| DADDY NOSTALGIE : Buchholz & Hacker's 'Horst Buchholz... My Papa' |
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HORST BUCHHOLZ, ONE OF 'THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN,' DIES AT 69 Tuesday, March 4, 2003 Posted: 4:39 AM EST (0939 GMT)
Buchholz, who was recovering from a broken thighbone, died in intensive care at the Charite hospital, spokeswoman Kerstin Ullrich said. Dubbed "the James Dean of German films" for the rebellious teens he played in the late 1950s, Buchholz moved to the United States and scored his first Hollywood hit with a role in "The Magnificent Seven," the 1960 western with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and James Coburn. The next year, director Billy Wilder cast him alongside James Cagney in "One, Two, Three." Set around the building of the Berlin Wall, the biting comedy features Cagney as a Coca-Cola executive who learns his boss' daughter has secretly married a communist, played by Buchholz. He also made movies in Britain, Spain, Italy and France, and played a Nazi concentration camp doctor in Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning 1997 film "Life is Beautiful." Born December 4, 1933, in Berlin's working-class Prenzlauer Berg district, the shoemaker's son survived World War II in the countryside where Nazi officials sent children to protect them from Allied bombing raids on the capital. Buchholz landed his first stage role at 15 in a Berlin theater version of the German children's classic "Emil and the Detectives." His Broadway debut came in 1959 in "Cherie." He is survived by his wife, Myriam Bru, and two children. Funeral arrangements were pending. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anyone seeking an informative survey of German movie-star Horst Buchholz's career will glean as much basic information from the brief Associated Press obituary reproduced above as they will from Horst Buchholz... My Papa, a feature-length documentary by his actor/director son Christopher (working with Sandra Hacker). Despite being mentioned in the AP headline, there is actually not a single reference in the film to what remains arguably Buchholz Sr's most famous screen appearance, in John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven (1960). Nor is it mentioned that he won Best Actor at Cannes in 1955 for Heaven without Stars, propelling him towards an international career. There are also none of the talking-heads one might expect from a documentary of this nature: Buchholz's directors, fellow actors, film critics and/or social commentators to put his career into context. All of this can perhaps wait for another day, for another project devised and executed by people less intimately acquainted with the subject. Because as the title suggests, Horst Buchholz... My Papa is primarily an intimate family chronicle - one made by, and to a large extent for, those left behind following the star's death in 2003: Christopher Buchholz (pronounced 'Boo-holts'), his sister Beatrice (now living in LA as a Sikh and preferring to be known as Simran Kaur Khalsa), and their mother Myriam Bru Buchholz, who had her own career as an actress and more recently as a successful agent. Each of the surviving Buchholzes have significant screen time here, though it's Horst himself who is, of course the real focus: he was never the most forthcoming talker, but was extensively interviewed by Christopher over what appear to be several months just before his sudden death, and we also see him in his vigorous prime via a range of clips (none of them labelled unfortunately) - including several excerpts from Roberto Benigni's Oscar-laden Life is Beautiful in which Buchholz played the concentration-camp doctor. Christopher also makes copious use of his mother's private collection of 8mm home movies, nimbly integrating these with newsreel footage of Horst on the glamorous public stage at Cannes, Berlin and the like. While clearly made with affection and love as an elegaic tribute to a recently-departed family member, Horst Buchholz... My Papa is certainly not a hagiography: Buchholz Sr is presented very much 'warts and all', and although the overriding tone is a warm one, he's often presented in a less than flattering light. His shortcomings both as a father and as a husband are presented in uncomfortable detail, Christopher probing his mother to the (tearful) limits of her candour on the subjects of Horst's infidelities and confused sexuality: as she herself puts it, she's only opening up for the camera because Christopher is her own son, "otherwise I never would have talked." Christopher is equally persistent with Horst, never the most forthcoming of interviewees, tackling one particular evasion with a blunt "Why are you bullshitting?" And despite Horst's many achievements, there's a strong sense that this was a career which could have been much more successful - as Myriam put it, he had so much talent that he "never had to work hard." Buchholz's merits as an actor aren't held up to much scrutiny here, but he clearly impressed many notable filmmakers: he turned down some remarkable opportunities (West Side Story) and several works which are firmly established in the cinema pantheon, most notably Visconti's The Leopard - the latter due to an especially unfortunate misunderstanding involving a photo of the lissom Horst in his swimming trunks. His wife recounts how, her patience finally exhausted, she effectively bullied him into taking a role in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire - an entertaining anecdote, but one that really should have been illustrated by a clip of the film itself. There are numerous such omissions, which makes you notice the material that is included but could have been profitably trimmed - for example, sequences showing Christopher padding around his recently-deceased father's now-empty old apartment feel like exactly that: padding. And Buchholz the director isn't averse to cliche, both in terms of how he marshals the clips and scores them with familiar-sounding orchestral muzak. But these are minor quibbles: Horst Buchholz... My Papa is on the whole much more than merely an exercise self-help for the bereaved: it's an engrossing and illuminating study of family relationships and also a moving memento mori. And it would make an unbeatable double-bill partner for another current documentary about a very different, equally prickly father-and-son relationship, Mark Wexler's Tell Them Who You Are. Neil Young 27th November, 2005 HORST BUCHHOLZ... MY PAPA : [6/10] : Horst Buchholz... Mein Papa : Germany 2005 : Christopher BUCHHOLZ & Sandra HACKER : 92 mins (timed) seen on VHS at home in Sunderland (UK), 26th November 2005 - with thanks to Christopher Buchholz NB: Horst Buchholz... My Papa won the 2005 Willhelm Dieterle Film Prize for best documentary in Germany and the Gold Plaque award at the Chicago Television hugo Award for best Historical/ Biographical Documentary. |
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