A weekly feature in which my four-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier.
Was it this weekend’s 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht that caused Charlie to choose actor Kurt Kreuger’s star yesterday on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Kristallnacht, the “Night of the Broken Glass,” occurred in Germany and parts of Austria on November 9 and 10, 1938, and consisted of a series of widespread attacks on Jews by the German populace (spurred on by Nazi SA henchmen). Thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues were destroyed and tens of thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Historians consider Kristallnacht to be the official beginning of the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” So what does that have to do with Charlie’s honoree? German-born Kurt Kreuger, who was raised in Switzerland, was certainly no Nazi, but because of his background and appearance, he became the most popular go-to guy in Hollywood any time someone needed a goose-stepping officer of the Third Reich.
When Charlie first landed on Kreuger, the name was familiar to me because of a poster I own for the final film Ingrid Bergman made during her tumultuous marriage to Italian director Robert Rossellini. In Fear, released in 1954, Kreuger played Bergman’s German ex-lover, involved in a blackmail scheme against her tortured character. Fear was Rossellini’s second look at Germany’s post-war reconstruction and was a grueling but fascinating film whose reputation has grown since its initial release. The film was recently restored and shown on broadcast television for the first time on Turner Classic Movies.
Kurt Kreuger started his film career 15 years earlier in Edward Dmytryk’s Mystery Sea Raider and went on to play a range of random Heil Hitler-ing Nazis until he made a name for himself in Zoltan Korda’s Sahara with Humphrey Bogart. In later years, Kreuger talked about his frightening death scene in that film at the hands of a Sudanese soldier named Tambul (played by Rex Ingram):
I was running across the dunes when Tambul jumped on top of me and pressed my head into the sand to suffocate me. Only Zoltan forgot to yell “Cut!” and Ingram was so emotionally caught up in the scene that he kept pressing my face harder and harder. Finally, I went unconscious! Nobody knew this. Even the crew was transfixed, watching this dramatic “killing.” If Zoltan hadn’t finally said “Cut” as an afterthought, it would have been all over for me!
Kreuger continued playing Nazis through the 1940s in films such as The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler and The Hilter Gang, and even appeared as an uncredited German U-Boat sailor in Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck. One of my favorite of Kreuger’s films was Preston Sturges’ 1948 comedy Unfaithfully Yours in which he drives jealous symphony conductor Rex Harrison nuts by shamelessly flirting with Linda Darnell, Harrison’s wife in the film. Kreuger also gave nice performances in Henry Hathaway’s noir classic The Dark Corner starring Lucille Ball and Clifton Webb as well as Robert Wise’s directorial debut, Mademoiselle Fifi, with Simone Simon. Despite the number of swastika armbands he sported on film, the handsome Kreuger was the third most requested male pin-up at 20th Century Fox for several years, just after Tyrone Power and John Payne. The actor became an American citizen in 1944 and didn’t seem to suffer any repercussions for his frequent Nazi roles. “I’ve never very much considered myself a German,” he said at the time. After his final movie appearance in Roger Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1967, he guest-starred on several TV series including Perry Mason, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Wonder Woman. Kurt Kreuger died on July 12, 2006 at the age of 89.