Career
Dieterle was an actor by training. Having worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, he made his movie acting debut in Fiesco (1913). He worked steadily as an actor throughout the silent era in, among others, Der Rattenfänger von Hameln (16. Rochus diese); Die Geierwally (21, E. A. Dupont); Hintertreppe (21. Paul Leni and Leopold Jessner); Lukrezia Borgia (22, Richard Oswald); Carlos und Elisabeth (24, Oswald); Waxworks (24, Leni); Faust (26, F. W. Mumau); and Qualen der Nacht (26, Kurt Bernhardt).
In the late 1920s he worked more as a director, and by 1930 he had moved to Hollywood, originally to make German-language versions of American films. Der Tanz Geht Weiter was Those Who Dance (William Beaucline) and Die Maske Fallt, The Way of All Men (Frank Lloyd). Dieterle proved a prolific workhorse, serving Paramount, Warners, and David Selznick.
His earliest American films are rarities today, although The Last Flight has a high reputation, and he is best known for A Midsummer Night 's Dream, the biopies he made at Warners, and for the Laughton Hunchback which has an uninhibited grotesque romance. It is hard to see the Dream as anything other than Reinhardt gleefully making use of such camera technicians as Hal Mohr and Byron Haskin. Absurd but delightful, the Dream is lighter and funnier than most things Dieterle touched, though Fog Over Frisco is a fast-talking and faster-progressing Bette Davis movie.
The biopies are ponderous, Germanic works, suffering from staginess and the unrestrained histrionics of Paul Muni who, presumably, was to Dieterle’s taste. Pasteur and Zola are sententious films, pap history disguising cliché, but Juarez is more enjoyable because it goes further into exaggeration and because Bette Davis gives a truly hysterical performance that relieves Muni s Aztec impassivity in the title role. Better than the Muni celebration of impossible heroes are Edward G. Robinsons thorough immersion in the character of Reuter and Ehrlich, the man who found a cure for syphilis.
Bv the mid-1940s Dieterle was under Selznick’s wing and his sense of almost supernatural atmosphere was not unsuited to the producer’s dreamy-mystical conception of Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie—indication of how often the women's picture encourages moderate talent into abandoning caution. He also directed Jones at Paramount in Love Letters, an intriguing story of amnesia—and one of Jones’s best films, ft should be added that Dieterle directed the flamboyant saloon opening to Duel in the Suu (46, King Vidor). Rope of Sand, September Affair, Peking Express, and The Turning Point all suggest if not a late flowering, a realization that his talent was for the lavish romantic. All the sadder then that Salome is a restrained movie and Rita Hayworth a rather inhibited voluptuary.
He returned to Germany in the late 1950s, but soon retired.