He wanted to build a second Hollywood in Prague. But he cared so much about success and fame that he married them to the Nazis. Secrets of celebrities
02/05/2022
Photo: Courtesy of GENI
Description: Screenplay, director and film entrepreneur Václav Binovec
PHOTO / VIDEO The somewhat gangster nickname Willy Bronx really suited him, he pursued his goal purposefully and sometimes hard. During the First Republic, he became a business shark, and he did not shy away from cooperating with the Nazis. But after the war came the settlement.
He can certainly not be denied a significant contribution to the development of our cinematography. The well-known screenwriter, director and businessman has made almost fifty films, which is based on six screenplays and has even starred in five films. After the liberation, however, there was a harsh show, and a number of filmmakers and their stars were accused of collaborating. In the end, not only were they convicted, but the verdict was never changed, only two gentlemen. Čeněk Šlégl, whose career and destiny I wrote about HERE AND HEREand one of the most prominent directors of the war era, Václav Binovec.
Václav Binovec and Suzanne Marwille in 1918 in the drama A Passion Wins; photo courtesy of the National Film Archive
Wandering for the film
He was born on September 12, 1892 as the first-born son of a well-known druggist from Prague’s Na Poříčí Street, and the company originally trained as a druggist in his father’s office. However, he also managed to graduate from the Karlín high school, in the years 1910-1911 he served in the Austro-Hungarian army as a one-year volunteer. And then he set out for his dream for the first time. He had been an art lover since childhood, and when the film began to flourish, he would not let him sleep. He therefore made full use of his extraordinary talent for languages and in the years 1911-1912 traveled around Europe and gathered information and experience about the new entertainment industry in film studios. For a time, he even followed them all the way to the United States. After that, he started studying at the Faculty of Pharmacy of Charles University, but his first fate was immediately mixed with the First World War.
Willy Bronx was born
In 1916 he had to enlist in the front, gradually working his way up to the rank of lieutenant. In 1917, however, he suffered severe head injuries, after which he was recognized as 100% disabled. Immediately after the end of the war, he founded his own studios, the production and distribution company Wetebfilm in Prague in 1918 under the pseudonym W. (Willy) T. Bronx. He imported films from the Soviet Union, directed and produced several films a year, mostly adventurous, romantic and melodramatic stories based on foreign models, comedies and adaptations of literary works. However, he sometimes reached for the original theme, for example for the drama from 1920 Flames of Life she wrote the screenplay Zorka Janovská and the author of the story The Girl from Podskalí was actress Marta Schöllerová two years later.
Pepina Rejholcová:
Star Suzanne
At that time, she was already performing under the pseudonym Suzanne Marwille, who invented Binovec for her, and thanks to his films, she became the most famous star of Czech film of the silent era. He appeared at the Vienna Theater when she was still married to Gustav Schullenbauer, with whom she had a daughter, Marta. Although she was not very talented or did not have an acting education, she had sex appeal and a passion for giving. She was Binovec’s life companion for several years, but in 1925, after her success in Martin Frič’s directorial debut, Father Vojtěch broke up. In 1926, she gave birth to her second daughter, Eva, and she probably did not know whether she was Binovec or Frič, from whom she married two years later.
Bet and single card
He invested all his family property in his Binovec company. In addition to his own production and production, he also ran a film school and a film rental shop. But the film world was much more financially demanding than it could. In the mid-twenties, he even sold his Na Poříčí business for his business after his father’s death, because his shoes were already starting to flow, and eventually Wetebfilm disappeared anyway. He returned as a director with the advent of sound film, starting again in 1932 with the musical comedy Pepina Rejholcová, for which he served as a model for the popular comic of František Voborský. The stories of his character began to be published in 1929 in the magazine Rozkvět, and Voborský also wrote a number of songs for his Pepina.
(Continued on Wednesday, May 4)
(sources: Wikipedia, National Film Archive, CSFD, Czech Film, FDB, Stanislav Motl: Clouds over Barrandov, Czech Television)
Entered by: Adina Janovská