"The lady in the tutti-frutti hat" was an inspiration to wartime audiences long before she inspired Chiquita Banana. While her "Brazilian bombshell" persona embodied the tempestuousness, seductiveness, and most importantly the exoticism of Latin America for U.S. audiences, the campy stereotype that m

Classic hollywood

Vienna-born actor, writer, and director Erich Von Stroheim worked mainly in the silent film genre (only one of his films was a "talkie"), but he seemed nevertheless to make a lot of noise. As an actor in Hollywood during World War I, he was often typecast as the leering, be-monocled Prussian villain.

Epic, Germans in hollywood, Perverse, Silent film, Tense

Another talented chip off the German Expressionist block, F. W. Murnau had a penchant for horror. With "Nosferatu" (1922) he brought the first of countless Count Dracula stories to cinematic light. Murnau made his Dracula as hideous, doomed, and gloomy as later incarnations are suave, elegant, and ta

Classic hollywood, Dark, Death, Elegant, Erotic, German expressionist film, Grotesque, Primal

After Goebbels made him an offer he couldn't refuse without unpleasant repercussions, celebrated German director Fritz Lang fled the new Nazi regime rather than supervise National Socialist Party motion pictures. Lang, a member-in-good-standing of the German Gothic school of Expressionist cinema, cut

Dark, Dystopia and its discontents, Dystopic, Germans in hollywood, Machinistic, Mathematical, Urban