Professor Mamlock
About Professor Mamlock
Professor Mamlock, a Jewish surgeon in Germany, keeps out of politics. His son Rolf, a communist, opposes the Nazis. After the party takes power, Mamlock is driven from his clinic with the word Jude scrawled across his white coat, and the antisemitic Dr. Hellpach is set over the hospital. He tries to kill himself. In the end he is machine-gunned while declaring his faith in Germany, and Rolf escapes to lead a resistance group.
Cast & crew
More about Professor Mamlock
Herbert Rappaport and Adolf Minkin directed the Lenfilm picture from Friedrich Wolf's 1933 play, written while Wolf was in exile in France. The screen adaptation is credited to Wolf, Minkin, and Rappaport. Rappaport had seen the play on a Moscow stage, and the film replaces the play's suicide ending.
Themes
Background
Soviet authorities pulled the film after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939. It was shown again after the German invasion on June 22, 1941.
In film history
It is one of the earliest fiction films to deal directly with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.
Reviews
Frank S. Nugent, in The New York Times on November 8, 1938, called it a long-overdue indictment of Nazi persecution of the Jews that had come from Russia rather than from a Hollywood worried about the foreign market. He found it engrossing, sincere, and admirably played, and wrote that the producers used that persecution as a political argument.
Audiences
Kristallnacht, two days after the New York premiere, drew more attention to the film. In the USSR it opened in sixteen Moscow cinemas, went out in three hundred copies, drew 370,000 admissions in the first eight days, and had been seen by 16 million people by April 15, 1939.
Look
Georgy Filatov photographed the film during principal photography in Leningrad.
Music
Yuri Kochurov and Nikolai Timofeyev wrote the score.
Notes
- Semyon Mezhinsky plays Mamlock, Oleg Zhakov plays Rolf, and Vladimir Chestnokov plays Dr. Hellpach.
- Amkino released it in the United States. The New York premiere was at the Cameo on November 7, 1938, and it played 103 cinemas in the metropolitan area.
- Mezhinsky received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour on February 1, 1939 for the role.
- The British Board of Film Censors refused a certificate. Anthony Aldgate and James C. Robertson wrote that it was treated as an uncompromising assault on a point of German domestic policy. The London Film Society showed it privately.
- After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, French censors banned it because it was a Soviet film.
- Edward G. Robinson said he would give his teeth to do an American version.
- Konrad Wolf, the playwright's son, directed another adaptation for DEFA, released on May 17, 1961.
Scenes
- Mamlock is driven through the streets with the word Jude scrawled across his surgeon's coat.
- He is machine-gunned while speaking of his faith in Germany.
Influenced by
- Professor Mamlock (play by Friedrich Wolf, 1933)
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (1938 Профессор мамлок.webm)
