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The World Without a Mask (1934)
German action star Harry Piel accidentally invents x-ray TV in this 1934 comedy. Devoid of Piel’s trademark hair-raising stunts, the film is somewhat plodding, but co-star Kurt Vespermann pic…
Nevertheless film scholar Florentine Strzelczyk describes Piel’s pre-war output as as being located at “the crossroads between the Weimar Republic and the Naziera”, applying “the aesthetic inventory of the 1920s” while “the narratives’ economy and the solutions presented fold into the larger context of the futuristic promise of the Nazi cause”. Biograph.de writes: “ The World Without a Mask, with its intricate, complex plot and its very own mixture of Jules Verne and Aldous Huxley, is an outstanding example of the cinema of a highly questionable man whose cinematic thirst for adventure has remained unique to this day.” A practised condescension and raspy, sometimes shrill delivery further added to this image.” While he would sometimes play outright villains in serious films, more often he did a send-up of the character for comical effect: “Audiences loved him as oily swindlers, impoverished aristocrats out to marry for money, bigamists, effete movie folk or obtuse officials.
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