After rewatching the film last night, I did a bit more research on it via Wikipedia and landed on the entry for Wolfgang Zilzer, who plays the young man that Alraune seduces in the first part of the film before “Dad” shows up… he evidently had an exceptionally long career, making his first film in 1915 and his last one in 1987; not quite as long as Curt Bois, who I believe is the film actor with the longest career, starting in 1907 and ending in 1987, but long enough.
Zilzer was born in the US but raised in Germany, became a featured player at UFA before fleeing to the US after you know who came to power, whereupon he appeared in a number of films by Ernst Lubitsch and did a number of anti-Nazi films during the war, including an obscure film called Casablanca (which also featured Curt Bois, oddly enough). One of those films was something called Enemy of Women, in which he actually starred as Joseph Goebbels, but most of them seem to have been minor, including one called The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler in which one of the main players was a fellow called George Dolenz; if you don’t know him, you may know his son. And one of his later films was Union City, the female lead of which was Debbie Harry from Blondie. Across the decades, Wolfgang Zilzer indirectly connected the world of 1960s pop with the New Wave. Even Curt Bois couldn’t claim that, I don’t think…
But the other notable thing about Wolfgang Zilzer is that he died in 1991, meaning that he was still alive when I first saw Alraune. Not only were SBS showing a film made in 1927, one of the primary supporting actors in it was still with us that night in July 1990 when they did. I wonder if he would’ve been as perplexed as I was back then about one of his old movies turning up on Australian TV like that…
