Mario Adorf in ‘Herr Puntilla und sein Knecht Matti’
Not everyone who looks like a tzadik is one. And for that matter, not every actor portraying the scoundrel is a bad guy either. Take Mario Adorf for example. Germany’s most popular film and television star began his film career playing a villain. It was a role he was predestined for. Physically agile and a skilled boxer, Adorf was deemed “strong as an ox” by the Jewish film producer Artur Brauner with whom he sometimes arm-wrestled.
Key to Adorf’s role was his well-rehearsed evil stare, shot out of coal-black eyes. It could strike fear into the hearts of even the most hardened gunmen or jaded moviegoers. As the bad guy par excellence of German cinema and theater since the 1950s, Adorf made life difficult for his on-screen enemies and earned a pretty penny doing it. A wider audience got to know him through his portrayals of the merciless gang leader Santer in numerous Westerns based on novels by the German author Karl May. The German directors reinforced old Hollywood stereotypes with their casting: Santer, the baddie, was portrayed by the German Adorf, the honorable trapper Old Shatterhand was played by the American actor Lex Barker, and the Frenchman Pierre Brice took up the role of the noble Indian Winnetou.
The good, the bad and Mario Adorf
And so Mario Adorf cemented his image as a villain in Germany and Europe for the decades that followed. Few people knew or cared that in his private life this on-screen devil was actually a gentle man who, forgoing any machismo his father, a Catholic physician from Sicily, might have wanted to see, preferred to stay with his mother who spoiled him at least as much as any yiddishe mame. His German audience and directors certainly did not want to know about this side of him. This is not true of his colleagues, however. They cherished Adorf as a helpful, understanding person who was always willing to listen to their troubles and support them however he could.
It was not until he was sixty, his hair shot through with streaks of white, that he conquered the hearts of the German public with his portrayal of the clever old businessman Bellheim. A few years later, he once again proved as the “shadow man” (Schattenmann), an unscrupulous mobster from the Frankfurt underworld, that he could still play the villain as well as anyone.
I first got to know Mario Adorf twelve years ago. I had been asked by a film production company to read through the script for Epstein’s Night, a movie depicting a revenge campaign undertaken by elderly concentration camp survivors. Unlike the other actors, Mario Adorf invited me to his hotel suite and asked for my opinion. I thought the plot was implausible and rushed. The actor thanked me for my candor and confided “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of too.” We have felt a connection ever since. In the end, the script went unrevised and the motion picture was a flop despite the able performances delivered by Adorf and his colleague Bruno Ganz.
Karl Marx or Venice’s Shylock?
Germany’s most popular film and television star, Mario Adorf
Some years later, I invited him to participate in a panel discussion. Fully aware that he could attract enormous fees thanks to his popularity, I approached him cautiously. “If you are the moderator, then I won’t ask for a cent,” he told me. Needless to say, he gave a great performance before a large and enthusiastic crowd. After the show, we went out for dinner and drinks. He told Jewish jokes until very late and I learned that he most wanted to portray an aging Karl Marx. Alas, that role does not fit well with the wise old man or the chilling gangster.
I think it would be much more fitting for Adorf to play Shylock, the ambitious moneylender to Antonio in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The perfidy of others transforms him into a monster who his enemies want to destroy now that he has become such an ogre. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” he calls in despair to remind them of his humanity. This is Shakespeare’s answer to the anti-Semitic cliché of the villainous Jew.
This role is not on the Adorf’s horizon at the moment. His most recent role was in the film The Last Mentsch (Der Letzte Mentsch). A fitting title!