Froelich, Carl

(1875-1953)

   director; a pioneer of film* as mass enter-tainment. Born in Berlin,* he studied electronics and engineering before his appointment as an engineer with an electrical firm. He was early enamored of motion pictures, and his background gave him insight into the running of a film studio. When Oskar Messter offered him a technical position in 1903 with the Messterfilm Company, he accepted immediately, thus beginning a fifty-year ca-reer in film. He made two movies, Tirol in Waffen and a biography of Richard Wagner, before World War I. During the war he employed film in the German cause; still convinced of German victory, he produced Der Adler von Flandern (The eagle of Flanders) in 1918.

   Froelich focused in the 1920s on the conventional. In filming Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov (1920) and The Idiot (1921), he emphasized acting at the expense of literary accuracy, a standard property of his work. He managed his own studio from 1922 and formed a partnership in 1924 with the popular actress Henny Porten. Although the content of their films was often shallow, the col-laboration generated the Republic's most successful filming studio. In 1929 Froelich introduced Germany's first sound production, the popular Die Nacht gehört uns (The night belongs to us), starring Hans Albers.* Greater success followed in 1931 with Luise, Konigin von Preussen (Luise, queen of Prussia), starring Porten. The same year he assisted Leontine Sagan, normally a stage director, in her direction of Mädchen in Uniform (Women in uniform).

   The enormous success of sound led Froelich in 1930 to join Friedrich Pflug-haupt in building a vast, modern studio in Berlin's Templehof district. The studio produced such films as Traumulus, Wenn wir alle Engel waren (If we were all angels), Heimat (Home), and, after the Nazi takeover, a pretentious production about Frederick the Great. As the NSDAP's favorite director, he enjoyed considerable success during the Third Reich, receiving the National Film Prize in 1936 and 1938 and becoming president of the film academy (Reichsfilmkammer) in 1939. His postwar work was uninspiring.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler; NDB, vol. 5.