Kurt Rehfeld — A New Director Appears (1925) 🇺🇸

Curt Rehfeld — A New Director Appears (1925) | www.vintoz.com

May 08, 2025

A critic sees an effulgent future for the man who is making “The Viennese Medley.”

by Don Ryan

The sheeplike proclivity of movie producers to follow each other in flocks would account for the immediate phenomenon of a Hollywood infested by military haircuts, rigid mustachios, and monocles glinting fiercely under the brilliant sun of Southern California.

When the first ten reels of “The Merry Widow” were shown — uncut — to a selected audience of exhibitors in New York and were received with unbounded enthusiasm, the producers immediately busied themselves on assorted versions of a story in which slender gentlemen of Continental appearance could wear spiffy uniforms. So it is easy to understand why First National Pictures is spending a million to make “The Viennese Medley” its most glittering offering of the year.

But why, in the name of all the safe-and-sane precedents of the overcautious producers, was this million-dollar picture — involving in its making the careers of two such favored stars as Anna Q. Nilsson and Conway Tearle — intrusted to the tender mercies of a director who has never made a picture?

Kurt Rehfeld [Curt Rehfeld] is the man. It is highly improbable the reader has ever heard his name. A stocky, one-legged German, with a stubby blond mustache and a quick temper more than counterbalanced by a melting smile. There is not even a one-reel comedy to his official credit! Yet he is directing The Viennese Medley with a method, a carefulness, and above all, an imagination, that is going to make this movie of prewar and postwar Vienna one of the big successes of the screen — unless, I say unless — unless his style is crabbed by the little studio god of production.

Behind the selection of Rehfeld is a story. June Mathis, head of the scenario department of First National, was given the job of supervising The Viennese Medley. And it was Miss Mathis who chose Rehfeld to direct her picture.

Now you may remember that June Mathis wrote the screen story of The Four Horsemen, the picture which, incidentally, made Rudolph Valentino. Rex Ingram directed this picture. The name of Kurt Rehfeld did not appear in it. But if you were to inquire of Miss Mathis to-day she would tell you that in her opinion Rehfeld, assistant to Ingram, was responsible for many splendid bits in this epic picture of the war. So we see that Miss Mathis was not acting blindly when she gave the former assistant a tremendous opportunity to make good or flop.

Thus it fell out that one fine morning last July the brand-new director found himself sitting at a mahogany desk on which a sign blazoned his name in letters of gold. On the other side of the desk sat Conway Tearle, his new leading man.

Rehfeld glanced at the script and cleared his throat.

“Mr. Tearle, you are to play Count Max von Hartig, scion of an aristocratic Austrian family, officer in a crack regiment.”

He looked at Tearle and cleared his throat again.

“Of course, Mr. Tearle — of course it will be necessary for you to begin growing your mustache right away.”

“What!” exclaimed the actor.

“Your mustache,” Rehfeld murmured. “You know — the Austrian army regulations said that any man who wore his emperor’s uniform must have a mustache.”

“But — good heavens, Mr. Rehfeld! Think of the audience. They’ve never seen me with a mustache. They wouldn’t stand for it. Confound it! I’d like to please — but I’m hanged if I’ll become a beaver for this picture!”

Then Rehfeld showed himself a diplomat. He smiled.

“Let me think it over,” he said, blandly.

That night he racked his brain. For, be it known, this Rehfeld is a realist. To violate the truth is to him the greatest sin. But he was not powerful enough in his new position to run counter to the wishes of a star as popular with the box-office as Conway Tearle.

Now Rehfeld, like all able-bodied men of the Central Empires, had served his time in the army. Suddenly he remembered the Eighth Dragoons. The colonel of the Eighth had unfortunately lost a part of his upper lip in an encounter. He couldn’t wear a mustache. Rehfeld remembered that a special order had been issued permitting this colonel and his officers to go with smoothly shaven chops.

So Tearle, designed for an infantry officer in the script, became instead an officer of the Eighth Dragoons. It was only necessary to make a few dozen new uniforms for him. And the movies have plenty of money to spend on uniforms.

The incident illustrates what Rehfeld has learned in America in the last ten years. As he told me:

“I learned by being first a stubborn fool. But the things that happened took all the conceit out of me.”

This realist is painfully honest. He told me his life — blandly, openly, concealing nothing in a past that is not embroidered with silk floss.

In contrast to the postwar swarms of Teutons in Hollywood, Rehfeld makes no pretensions to noble blood. He comes of a rich bourgeois family. In the army his grade was Fizefeldwebel the equivalent of a top sergeant. On his left forearm he bears a jagged scar made by an assegai spear in one of the African campaigns. On the Medley set there are enough of his titled countrymen, former officers, working as atmosphere, to organize a Liederkranz. Such is America — the land of topsy-turvy.

Idle son of a rich manufacturer, Rehfeld came to America at the age of thirty-five. He spent the six thousand dollars he brought with him in New York and New Orleans. And in San Francisco the few dollars he kept in the bottom of his trunk to pay for a cable that would bring more money from his father were stolen.

Dead broke, he shipped with a gang of laborers bound for a railway-construction camp in the northern part of the State. The greenhorn must have presented a strange appearance to the others, scum of the San Francisco water front, for he was dressed in a fashionable corduroy shooting jacket with knee breeches, wore an Alpine hat with a feather in it, and carried as a bedding roll — a pink silk coverlet.

In the rough life of the construction camp he had fistic duels with rival German émigrés, Swedes, Scotchmen, and other nationals, gradually fighting his way up from the lowly position of dishwasher, through those of wood chopper and tunnel mugger to that of river driver.

A painful accident — Rehfeld sat on a rusty nail — sent him back to San Francisco, where, after recovery, he got a job as baritone in the chorus of a fly-by-night opera company. The troupe went broke in Los Angeles. Rehfeld married one of the girls in the chorus. They pooled their resources, netting a total of eighteen dollars, and started out to hunt for work. The wife found it first — a job as telephone operator. A few days later the husband got a job as extra man with Christy Cabanne at three dollars a day, the most money he had ever earned in his life.

Under the tutelage of D. W. Griffith the coming director of a million-dollar movie was thoroughly grounded in this game, art, profession, or business, as it is variously called. At last he had worked himself up to a point where he was given a contract in stock at forty dollars a week.

He was to go to work on a Monday. On the Saturday before his career as stock actor was to begin, Rehfeld fell under a Pacific Electric car at Venice, California, and his right leg was cut off at the knee. The fate that had pursued him grinned triumphantly. But a handful of bills — the hard-won money of teammates in the struggle for existence in Hollywood — tided him over the period of convalescence. A few months later, with a cork leg strapped to his knee, he was back with Griffith as military expert in “Hearts of the World.”

In the years that followed Rehfeld underwent all the vicissitudes of those who toil in the lower strata of the most uncertain profession in the modern world. He was wardrobe man, research man, assistant director, at last, production manager. He was treated at various times with generosity, injustice, appreciation, and contempt.

When he came back from the trip abroad with Ingram the heads of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer organization promised enthusiastically to “take care of him.”

“Mr. Rehfeld,” beamed Marcus Loew, “you are the first manager to come back from making a picture with fifteen thousand dollars under instead of fifteen thousand dollars over the estimate.”

But for some reason the promised job failed to materialize. In fact, when Miss Mathis called Rehfeld to direct the Medley, he had not earned a cent for eleven months and was using only the back door of his bungalow. The front was besieged with bill collectors.

The Viennese Medley will enable him to pay his bills. Not much more. For Rehfeld is receiving a ridiculously low salary considering the work on which he is engaged. But if he makes a successful picture, he can, after its release, demand a figure that would thrill a grand-opera prima donna. In fact, I am convinced that Kurt Rehfeld, uninterfered with, will produce a picture that will fix the future, not only of himself, but of all those connected with him in this enterprise. The danger that menaces him is that expressed in the old proverb: Too many cooks spoil the broth.

In Anna Q. Nilsson and Conway Tearle, the director of The Viennese Medley has two popular, sophisticated performers — troupers in the old sense — and in this respect good material.

Tearle, in my opinion, is not the type for the count. He makes a very excellent American business man on the screen, but he cannot be expected to carry himself as an Austrian army officer. However, I do not think that American audiences will give a hang if their idol walks across the room with an unmilitary roll of the shoulders that would make the blood of a Prussian drillmaster boil with rage.

The thing I like about Tearle is his consistent refusal to yield to vanity — consuming evil of the acting profession. There are too many persons in the movies who believe what their own press agents write about them. Tearle does not. He laughs about it.

He comes of an ancient and honorable line of stage actors, and he got into the movies when he was playing with Ethel Barrymore. Ethel was going to make a picture. She was canny enough to know that a movie leading man, cognizant of the tricks of his trade, might steal it away from her. So she took Tearle onto the lot as her support.

Ethel Barrymore flopped — terribly. Tearle, a handsome fellow who photographed well, went over big. He has been in the movies ever since.

“Why?” I asked him, as we sat in the studio restaurant on the United lot. “Do the pictures satisfy your artistic yearnings more than the legitimate drama?”

And I winked.

“Go on and kid me,” replied Tearle, impaling a fragment of shrimp. “You know why I stay in the movies. I get three times as much as I could make on the stage.”

We had just come from the set on which actor and actress had been engaged in one of those scenes that titillate the minds of adolescent gogglers.

“That was an easy scene,” commented Tearle. “I used my No. 12 expression all the way through. I call it my No. 12. It’s really only my No. 2. I only have three, you know. But when the director sings out a high number it makes the Iowa visitors standing around marvel.

“‘Director: Now Tearle, your No. 12. Ah — Throw in a little of No. 28, please. Fine — ah! A touch of 32 now!’”

“‘Lan’ sakes!’ they think, ‘that actor’s got thirty-two expressions!’”

Of course this was just fooling. But it expressed something of what Tearle thinks about the realities of cinema acting.

He does not believe that pictures will be better until some fresh intelligence is admitted.

“They’ve come to a stone wall,” he said. “The limit of pictures has been reached because the limit of the intelligence of producers has been reached. They have the money, they are in control, and they don’t want any new ideas — any fresh intelligence.”

“The other day,” said Tearle, “I suggested Tolstoy’s Resurrection to a movie producer. He told me the boom on costume stuff was over. When I tried to explain that the costumes were modern Russian he said, ‘How much money are you worth?’

“‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘I’m just an actor.’

“‘Well, I’ve made thirty million dollars in pictures. Do you think you can tell me how to run my business?’”

Equally practical, but possessing in addition a great deal more of what we call temperament for lack of a better name, is Anna Q. Nilsson, who plays opposite Tearle in the role of Fanny von Berg. Rehfeld describes her well.

“She is a high-strung wire,” said the director. “Just a touch and she vibrates.”

Anna Q. came to America from her native Sweden when she, was still a schoolgirl. Before she came she had heard her father — the superintendent of a beet-sugar factory — and her other relatives talk about the New World. There was just one theme running through their conversation — money. America was the land where great fortunes could be made easily. That was the sole reason for anybody going to America. That was America.

Anna came over for a visit with relatives. She was to get back in time to reenter school that fall.

“I was supposed to stay a month in New York,” she told me. “At the end of that time my relatives tried to send me home. I packed my little grip and skipped. And I was careful not to let them know where to find me.

“In those days I was absolutely without fear. Youth is that way. Innocence or ignorance, whichever you wish to call it. I thought nothing of setting out to battle New York alone. And just for that reason, no doubt, I made a success of it.

“My first job was posing for a photographer. The next logical step was the movies. I went to work for the Kalem Company in 1911.”

Anna told me some of her early adventures in the movies. If these are the days of art for art’s sake, those were the days of stunts for the sake of stunting. Anna was a favorite because she had nerve. Whenever they wanted somebody to drive a locomotive over a precipice or jump from a bridge and nobody else would do it, they’d say, “Let’s give it to Anna!”

Kurt Rehfeld is like Erich von Stroheim inasmuch as they are both realists; inasmuch as both will resign their jobs rather than violate a truth. But here the resemblance ends. Yon Stroheim, whom I esteem the greater artist, has a philosophy of despair. Rehfeld, who, I predict, will become the more popular, has just as sincere a philosophy of optimism. And it is for this reason that I see him on the celluloid heights of future greatness. When sincerity is wedded to optimism the recipe is sure-fire.

And this, also, is the stuff that causes Moe Fishbin, proprietor of the Jewel Theater, to write in to the trade sheets somewhat as follows:

Picture: Viennese Medley.
Weather: All right.
Business: Swell.
Remarks: Say give us some more of this Rehfelds pichters, our audyence don’t get all that europeen stuff but where Anna Q. breaks down and shows she done it because she loved him there ain’t a dry eye in the theayter.