Curt Siodmak

by Hans J. Wollstein film biography
The younger brother of director Robert Siodmak, Dresden-born author, screenwriter, and director Curt Siodmak broke into the film business as an extra in Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis (1926). Siodmak was a newspaper reporter at the time and was mainly interested in writing a story about Lang and his film. But screen work appealed to Siodmak's sense of adventure and in 1929, he and Billy Wilder co-wrote Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) directed by brother Robert and the young Edgar C. Ulmer. Curt Siodmak enjoyed some success with the German science fiction thriller F.P. 1 Antwortet Nicht (Platform 1 Does Not Answer), but like so many of his contemporaries, he was forced to flee Nazi Germany in favor of first Great Britain and then Hollywood, where he finally arrived in 1937. Through a friend, German expatriate director Joe May, Siodmak landed with Universal where he wrote or co-wrote screenplays for a series of genre films that included The Invisible Man Returns (1940), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1942), the intelligent Son of Dracula (1942), and I Walked With a Zombie (1944). The last, written for producer Val Lewton, contains perhaps Siodmak's most haunting work and remains a classic of the horror genre. In 1942, Siodmak published the influential science fiction novel Donovan's Brain in which a scientist manages to keep alive the brain of a tyrannical industrialist with unexpected and horrifying results. Based in part on Siodmak's screenplay for Black Friday (1940) in which benign college professor Boris Karloff turns into a vicious gangster after a brain transplant, Donovan's Brain itself was filmed in 1944 as The Monster and the Lady, in 1953 under its original title, and in England in 1965 as simply The Brain. In the 1950s, Siodmak began a brief directorial career that included the dreadful but still eminently watchable voodoo "epic" The Bride of the Gorilla (1951); The Magnetic Monster (1953), which had special effects "borrowed" from the 1934 German Gold; and The Devil's Messenger (1961) starring Lon Chaney Jr. The last was made on nearly no budget at all and was mostly recycled footage from a 1950s Swedish television series No. 13 Demon Street. Siodmak returned to Europe in the 1960s, but his work there was mediocre at best. His last assignment as a director was the German Liebesspiel im Schnee (1967) released in America in 1969 as Ski Fever and mainly of interest for the appearances of Dean Martin's daughter Claudia and European television stars Vivi Bach and Dietmar Schoenherr.

filmography snapshot

1930
1935
1940
1945
1950
1955
1960
1965
Year Title Rating    
1929 Mascottchen

Screenwriter

1930 The Shot in The Talker Studio

Screen Story

1931 Der Mann, Der Seinen Moerder Sucht

Screenwriter

1931 Le Bal

Screenwriter

1933 F.P. 1 Antwortet Nicht

Screen Story

1933 F.P.1

Screenwriter

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1933 Marion, das Gehoert Sich Nicht

Screen Story

1934 Girls Will Be Boys

Screen Story, Screenwriter

1935 It's a Bet

Screenwriter

1935 Transatlantic Tunnel

Screenwriter

1937 Non-Stop New York

Screenwriter

1938 Her Jungle Love

Screen Story

1938 The Loves of Madame Dubarry

Screenwriter

1940 Black Friday

Screenwriter

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1940 The Ape

Screenwriter

1940 The Invisible Man Returns

Screenwriter

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1940 The Invisible Woman

Screen Story

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1941 Aloma of the South Seas

Screenwriter

1941 Pacific Blackout

Screen Story

1941 The Wolf Man

Screenwriter

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1942 Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman

Screenwriter

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1942 Invisible Agent

Screenwriter

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1942 London Blackout Murders

Screenwriter

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1943 False Faces

Screenwriter

1943 I Walked with a Zombie

Screenwriter

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1943 Son of Dracula

Screen Story

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1943 The Mantrap

Screenwriter

1943 The Purple V

Screenwriter

1944 House of Frankenstein

Screenwriter

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1944 The Climax

Screenwriter

1944 The Lady and the Monster

Screen Story

1945 Frisco Sal

Screenwriter

1945 Shady Lady

Screenwriter

1946 The Beast with Five Fingers

Screenwriter

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1946 The Return of Monte Cristo

Screen Story

1948 Berlin Express

Screen Story

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1949 Tarzan's Magic Fountain

Screenwriter

1950 Four Days Leave

Screenwriter

1951 Bride of the Gorilla

Screenwriter, Director

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1953 Donovan's Brain

Screen Story

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1953 The Magnetic Monster

Director, Screenwriter

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1954 Riders to the Stars

Screenwriter

1954 Tales of Frankenstein

Director

1955 Creature with the Atom Brain

Screenwriter

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1956 Curucu, Beast of the Amazon

Screenwriter, Director

1956 Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

Screen Story

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1957 Love Slaves of the Amazons

Director, Screenwriter, Producer

1962 Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace

Screenwriter

1962 The Brain

Screen Story

1962 The Devil's Messenger

Director

1964 Vengeance

Screen Story

1965 Ski Fever

Screenwriter, Director

1998 Universal Horror

Participant

2001 Ritual

From Screenplay by

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2010 The Wolfman

From Screenplay by

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