A German-made film version of Thomas Mann's The Confessions of Felix Krull has been making the rounds of U.S. theaters for three years, and is still playing, with "Henry Bookholt" in the lead. Few American exhibitors are aware of the promotional chance they are missing: their star—whose name meant nothing outside Germany three years ago and was more or less Anglicized* in the English credits—is Horst Buchholz, one of the biggest box-office draws of 1961.
No German performer has ever approached the popularity in U.S. motion pictures of Berlin-born Marlene Dietrich, but Buchholz may. At 27, he has starred in United Artists' recent The Magnificent Seven and is appearing in the film version of Fanny. He is now at work in Munich in Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three. A good start, but if he hopes one day to be Hollywood's most glamorous grandfather, he will first have to outgrow an unfortunate label: "The Teutonic James Dean."
Cattle Car. A capable and promising actor who reflects the caliber of his directors, he is somewhat less than animate under Joshua Logan in Fanny, but was superb in 1959's Tiger Bay under J. Lee-Thompson, who turned him into the most sympathetic heavy since Mack the Knife. He does look something like Dean, with high Slavic cheekbones and slanting Oriental eyes. The comparison was forced in 1956, when he made Die Halbstarken (literally, The Half Strong Ones, German slang for juvenile delinquents). The picture was a superb study of Germany's postwar youths who grew up trading in the black market, noised around on motorcycles, wore black leather jackets, were devoted to rock 'n' roll and idolized the late James Dean. Germany's actual Halbstarken instantly worshiped Buchholz as their hero, and pressagents tailored his biography to make him one of them.
Actually the son of a prosperous shoemaker, Buchholz is a trained and educated actor, whose boyhood was rough but hardly twisted. Born in Berlin and bombed out of his home at ten, he spent the latter part of the war in various children's evacuation camps, ultimately in Czechoslovakia. Riding in a cattle car in retreat before the advancing Russians, he survived a bombardment that destroyed the train, spent the entire summer of 1945 walking home to Berlin, dodging still trigger-happy Russian patrols and living on begged and stolen food.
White Cadillac. As a high school student back in Berlin, he began supporting his family (his father remained in a P.W. camp until 1947) by working as an extra and bit player in dozens of comic operas. By 1949 he was picking up more money dubbing foreign films into German and, at 16, began to establish a sound reputation on the Berlin stage. In 1959 he appeared on Broadway in a short-lived theater version of Colette's Chéri, in which he played the lead—the spoiled, sexually precocious son of a courtesan.