus of the Austrian-Jewish film community back to Vienna, where they enjoyed a temporary haven before the Anschluß (annexation of Austria) in 1938. However, in 1932, Hedy left Berlin because she had been cast in a new film to be shot by the renowned Czech director Gustav Machaty. Its title was Extase or Ecstasy.
3
Ecstasy
BY THE TIME he began filming Ecstasy, Gustav Machaty enjoyed a reputation as a director of art films. His most celebrated work was an erotic masterpiece, Seduction (Erotikon), made in 1929. The film concerned the sexual encounter between the daughter of a station master and a stranger and opens with scenes from their night of love, which marked the film as highly explicit without being pornographic. Immersed in Czech modernism, the Jewish Machaty had reputedly worked in Hollywood as an apprentice to D. W. Griffith and Eric von Stroheim, though this may be a self-penned myth. He was definitely back in Czechoslovakia by 1926, when he made The Kreutzer Sonata and Seduction. He followed this in 1931 with his first sound film, From Saturday to Sunday (Ze Soboty Na Nedeli), which was also the first Czech sound film. Scored by the Czech avant-garde jazz composer Jaroslav Jerek, the film still feels like a silent era production. Structured again around a young woman's awakening desire, the story follows a prim secretary who is offered money for sex while out with her friend at an up-market nightclub. Outraged, she slaps her escort and flounces out into the rain. In a sequence that anticipates Ecstasy, she is soaked in a downpour and accepts a passing stranger's offer to come and dry off in his apartment. There follows an intensely erotic sequence, after which a series of misunderstandings leads the couple to part and finally be reunited.1
Machaty met Hedy in Berlin in 1931. He liked casting unknown or nonprofessional actors and struck by Hedy's looks, he chose her for the part of the young woman Eva in Ecstasy. Shooting on Ecstasy began in July 1932, although the film had been in preparation long before that. While she was waiting for Machaty to begin, Hedy returned to the Viennese stage. In February 1932 she replaced Marta Lille in the role of Sybil (originally played by Karin Evans) in the Komödie Theatre in Noel Coward's Private Lives for the last few weeks of its run. Sybil is one of the four main characters in Coward's comedy of manners; it was another good part for the young actress. Hedy Kiesler's star was quickly rising.
To shoot Ecstasy, the cast and crew traveled to Czechoslovakia. The bathing scenes were shot near Jevany, close to Prague. Otherwise, the outdoor scenes were shot in the Carpathians, in and around Dobšiná (site of the famed Dobšinská Ice Cave). They lived in this “godforsaken place,” according to Hedy, “like the most simple of people from the Steppes. And because the sun only shines brightly there for a few hours, and in the morning and afternoon a thick mist falls over everything, we had to be careful to use every minute we could. At lunchtime, we huddled in the small camera van to grab a quick bite of food.”2 The café sequence was shot on the elegant Barrandov Terraces on the outskirts of Prague, a location that would have been easily recognizable to locals, as it was a popular day trip from the city. The film was shot in three language versions—German, Czech, and French. For the French version, Aribert Mog was replaced by Pierre Nay and Leopold Kramer by Andre Nox. The Czech actor Zwonimir Rogoz played the father in all three versions. Hedy, too, played Eva in all three versions; “she learnt Czech in a few weeks,” Aribert Mog told a reporter.3 In fact, as Joseph Garncarz has demonstrated, Hedy was post-synched by a Czech speaker having first of all delivered her lines in Czech to camera.4 Not only could she play her role in multiple languages, she also endeared herself to her director by translating for him on set.
Ecstasy continued the celebration of awakening female sexuality that had made Seduction such a conversation piece. The story focused on a young woman, Eva (Hedy Kiesler), who marries a much older man, Emil (Zvonimir Rogoz). He turns out to be impotent and she leaves him. During a nude swim in a lake, her horse bolts, taking her clothes with it. She is rescued by a young engineer, Adam (played by Aribert
