Fährmann Maria
| Fährmann Maria | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Frank Wisbar |
| Produced by | Eberhard Schmidt |
| Written by | |
| Starring |
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| Music by | Herbert Windt |
| Cinematography | Franz Weihmayr |
| Edited by | Lena Neumann |
| Distributed by | Pallas Film (II) |
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Release date
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Running time
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83 min. |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
Fährmann Maria (translates to Ferryman Maria) is a 1936 German horror/occult film by Frank Wisbar from the year 1936. After the old ferryman of a small village dies while transporting The Stranger, a homeless woman arrives and takes over his duties. The next evening, a wounded man appears and asks to be ferried across. She does more, hiding him from pursuers and nursing him back to health. Gradually, she falls in love.
But he was not meant to live, and soon The Stranger appears on the shore. This is, she quickly realizes, Death itself, and she refuses to conduct him across. The drifter, Mary, instead seeks to outwit the Grim Reaper when he then appears in the village. She hides in, naturally, a church, before leading him into the marsh she now knows. He sinks while she knows where solid ground is. As was the theme with supernatural German films of the period, such as Der Student Von Prag and Der Mude Tod by Fritz Lang, love won out over supernatural forces.
It arrived in the United States in 1938, distributed in the United States by Casino Film Exchange.
The interior scenes were shot in Berlin studios from August to October in 1935 while the outdoor scenes were filmed in Lower Saxony (the Hamburg, Bremen and Hanover areas) near a farm called Tütsberg in the village of Heber, and also near Soltau.
The film premiered at the Bernward Light Games in Hildesheim on January 7, 1936.
The National Socialists had changed film inspection standards in 1934 (originally to increase the quality of film production by creating censorship standards) to also cover film awards, and as a result movies would be awarded extra consideration, and lower taxes, if they were deemed state-politically and artistically particularly valuable. Though Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister for the Third Reich, dismissed it as "an experiment, but not a good one", the film still received an award for artistic value.
After Wisbar emigrated from Germany to the U.S. following the November pogroms of 1938 (Kristallnacht) he worked odd jobs in cinema and then Fährmann Maria was remade as Strangler of the Swamp in 1945. The remake was far more horrific, in tune with attempts to revive the horror genre in the 1940s, than the atmospheric original.
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