Richard Eichberg (Richard Albert Eichberg)

Traversing a middle line between artistry and prosaic mainstream fare was the director Richard Eichberg. Though he enjoyed moderate success as an actor on the stage from 1906, Eichberg soon focused his energies on the film industry. His career as a director/producer commenced properly in 1915 with the setting up (as co-founder) of a production company under his name, the Richard Eichberg-Film GmbH. Skilfully anticipating public tastes for escapist action, he came to specialise in turning out technically proficient, economically budgeted crime thrillers and melodramas (eventually also incorporating comedies and operettas). Read more... locales. Such material was perfectly suited to starring the athletic actress and dancer Lee Parry (at the time also his first wife). Eichberg directed Parry in her biggest box-office hit, Monna Vanna (1922), one of his more expensively made projects. Having tasted stardom, Parry moved on to pastures greener in 1925 and Eichberg found himself having to scout for new talent.

Eichberg's reputation partly rests on bringing to the fore a future Hollywood star in Anna May Wong, in addition discovering such other leading lights as Mártha Eggerth, Franciska Gaal and Mona Maris. With his comedy Die keusche Susanne (1926), he also inaugurated the dynamic box-office pairing of Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch. After Harvey was snapped up by Ufa in 1928, Eichberg signed a two-year contract with British International Pictures to make Anglo-German co-productions. These included the lucrative Anna May Wong vehicles Schmutziges Geld (1928) and Großstadtschmetterling (1929), as well as the police thriller Der Greifer (1930), which helped propel the actor Hans Albers to fame and fortune. Never in tune with the national socialist regime in Germany, Eichberg continued to make pictures elsewhere. During the mid-30's, he worked in France and Bulgaria, filming the classic Jules Verne adventure Der Kurier des Zaren (1936) with the charismatic Austrian actor Anton Walbrook playing the lead role of Michael Strogoff.

A significant box office triumph (though by no means a universal hit with the critics) was Eichberg's remake of Fritz Lang's Indian two-parter The Tiger of Eschnapur (1938) and Das indische Grabmal (1938). Both starred the exotic dancer La Jana and Eichberg's second wife, an actress named Kitty Jantzen (who disappeared into obscurity shortly after release). Thanks to numerous re-runs on television, Eichberg's version is by far the best known. At the least, it is superior to Lang's kitschy 1958 re-visitation, with its doctored 'happy ending' (even Lang himself regarded this as one of his notable failures).

By the end of the decade, Eichberg found the situation in Germany more and more intolerable. In 1939, he emigrated to the U.S. and was granted American citizenship five years later. For all of his credentials, he never managed to find work in Hollywood. In 1942, he was briefly active on Broadway as artistic director and co-financier of Lehar's "The Merry Widow" at Carnegie Hall. Seven years later he returned to Germany attempting to rekindle his career in familiar fashion with a typically exotic fantasy, Die Reise nach Marrakesch (1949). Despite the lavish production (filmed on location near Casablanca) and fielding a quartet of bankable stars (Luise Ullrich, Paul Dahlke, Karl Ludwig Diehl and Grethe Weiser), the end result turned out to be calamitous. Some reviewers described the picture as a 'glorified travelogue', most others were less kind. In the final analysis, tastes for entertainment had changed in the aftermath of the Second World War Eichberg's formula had not. From this point on, his career was

effectively over. However, he had made wise investments over many years (including a villa in Switzerland) and retirement would not have been a harsh one.