2 - New Movies and Neue Menschen: From Red Vienna to “Anatol on the Missouri”

Summary

IN SPITE OF RESISTANCE from her family and others, Ann Tizia Leitich chose to stay in New York City and continued to live, as she explained it to them, “nach meinem eigenen Schädel” (on my own stubborn terms). After working her way through various office jobs as a stenographer and a secretary, and after launching her intercontinental journalistic career, Leitich landed a job in the New York-based scenario department of Metro-Goldwyn film studios. Leitich's new job with Metro-Goldwyn not only gave her rare insight into the intricate workings of the American film industry but also into the relationship between Americans and the films that they consumed with such voracity. Between 1924 and 1932, Leitich wrote twenty-two film reviews and mentioned several others films in her discussions of America. She wrote about many American films that would be exported and shown in Europe (including Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command and the now-lost 1928 version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, directed by Mal St. Clair), as well as German films that were shown in America such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis. In her very first film review in the Neue Freie Presse titled “Die Affären des Anatol am Missouri” (The Affairs of Anatol on the Missouri), Leitich harks back to her first months in Iowa when she went to see Cecil B. DeMille's American film adaptation of Anatol, Arthur Schnitzler's mannered Viennese drama. In her review, she tells her reader how she bought a ticket, walked into the theater, and hoped to be taken back to the ballrooms and literary circles of her youth:

Anatol! Unser Wiener Anatol, hier in der Farmerstadt am Missouri, denn hier steht es in schreienden Lettern: Cecil de Milles neueste und großartigste Produktion nach einem Stück von Schnitzler. Man glaubt den Augen kaum und man kauft ein Ticket um 35 Cent und segnet die Kinematographie, die einem den Altvertrauten aus der Heimat, den man von Sophiensaalbällen und den Jours der Frau Hofrat so gut kannte, hier in die Prärie herzaubert. Man hat sich natürlich getäuscht. Es ist gar nicht Anatol.

[Anatol! Our Viennese Anatol, here in a farm town on the Missouri River. There it is in garish letters: Cecil DeMille's newest and greatest production, based on the play by Schnitzler.