Since the early days of cinema, there have been sequels. Thomas Dixon Jr.—the man who wrote the book upon which The Birth of a Nation was based—attempted one when he directed his own script of The Fall of a Nation (it bombed). Universal Pictures made an industry out of sequels during the thirties and forties with films such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, and The Mummy’s Ghost. Movie sequels tapered off with the introduction of television. Why wait for a sequel to the latest Francis the Talking Mule movie, when you could have Mr. Ed once a week? During the seventies, sequels came back with a vengeance as Hollywood, bereft of ideas, found it more profitable to keep remaking its successful movies rather than take chances on new ideas.
While sequels often indicate creative timidity, this certainly doesn’t apply to Like Father, Like Son. This is as unique a movie as you are likely to see. It was made in 1986, which doesn’t mean much until you take into account that the film it follows was made in 1962. Even that wouldn’t count for much if not for the fact that the film featured the same director and virtually the same cast as the original film. The only major omissions are Walter Jupé (who played Herr Klinkhöfer) and Herwart Grosse (who played Thomas’ father), and they are only missing because both men were dead by the time the second film was made, and in the sequel, Mrs. Klinkhöfer is now a widow. Even minor characters come back with the same actors: The drunken ex-butcher is still in the pub lamenting the state of things, Walter’s date Peggy is now his wife, and the ubiquitous Fred Delmare, who played the taxi driver in the first film, shows up here as as an attendant at the hospital.
In the first film, Walter Lörke’s daughter Anne shows up to let him know that she is pregnant and planning to marry a man whose loyalty to the ideals of the state are somewhat questionable. In the second film, Anne’s daughter, Maria, nicknamed Twini, is now a 17-year-old and shows up at Walter Lörke’s apartment on Christmas to let him know that—like her mother before her—Twini too is pregnant (strictly speaking, Twini should be 24 at this point, but movie time is more elastic than real time). In the sequel, the point of conflict is not one of politics but of socio-sexual mores. Twini is indifferent to marriage and she is currently living with two men she’s had sex with. As the story progresses, the film moves seamlessly between the events in the 1962 black-and-white film and the 1986 color film. That this was possible is due, in no small part, to the fact that director Günter Reisch is also the screenwriter, but props also must be given to his film editor, Monika Schindler, whose work on this film would have garnered her an Academy Award nomination had this been a Hollywood production.
Ms. Schindler was not the editor on the first film. Her career was just getting started back in 1962. At that time, she was still working on the short “Stacheltier” films that were shown before the main features. One of her first feature films, When you Grow Up Dear Adam, had the misfortune of being banned during the 11th Plenum. This certainly didn’t help her career any, but she continued to find work and soon was one of the most sought after editors at DEFA. She is also one of the few who successfully made the jump from DEFA to the film studios of unified Germany. This alone is proof of her skill since, at the time, the western studios demonstrated a strong prejudice against the technicians from the east. She has won several awards and in 2013 was recognized by the DEFA Foundations for outstanding achievements in the film arts. She continues to work, most recently on Stephan Lacant’s Freier Fall (Free Fall).
Like Father, Like Son was the last feature film directed by Günter Reisch. Unlike Monika Schindler, Mr. Reisch would find no directing jobs in the new Germany. We discussed Günter Reisch and the main actors in the previous post, so let’s take a look at the rest of the cast this time, both new and old.
Playing Twini is the beautiful Andrea Lüdke. Ms. Lüdke got her start as a stage technician at the Theater der Altmark in Stendal. She first appeared on stage as a stand-in when an actress either flaked out or couldn’t cut it. This experience led her into acting, at first on stage and eventually in films. Like Father, Like Son was her first feature film and she holds her own against the veterans here. In July of 1989, months before the wall finally fell, Ms. Lüdke left East Germany and moved to Hamburg, where she still resides. After the Wende, Ms. Lüdke had more success than many other DEFA actors in finding acting work. She became familiar as Tanja König on four seasons Großstadtrevier, a long-running cop show about crime in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn district.
The clueless but well-intentioned “King” is played by another newcomer, Karsten Speck. Mr. Speck was a member of the comedy ensemble at Die Distel, an East Berlin Cabaret. Before the wall fell, he was one of the hosts for the Saturday night variety extravaganza, Ein Kessel Buntes (The Colorful Kettle). After the Wende, the show was taken over by ARD and Speck became the permanent host. The show ended in 1992. After that, Speck continued his career as an actor on TV in several popular TV shows, most notably, Hallo Robbie! and Barfuß ins Bett (Barefoot in Bed). In 2010 he was convicted of real estate fraud and sentenced to five years in Hakenfelde Prison in Berlin. The same prison that housed the East German officials Egon Krenz, Günter Schabowski, and Heinz Keßler after reunification.
The most amazing performance in Like Father, Like Son belongs to Mathilde Danegger, the grandmother in the first film and a great-grandmother in the second. She was already retirement age when the first movie was made, and pushing ninety during the second. Ms. Danegger was born in 1903 in Austria. She is the daughter of the well-known actor, Josef Danegger, and got her start in films in Michael Curtiz’s Labyrinth des Grauens (Labyrinth of Horror) in 1921. A dedicated communist, Ms. Danegger left Austria and emigrated to East Germany after the war. Wie die Alten sungen… was her last motion picture.
By itself, Like Father, Like Son is not a particularly original story. Most of the situations in this films had already occurred in dozens of films before it. But as a cinematic construct, there is no other film quite like it. It treads close to conceptual art in its execution, and it’s doubtful that we will see another feature film using this technique. DEFA’s uniquely insular community made it possible for all these actors to stay in the same film circles nearly thirty years later. Hollywood with its fifteen minute approach to stardom does not create the same opportunities. Kurosawa did something similar with his frequent use of Toshiro Mifune and Isao Kimura, but the screenplays rarely overlapped. Bollywood has been known to make sequels twenty years later (Aashiqui and Aashiqui 2, for example), but not with exactly the same cast and director. As a piece of cinema, Like Father , Like Son stands alone.
East German Cinema Blog 