Willi Forst

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A female cabaret singer is put on trial for murdering a predatory musician.

Wikipedia wrote:
Warner Brothers Studios acquired the U.S. distribution rights but shelved the film in favor of its own scene-by-scene 1937 English language remake, Confession, which starred Kay Francis. Mazurka’s sets were designed by the art director Hermann Warm. It was partly shot on location in Warsaw. The film was made by Cine-Allianz whose Jewish owners Arnold Pressburger and Gregor Rabinovitch were dispossessed during pre-production of the film.Read More »

This is Willi Forst’s second collaboration with director Géza von Bolvary, made shortly after the far better known “Zwei Herzen im Dreivierteltakt” (in which he didn’t have first billing, though). Again, the script is by Walter Reisch and the music is by Robert Stolz.

In “Ein Tango für Dich”, Forst plays Jimmy Bolt, who is working as a singer and dancer (and occcasionally as a waiter) at a varieté. The man may be talented, but he’s not exactly a big success, and things get complicated when a young orphan girl (Fee Malten) falls in love with the voice of another singer (Oskar Karlweis) but then mistakes Bolt for him…Read More »

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“Der Herr auf Bestellung – the gentleman who can be booked” has the Weimar dream team of Walter Reisch as scriptwriter, Geza von Bolvary as director and most importantly, the incomparable Willi Forst as main actor.

This ‘musical burlesque’ tells about a stylish young gentleman (Willi Forst) who works as a so-called ‘Festredner’; an untranslatable term, it indicates a person who makes speeches at important events like marriages etc. for people who don’t feel able to do it themselves. Willi lends his voice to a speech-impaired professor (Paul Hörbiger), but the baroness (Trude Lieske) who falls in love with Hörbiger only does so because of Willi’s voice, and you can guess that this leads to all sorts of complications…Read More »

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I don’t hesitate to call “Das Lied ist aus” one of the great masterpieces of early German cinema. It is one of the best and most stylish of all the Weimar musical sound films, and it’s unusual for its strongly melancholic undertone and unhappy ending. It can also be regarded as one of the defining films for the team of actor Willi Forst, director Geza von Bolváry and scriptwriter Walter Reisch. Forst fully established his screen persona here: the witty, elegant, but also fragile and thoughtful gentleman, although he was a much too versatile actor to be pinned-down to such keywords. Forst is paired here with the equally stunning Liane Haid, very charming and womanly, and the chemistry these two have has rarely been achieved again in later films with Forst (but check out “Der Prinz von Arkadien” with the same team!).Read More »

Silvia Breuss wrote:
It is one of those hidden big-city asylums where light-shy existences meet. Many paths lead into the demimonde of Café Elektric, but only a few lead out again. Women looking for the buyers of their bodies in the glow of the street lamps find their way in, as do night owls and all kinds of sinister figures. Truth meets deception here, drive meets dreams and feelings, possession and money meet dependence. Gustav Ucicky’s atmospherically dense “film of manners”, still captivating today in its direct and unsentimental portrayal of the Viennese milieu, with the young Willi Forst and Marlene Dietrich in her first leading role, was intended to show “how easy it is in our time to stray from the right path”. The signpost for three great careers.Read More »