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25th September 1928: American comic actor Buster Keaton (1895 - 1966) wearing a baseball strip and boots. (Photo by John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images)
The 1932 aquatic adventure F.P. 1 Doesn't Answer follows in the trailblazing path of 1930's People on Sunday and The Blue Angel, Weimar-era films that introduced future Hollywood players. As with the Erich von Stroheim classic, UFA produced alternate-language versions. In each, a notable star plays raffish pilot Ellissen, the central character. In Karl Hartl's original, it's Hans Albers (Peer Gynt, The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen). The adventure begins when he meets the compelling Claire (Sybille Schmitz, Diary of a Lost Girl, Vampyr) just as he's planning a heist.
Instead of a conventional theft, he breaks into the offices of Lennartz Shipyard to shift the blueprints for a mid-Atlantic floating platform from the storage room to the executive chambers. He escapes detection by everyone except his unofficial PR flack Foto-Jonny (a blond Peter Lorre, just one year from Fritz Lang's masterful M), who would never betray his confidence. Little does he know that Claire is a Lennartz with a controlling interest in the company.
Fortunately, his plan pays off when they decide to build the F.P.1, brainchild of Ellissen's war buddy, engineer Droste (Paul Hartmann). The scheme brings him and Claire closer while pulling the more serious-minded Droste into her orbit. When Ellissen gets the chance to circumnavigate the globe, he resists her entreaties to settle down, only to return a broken man two years later. Although setbacks have embittered him, Droste oversees the successful completion of the artificial island. When a saboteur threatens to sink the entire operation, Claire reaches out to Ellissen who puts the bottle down and springs into action to fly them to the F.P.1 and put things right.
Though described as science fiction, the screenplay from Walter Reisch and Kurt Siodmak, an adaptation of the latter's novel, plays more like an espionage thriller with noir elements. The use of shadows to add intrigue reflects expressionist cinema as much as it predicts film noir. Kino's Blu-ray includes the British version with Conrad Veidt (The Man Who Laughs) as Ellissen (Charles Boyer played the role in the French version). Though both films adhere to the same storyline and use the same sets, the German version has the edge thanks to Albers' more dynamic performance. He and Lorre make for a particularly enjoyable team as his spirited insouciance strikes sparks with Lorre's exaggerated impatience.
Upon its release, Lorre would trade Germany for England, where he starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much before continuing on to the US. Curt and his brother Robert Siodmak, who collaborated on People on Sunday, would also relocate to Hollywood where the former made his mark as a writer of horror films like I Walked with a Zombie. In his comprehensive commentary track, film historian Eddy von Mueller profiles other cast members, like Schmitz, whose tragic trajectory would inspire Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Veronika Voss. If the comparisons to more overtly fantastical films, like Lang's Metropolis, don't quite fit, F.P.1 offers its own unique hybrid-genre pleasures. Recommended.