Helmut Dantine — Important Import (1943) 🇺🇸
He shocked his way into the mind of the American public. Out of the calm of Mrs. Miniver's garden rose a new kind of masculine menace, a menace that in "Edge Of Darkness" was to cause a clamor from intrigued movie-goers. Hard, merciless, bitter as a dose of arsenic, who was the man who played the Nazi officer? Whence did he come and what was he really like?
His name is Helmut Dantine. He came from a German concentration camp. And what he is really like is nothing you have yet seen on the screen. His eyes and skin and hair are hazel. His smile, broad and wide, is an exciting contrast to the sternness of his face. He has the manners of the old world — kisses the hands of ladies who love it — and clicks his heels to the men — who deplore it. Despite his slight build he's one of the finest athletes in Hollywood. Seldom, however, will you find him relaxed — unless you happen upon him after he's finished a fast and furious boxing session in the gym.
By nature and by the course of his turbulent life he's tense and serious, with eyes that blink nervously. For he remembers many things...
There were the five friends with whom he graduated from the University of Vienna. They made a bet as to where they would be five years hence. Already he knows where three of them are. The first died in Russia. The second was killed in Poland. The third crashed in a plane on his flight to Australia and freedom.
And Helmut? When Hitler was about to enter Austria, Dantine was hurriedly called home from his consular post in London. But before the Austrians could organize, the Nazis took over and Dantine along with his liberal-thinking friends was marched off to a concentration camp. The special form of torture devised for hem was inactivity. They were awakened at five o'clock in the morning, fifty men in one small room, and until ten at night they stood in blank despair without the release of labor, of anything to read, of even a place to walk. The older men died; the younger ones managed to hold on longer.
At the end of three months Helmut was taken from the camp and placed aboard a ship bound for America. Miracle of miracles, his uncle, vice-president of Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego, had succeeded in obtaining his release.
Upon his arrival he and his uncle decided upon a business career for him. Typically, Helmut insisted on a thorough foundation and enrolled at U.C.L.A. in business administration. But the boy from the concentration camp had a lot of thoughts in his head which didn't have anything to do with business administration.
Here was a vast and hospitable America unaware of the danger she faced in the European conqueror. How could one bring a consciousness to her of that danger? One could write — but he was not a writer. One could speak — but he was not a lecturer. Ah, but there was another kind of speaking — the vivid, dramatized spoken word of the theater. To that, people would listen.
So Helmut hied him over to the Pasadena Community Playhouse to fit himself for a new role. He traveled back and forth from Westwood in a casual jaloppy purchased with funds he earned coaching less nimble American tongues in the intricacies of French and German.
It was at the Playhouse he met "Gwennie" (as he calls Gwen Anderson) — young, ambitious, straight from the heart of America — Iowa itself. "Gwennie" had come from Des Moines determined to be an actress and a good one. She'd been attending the Playhouse two years when Helmut first appeared there. It was "Gwennie's" way of laughing at obstacles and disappointments that attracted the sober and serious Dantine. Soon he found he didn't want to walk without her. And one day they were married in a Pasadena church — Vienna and Des Moines merged into one.
They were young and poor. But they also were in love so they didn't mind too much the lack of money and comforts. They lived in a tiny Hollywood apartment and small roles for Helmut in "Escape" and "The Navy Comes Through" helped out. Then they both joined a small stock company in Del Monte, California, which Helmut directed and bit by bit the money was accumulated for Gwen's great experiment — the invasion of Broadway.
The day she left Hollywood the doom of their marriage was sealed. But of course they didn't then realize this. When Gwen was given the lead in the play "Janie" it was all over. The play went on and on. Helmut, because of his motion-picture work, was never able to spend more than a few days at a time in New York. Gwen couldn't get out to Hollywood. The breech widened. Finally Gwen revealed from New York their plans to separate. As soon as the show was over she'd go to Reno and get a divorce.
"There are two fates in every life," Helmut says philosophically. "One is inevitable — it will happen anyway. That's the Big Fate, such as the parting of Gwennie and me. There is nothing one can do about it. Then there is the Little Fate — the one we shape when we do our best to achieve success in our work and happiness in our daily lives."
He realizes that it was what he calls the Big Fate that kept him from getting the lead in "Conflict" when Bogart refused to do it. But it was Little Fate of his own creation that prompted him to make the test that was good that he was actually chosen for the lead — until Bogart decided to come back.
Like most Teutonic people Helmut still says, "Ya" for yes, and inevitably says, "things what I have" for "things that I have." And not long ago he entertained his listeners by referring to an ash blonde as a girl with "palladium" hair.
His unfamiliarity with this country frequently leads him into comical situations. Just after he had enrolled at U.C.L.A. and had acquired the customary college clothes of slacks, colorful pullover and soft hat he was driving along Sunset Boulevard one day when a gentleman on a motorcycle drove along beside him and said, "Pull over." Helmut, not quite sure whether this gentleman's uniform designated a Western Union boy or a general, was flattered. "Ya," he smiled, glancing down at his own bright pullover. "Pull over, Buddy," the man repeated. "My name is not Buddy," Dantine patiently explained. "It's Helmut."
Whereupon the gentleman closed and convinced him he wasn't interested in his sweater or his name. All he wanted to do was to give him a ticket for speeding.
"But you didn't point to your gun and scowl," Helmut insisted. "That is why I didn't know you were an officer!"
Once in "International Squadron," he had to speak the typically American line of "Give them the works." He thought about this intently and then, stepping before the camera, he shouted, "Let them have the factories."
The leading man rolled on the floor.
The change in food interests him. Our zucchini, celery, avocadoes and sweet potatoes are all new to him. He cooks his own breakfast of toast, eggs, jam and tea in his bachelor apartment and eats his lunch and dinner out.
He has ideas Nazis should be portrayed on the screen. And Hollywood recognizes the fact that Dantine, their victim, should know. It's interesting that he rates the Nazis as he knows them in this manner: The kind he portrayed in "Mrs. Miniver" are about ten percent of the Nazis as they are. His Nazi of "Edge Of Darkness" is less than ten percent of the real Nazis. His Nazi of "To The Last Man," the man who shows the mental rather than physical perversion, will be an eighty percent true Nazi. Of course, and it comes as a relief, his role in Passage To Marseilles, with Bogart, is not that of a Nazi at all but an escaped French convict. And now that the voices of fans have clamoured long enough, he'll be the romantic lead he should be in "Three Strangers."
He thinks Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in "Me And My Gal" the embodiment of all that's wonderfully American. "They express it more than anyone," he says, "in their sincerity and honesty."
Fortune, Time, Newsweek are relentlessly perused by Dantine, who already possesses his first American citizenship papers and eagerly awaits his second. "The voices of 10,000,000 boys back from Japan and Europe, the boys who fought and bled, will have something to say when they return in keeping this America the way they want it and the way some of them died to keep it," he says. He wants desperately to be a part of that America in everything.
"For, if America fails, humanity fails," he says. "This country is the hope of the world. That is why I gratefully want to become an American."
The End
He has the manners of the old world, the ideas of the new — Helmut Dantine of Warners' Passage To Marseilles.
$85.00 in War Bonds buys a Garand rifle!
$6.00 buys an anti-tank shell — Buy U. S. Bonds
Maria Montez in Universal's Cobra Woman
... the color stays on through every lipstick test
Lovely reds, glamorous reds, dramatic reds... all exclusive with Tru-Color Lipstick and all based on an original patented* color principle discovered by Max Factor Hollywood... one dollar.
U.S. Patents No. 2157667, 221 1465
Complete your make-up in color harmony with Max Factor Hollywood Powder and Rouge.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, October 1943