The Alternative Conrad Veidt Biography
(Warning: this posting is rather long)
I dreamt I was at the Conrad Veidt Society Website and I clicked on Connie’s bio and began to read.
Of course I read all the usual. Connie was born on January 22, 1893. He had an older brother who died when Connie was seven. He did not do very well in grade school and high school. He started out studying to be a surgeon then changed over to acting. His father did not approve of the choice but Connie went ahead with it anyway. I read about his theatre career. I read about his movie career. I read of all his successes in the silent film era and of his successes when he made the easy transition over to talking films. I read of his marriages, of Viola and all the joy she brought to his life.
I read of his vehement opposition to Nazism when it reared its ugly head in Germany. I read of the enemies that netted him and how he narrowly escaped with his life from an assassination attempt by the Gestapo. I read of his escape to England and how be became a British citizen. I read of the success he had in roles he played for the British cinema and how that success led to his gaining roles in films in the U.S. I read of his first just playing villains such as in “Thief of Baghdad” and “A Woman’s Face” then how it switched to him playing Nazi villains after the U.S. entered World War II.
Then I came to an April day in 1943. I read how Connie left the house to go golfing that day, he and three of his friends had played an uneventful game until they all came to the eighth hole and. . . nothing happened. OK, Connie sliced his shot a little to the right, but other than that, nothing happened. The four men played out the rest of the game. Connie went home, told Lilli about his day, she told him about hers, they both had dinner and life went on.
For any Conrad Veidt fan, to have the dream end there would be paradise enough but looking over to the right side of the screen, the scroll bar was only halfway down the page. I clicked on the bar, dragged it down to the next screen of information and kept reading.
According to the rest of the bio, Connie stayed on in Hollywood for the rest of WWII. He went on being cast in Nazi roles and went on being very successful in those roles. Sometime in early 1945 when it was pretty obvious the Nazis were going to lose it was just a question of when, a reporter asked him did he mind being typecast as a Nazi during the war years. Connie’s response was quoted in the bio and it was a very well known response among the fans of Conniedom.
“No, I don’t mind at all!” was Connie’s quote. “I don’t mind being remembered as a Nazi so long as it helps the world and future generations remember the Nazis, themselves.”
“Anytime Nazis first appear anywhere, they never present their true nature. They present themselves as charming, friendly, completely in sympathy with your culture, your thoughts and beliefs, your hopes and dreams. Only after they have achieved a strong position of power from which they are confident they can never be deposed does the mask come off and they reveal themselves to be the selfish, inhuman monsters they really are. I could grow old and watch every single one of my roles be forgotten except for the Nazi roles so long as viewers take notice of what cold, heartless bastards these characters were, as I tried my utmost to play them, because that is the reality of Nazis. That is what they are, cold, heartless bastards.”
“No, I don’t mind being stereotyped if that stereotyping could put history on its guard and never let an evil this deep ever resurrect itself again. I can go to my grave in peace knowing I have done what little service I can do in the effort to crush that evil.” -
(Legal disclaimer: Alright, true! We all know Connie never actually said those words but then again he was never asked by anyone about being typecast as a Nazi. It is my opinion that if Connie ever had been asked such a question, the preceding would have been his answer.)After the war, as the months after the German surrender grew in number, Nazi’s began to be seen as less and less of a threat. This caused there to be less and less need for Nazis as villains in movies so roles for Connie, after 1946, began to become fewer and farther between.
He did have his moments of glory, though. According to the dream bio, in the 1946 movie “The Stranger” while it was still directed by Orson Wells, it was Connie, not Orson, who played Professor Rankin.
As the 40’s went on, Connie and Lilli came to the conclusion that there was too little work for Connie to make staying in Hollywood worthwhile any longer. So they made the announcement to all their friends that as soon as it was possible, they were leaving the U.S. and as Connie put it “going home to England.”
During 1948, Connie and Lilli made all the necessary arrangements to make the move and in early 1949 they said good-bye to all their Hollywood friends and returned to England and took up residence in a flat in London.
Moving back to England, of course, meant Connie and Lilli were starting over from scratch. Lilli got a job working for a theatrical agency almost immediately and initially she was the main breadwinner in the Veidt household. There wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity in the British film industry for Connie when they first returned but he did stay active in local theatres plus the fact that Connie had come to the conclusion, as had many British entertainers, that this new fangled little electronic box turning up in more and more English parlors was not just a passing fad it was the way of the future in entertainment. Wise, indeed, is the entertainment industry member who made friends with this new way instead of looking at it as an enemy. As I read this section of the biography, my dream self did now remember watching Connie in various guest appearances in British television programs. Yes, my dream self recalled, television was the next step Connie’s career path took and that is the direction it stayed on right up until the time he and Lilli retired from show business.
Every free moment he had, Connie learned all he could about television. He would spend hours in a television studio learning how television operates, how a television camera operates, how a television show was produced, how it was directed, he got to make friends with people in television at all levels of production, all the while still working in theatre and some movie work.
He became a great conduit between the two branches. Anytime he heard one of his fellow actors saying they weren’t too sure about this new medium, Connie instantly put on his best salesman self and hastened to assure said actor/actress that television was nothing to be feared or repulsed but simply the next phase in the evolution of entertainment. Here was one more stage for an actor/actress to apply their craft but in this case, through the magic of television, it would be the players and the play that went to the audience instead of the audience coming to the play. He did much to assuage fears and convinced many of his fellow actors to look into television work.
According to the dream biography, in 1952, after having done exclusively news broadcasts and documentaries, the BBC announced it was now going to take the plunge and branch out into entertainment broadcasts. They were going to broadcast live their very first television play and they asked Connie to be the lead in that play.
At this point in the biography, there was a “
click here” hyperlink that took the reader to the YouTube posting of that episode which being the first entertainment television broadcast ever in the history of the BBC was, of course posted on the internet for the world to see.
I clicked on the link and waited for the show to download.
Once the show started playing, you could tell immediately it had been recorded on early videotape. It had that look to it you always see in television shows from the early 50’s. The dark shadow ring around the image of everything on the screen and any reflection of the spotlights off of any shiny object produce this huge momentary glare. It was just one of these early examples of videotape where the video quality is horrendous but you forgive them because after all, this is early television and everyone is learning as they go.
In the episode, Connie was playing the Captain of an airline making its way to Heathrow Airport. About half way into the flight the plane ran into a large, peculiar cloud bank. The inside of the cloud bank seemed to be electrically charged and there were lightning bolts shooting all around the plane with electrical zapping noises heard at each lightning flash. Realizing the danger the plane was in, the Captain immediately lowered the altitude of the plane and got out of the cloud bank as fast as he could. As soon as the plane had cleared, one of the crew looked out the window and called in amazement for the Captain to look out as well. The crew looked out the window and started describing a scene where they were flying over a field where a battle was taking place. (In the episode, the point of view of the camera never left the cockpit to show what was taking place on the ground. The crew would look out the windows and describe what they saw. That is how the viewer knew what kind of scene to picture.)
The plane’s Navigator looked down and figured out it was the Battle of Hastings. (It’s nice in a situation like this to have a navigator who’s also an accurate historian). Something had obviously gone very wrong while they were in that cloud bank and the Captain figured if it was something in the cloud bank that had sent them out of their own time, then that same something in the same cloud bank could get them back to their own time. So he pulled the plane up out until the cloud bank again which was indicated to the viewer by the reappearance of the electrical storm. After a few minutes in the storm, the Captain announced to the crew he was bringing the plane down. Hopefully, by now they were back in their own era.
The sounds of the electrical storm subsided and the crew once again all looked out the windows to see where they were. They began describing a scene where a young woman was being brought out of a building escorted by two guards followed by a minister. The guards were leading this woman to a scaffold on which stood a man wearing a black hood. He was holding an axe and next to him was a large, bloodied block of wood. The Navigator then advised the Captain that if he was as concerned for the mental well being of his passengers as well as their physical well being, he’d better get the plane back up into that cloud bank. Otherwise, the entire flight was about to become eye witnesses to the execution of Ann Boleyn.
The viewer then heard the instant increase in the engine roars and the cockpit take an obvious pitch upward as the Captain “gunned it” and got the plane out of there. The sounds of the electrical storm soon resumed.
At this point I sat back in my chair and just laughed out loud at the irony. I thought to myself ‘Well! I guess we all know now where the boys on the writing committee of “The Twilight Zone” go their idea for the Flight 33 episode, now don’t we!’
The Captain decided since they were clearly a long way from their own time period, he would keep the plane in the cloud bank a little longer than he previously had. Hopefully this would make up the lost ground between 1536 and 1952.
After what must have seemed to the crew like an eternity, the Captain decided to bring the plane down once more to see if they had returned to their own time. Once the sound of the electrical storm stopped, the crew went to their accustomed places at the windows of the cockpit. They then began to described seeing a large, glass building in a city that seemed to be London. The crew didn’t see any cars but there were people walking all around and carriages drawn by horses. The Navigator then announced what they were looking at was The Great Exhibition of 1951. Frustrating as this news was, still it meant they were now in the Victorian Era. They were much closer to 1952 now than they had been a few minutes ago when they were in the Tutor era. The flight was at least headed in the right direction. One more trip into the cloud bank and they’d be home again.
Just as the Captain was about to elevate the plane into the cloud bank for the fourth time, one of the Stewardess’ knocked on the door of the cockpit and asked if the Captain could come out to the plane’s galley to speak with her and the plane’s Steward for just a few minutes. The Captain turned control of the plane over to his co-pilot and for the first time since the episode started, the camera took a point of view outside the cockpit. The next scene showed the Captain meeting behind a closed curtain with the head Steward of the flight and one of the Stewardess’
The Stewardess related to the Captain that the passengers were becoming upset. They had been observing things out the windows that they couldn’t explain and with an electrical storm coming up every now and then, they were beginning to panic, thinking something might happen to bring the plane down. The Stewardess then asked the Captain if there was some way he could get on the loudspeaker and explain to them what is going on. The Captain replied that there is nothing he’d like better to do but he wasn’t sure he could explain to the passengers what was going on, he didn't know, himself. The Steward then spoke up and said that in that case perhaps it would be better to tell the passengers nothing until the crew could know for sure what the problem was and how to resolve it.
The Stewardess offered the opinion that the Steward’s idea was the worst thing the Captain could possibly do. The passengers were on the edge of their seats in fear not knowing what was happening. To leave them in ignorance while more strange things go on happening would only serve to make the situation worse not better.
The Steward warned the Captain that if he told the passengers what was going on, it could lead to them asking the crew questions they would not be able to answer.
The Stewardess reminded her fellow crew member that the passengers were
already asking questions they were not able to answer. She then turned to the Captain and asked him to please do the decent thing and let the passengers know
something of what was happening to them. To know half the facts would be better than knowing nothing at all.
The Captain then turned his head and looked off to the side as he took in all this information and weighed it in his head carefully trying to make the decision.
At this point, my dream self became aware of someplace I had to be, work, church, a doctor’s appointment. I had to be somewhere and I had a responsibility to be there on time so I closed out the YouTube window intending to return and see the rest of the episode later and I got up from the computer and began to get dressed.
My alarm clock went off just seconds after that and when I look at the four walls of my bedroom and realize that everything I had just read or seen about Connie had all been merely a dream, I said out loud, “You mean I don’t get to see the rest of the video?! Aw, damn!” and it hit my fist down on the pillow with all the force of frustration I had!
(I should let you all know, I am single and sleep by myself so there was no one else in the bed next to me to think me a lunatic for this action.)However, the reality of it all was, I did have to be to work and I did have a responsibility to be there on time. That part of my dream, at least, was accurate. I got out of bed and began to get ready for the day ahead quietly cherishing my dream time with Connie.
I remain frustrated to this day at not being able to see the other half of the video, however, Connie was a man of character and integrity. I expect he would create his character of the Captain to be the same way so it is my opinion that in the end the Captain does share with the passengers what is happening. At some point the plane finds its way back to 1952, it’s just a question of how many more time travel adventures does it go through before reaching its final destination.
