Felix Bressart Trailers
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Felix Bressart (March 2, 1892 – March 17, 1949) was a German-American actor of stage and screen.
Felix Bressart (pronounced "BRESS-ert") was born in East Prussia, Germany (now part of Russia) and was already a very experienced stage actor when he had his film debut in 1928. He started off as a supporting actor, e.g. as the Bailiff in the box-office hit Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930), but had soon established himself in leading roles of minor movies. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Jewish-born Bressart had to leave Germany and continued his career in German-speaking movies in Austria, where Jewish artists were still relatively safe. After no fewer than 30 films in eight years, he emigrated to the United States.
One of Bressart's former European colleagues was Joe Pasternak, now a successful Hollywood producer. Bressart's first American film was Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939), a vehicle for Universal Pictures' top attraction, Deanna Durbin. Pasternak also selected the reliable Bressart to perform in a screen test opposite Pasternak's newest discovery, Gloria Jean. The influential German community in Hollywood helped to establish Bressart in America, as his earliest American movies were directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Henry Koster, and Wilhelm Thiele (director of Die Drei von der Tankstelle).
Bressart scored a great success in Lubitsch's Ninotchka, produced at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM signed Bressart to a studio contract in 1939. Most of his MGM work consisted of featured roles in major films like Edison, the Man.
He combined his mildly inflected East European accent with a soft-spoken delivery to create kindly, friendly characters, as in Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, in which he sensitively recites Shylock's famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech from The Merchant of Venice. Lubitsch also directed Bressart to similar effect in The Shop Around the Corner.
Bressart soon became a popular character actor in films like Blossoms in the Dust (1941), The Seventh Cross (1944), and Without Love (1945). Perhaps his largest role was in RKO Radio Pictures' "B" musical comedy Ding Dong Williams, filmed in 1945. Bressart, billed third, played the bemused supervisor of a movie studio's music department, and appeared in formal wear to conduct Chopin's "Fantasie Impromptu."
After almost 40 Hollywood pictures, Felix Bressart suddenly died of leukemia at the age of 57. His last film was My Friend Irma (1949), the movie version of a popular radio show. Bressart died during production, forcing the producers to finish the film with Hans Conried. In the final film, Conried speaks throughout, but Bressart is still seen in the long shots.
Most Popular Felix Bressart Trailers
Total trailers found: 63
21 May 1936
Two twin brothers working in a Vienna fair and who are both gifted for singing meet different luck both in love and their careers.
18 August 1932
Gottfried Jonathan, a small civil servant, lives as a lodger and is roommates with the blonde Käthe.
07 June 1945
A young couple's accident could make them rich, if they can evade a Nazi spy ring.
11 October 1940
Magazine editor Margot Merrick pretends to be married in order to avoid advances from male colleagues.
21 September 1942
Marine James Murfin, is unaware of Icelandic customs. When he flirts with Katina her Icelandic family take his actions as a proposal of marriage to Katina.
05 December 1944
Peter and Delilah are a married couple running a roadside café in Nevada. Their stable partnership turns rocky, though, with the arrival of the sultry Sally, a waitress who catches Peter's wandering eye.
06 September 1946
Steve, revue producer in Rio de Janeiro, is still in love with his ex-wife Vicki, his star Linda is in love with Steve and Tito is in love with Linda.
23 September 1946
A WWII tale of romance that begins during New Orlean's "Mardi Gras" celebration when a soldier and a girl meet and fall in love.
16 October 1941
A man's marriage suffers when he pretends to be a bachelor while promoting "his" best-selling book about married life (actually written by an eccentric professor) in order to pay off a debt to a gangster.
08 November 1940
A woman runs away with her music teacher in order to escape an arranged marriage, but they struggle to make ends meet.
18 December 1941
Kathleen is a twelve-year-old who lives in a big house with a nanny, a butler, maids, no mother and a father who is working most of the time.
26 May 1939
A carefree playboy with an aversion to marriage falls for a lass he meets in the French Alps.
13 August 1930
A meek clerk can no longer abide the nastiness of his boarding house proprietress and takes drastic action.
12 January 1940
Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realising that they are falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.
29 December 1939
Swanee River is a 1940 American biopic about Stephen Foster, a songwriter from Pittsburgh who falls in love with the South, marries a Southern girl, then is accused of sympathizing when the Civil War breaks out.
25 April 1941
Discovery by Flo Ziegfeld changes a girl's life but not necessarily for the better, as three beautiful women find out when they join the spectacle on Broadway: Susan, the singer who must leave behind her ageing vaudevillian father; vulnerable Sheila, the working girl pursued both by a millionaire and by her loyal boyfriend from Flatbush; and the mysterious European beauty Sandra, whose concert violinist husband cannot endure the thought of their escaping from poverty by promenading her glamor in skimpy costumes.
06 March 1942
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, an acting troupe becomes embroiled in a Polish soldier's efforts to track down a German spy.
16 November 1939
A stern Russian woman sent to Paris on official business finds herself attracted to a man who represents everything she is supposed to detest.
25 December 1948
A mysterious girl inspires a struggling artist.
23 January 1942
Married sleuths (Gracie Allen, William Post Jr.) find a corpse in their closet and round up suspects.
30 September 1931
Felix Bressart, later one of the most delightful members of the Ernst Lubitsch "stock company," plays the title character in the Austrian comedy Hirsekorn Greift Ein (Hirsekorn Does Something About It).
15 April 1946
Ding Dong Williams, a clarinet player who can neither read nor write music is employed at a motion picture studio.
11 May 1934
When he is not conducting his orchestra, a talented young man invents a device to thwart car thieves.
14 August 1949
Catherine Sykes disappears after a midnight drive with Professor Andrew Gentling . When she's presumed murdered, his friend Martha convinces him that he's a prime suspect and should investigate before he's arrested.
15 August 1941
Edna marries Texan Sam Gladney, operator of a wheat mill. They have a son, who is killed when very young.
13 December 1940
An American reporter smuggling news out of Soviet Moscow is blackmailed into helping a beautiful Communist leave the country.
23 July 1942
A French diplomat who's recovered from amnesia is blackmailed over crimes he can't remember.
19 October 1948
The story of seven scholars in search of an expert to teach them about swing music. They seem to have found the perfect candidate in winsome nightclub singer Honey Swanson.
15 September 1930
Willy, Kurt and Hans are broke, so they sell their car and open a filling station. Then, they all fall in love with the same girl.
10 May 1940
In flashback, fifty years after inventing the light bulb, an 82-year-old Edison tells his story starting at age twenty-two with his arrival in New York.
26 July 1931
An American millionaire, who had always bad luck with women, bets that he can live without them for five years.
17 November 1931
At a mine on the shared edge of France and Germany, an underground explosion leads to the entrapment of a group of French miners.
24 July 1944
In Nazi Germany in 1936 seven men escape from a concentration camp. The camp commander puts up seven crosses and, as the Gestapo returns each escapee he is put to death on a cross.
01 November 1940
An American goes to pre-war Germany to find his mother and discovers her in a concentration camp. With the help of an American-born widowed countess he seeks to engineer her escape.
06 April 1940
After crooked nightclub owner murders a police informant, he blackmails his piano player to allow him to stay at his eccentric mother's boarding house.
21 May 1943
When his wife threatens him with divorce, a reporter courts her again.
31 May 1943
Two newlyweds spy on the Nazis for the British Secret Service during their honeymoon in Europe.
22 March 1945
In World War II Washington DC, scientist Pat Jamieson's assistant, Jamie Rowan, enters a loveless marriage with him.
10 November 1930
When an attractive maid in a garrison town becomes pregnant, she reveals that one of three soldiers stationed there who had been chasing after her, is responsible.
03 September 1931
Caught by Archduke Max in an embarrassing situation with Marie-Charlote, Captain Rudi is forced into marriage.
05 February 1932
An unemployed man who plays a concertina gets involved with a band of crooks and tries to frustrate a kidnapping, in this farcical caper.
10 February 1944
American conductor John Meredith and his manager, Hank Higgins, go to Russia shortly before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
27 September 1944
In 1922, a would-be classical composer gets involved with people putting on a musical revue.
24 March 1939
Three sisters who believe life is going to be easy, now that their parents are back together, until one sister falls in love with another's fiancé, and the youngest sister plays matchmaker.
28 August 1930
Mr. and Mrs. Linsemann have been happily married for a year. In their chic home, a modern villa financed by a loan and not yet fully paid off, the lady of the house intends to throw a big one-year anniversary party to please her husband.
15 October 1930
A romantic drama about a relationship between people of different social classes. The young baron, who is in love with a record shop saleswoman, is sent by his family on a diplomatic mission to Budapest, where he loses his heart to a beautiful noblewoman.
16 March 1931
The village mayor is a bigoted man: when he sees a girl from the variety show, the morality no longer applies to him.
15 December 1930
The lively Anny meets the nice Dr. Jack Braun and throws everything in his life into disarray. As Jack is in the middle of divorce proceedings against his wife Renate, his lawyer and best friend Richard doesn't like the idea of a female being in his vicinity.
01 February 1935
Operetta star Gitta Alpar plays a singer engaged for a performance at the Savoy Hotel, where she mistakes Baron von Wollheim for a waiter.
01 October 1935
A Hungarian-Austrian comedy and one of the last emigrant films made in Austria before the industry submitted to pressure from Nazi Germany and ceased to employ Jewish filmmakers.
16 January 1931
During hard times, a vivacious girl looks for an office job in the hope of landing a rich man. The director of the bank she works at flirts with her while not at first revealing his identity so she rejects him.
02 December 1946
A beautiful young concert pianist is torn between her attraction to her arrogant but brilliant maestro and her love for a farm boy she left back home.
19 December 1934
Starring Francisca Gaál in a breeches role. Dressed as a boy, a street musician gets a job pumping gas.
31 October 1934
An unemployed artist must choose between a flower seller and a Hungarian dancer and defend himself against suspicion of shoplifting.
04 July 1943
Propaganda short film depicting the rise of Nazism in Germany and how political propaganda is similarly used in the United States.
19 October 1928
An impoverished nobleman would rather chase after the local milkmaid than seek a wealthy match, to the chagrin of his family.
