Curt Siodmak Filmography

Universal Horror

Actors: Kenneth Branagh, Forrest J. Ackerman, Turhan Bey, Ray Bradbury, Jim Curtis

Synopsis: Assembled by film historian Kevin Brownlow and narrated by actor Kenneth Branagh, this 90-minute special celebrates the classic horror films that emanated from Hollywood's Universal Studios. Beginning with such silent classics as The Phantom of the Opera and The Cat and the Canary, Universal went Read More

Ski Fever

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Martin Milner, Claudia Martin, Vivi Bach, Dietmar Schoenherr, Toni Sailer

Synopsis: The beautiful slopes of the Austrian Alps provide the setting for this lively romantic comedy that centers on an American music student who earns money by working as a ski instructor at a popular resort. He is dismayed to learn that part of his job involves entertaining certain guests after hours. Read More

Vengeance

Crew: Screen Story

Synopsis: Vengeance is a low-key American "B" western with a largely unknown cast. William Thourlby plays ex-Confederate officer, who seeks revenge for his brother's death. Only after much blood is shed does Thourlby discover that the man he seeks is not the genuine culprit. Wrestlers Tiger Joe Marsh and Read More

Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Christopher Lee

Synopsis: Holmes and Watson are again after Moriarty but this time Scotland Yard for some reason does not even suspect that he's the one who wants to get the necklace stolen from Cleopatra's tomb. Doesn't really hold together like most of the Holmes/Watson movies and is a rather odd interpretation of Sir Read More

The Devil's Messenger

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Satan sends his newest most seductive minion back to the earthly plane to search for new recruits in this horror compilation from an unsold Swedish television series No. 13 Demon Street that stars Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Devil. Each of the beautiful hellcat's victims dies in interesting ways Read More

The Brain

Crew: Screen Story

Synopsis: This third film version of the Curt Siodmak scare piece Donovan's Brain stars Peter Van Eyck as an overly dedicated scientist. When a powerful and ruthless financier dies in a plane crash, Van Eyck keeps the tycoon's brain alive in his laboratory. Gradually, the brain takes over the doctor's mind Read More

Love Slaves of the Amazons

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Don Taylor, Gianna Segale, Eduardo Ciannelli, Harvey Chalk, John Herbert

Synopsis: You knew what you were in for when you saw the title, so don't grouse. Don Taylor stars as a doctor/adventurer who ventures into the South America jungle with explorer Eduardo Cianelli. Taylor and Cianelli stumble upon a race of green-skinned Amazon women, all of whom look suspiciously like Read More

Curucu, Beast of the Amazon

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: John Bromfield, Beverly Garland, Tom Payne, Harvey Chalk, Sergio de Oliveira

Synopsis: In this jungle adventure, two explorers travel deep within the mysterious, dangerous Amazon in search of medicinal herbs, used for head-shrinking by the natives, that could used in the treatment of cancer patients. During their arduous trek, the two slowly fall in love. Meanwhile a plantation Read More

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Hugh Marlowe, Joan Taylor, Donald Curtis, Morris Ankrum, John Zaremba

Synopsis: Anyone who's seen the 1996 science-fiction lampoon Mars Attacks may have trouble watching Earth vs. the Flying Saucers with a straight face. Hugh Marlowe plays scientist Russell Marvin, who is on-hand when an alien spacecraft lands on earth. The saucermen at first insist that they've come in Read More

Creature with the Atom Brain

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Gregory Gaye, Richard Denning, Angela Stevens, S. John Launer, Michael Granger

Synopsis: A gangster is killed by a big man who pays no attention to bullets, and who leaves glowing fingerprints. Police scientist Chet Walker (Richard Denning) discovers that the fingerprints are radioactive -- as well as those of a dead man. We soon learn that this walking corpse was created by Dr. Read More

Riders to the Stars

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: William Lundigan, Herbert Marshall, Richard Carlson, Martha Hyer, Dawn Addams

Synopsis: In this vintage sci-fi adventure, a team of scientists is studying meteors and is baffled by how and why they are often destroyed when they enter the Earth's atmosphere. In a desire to better understand this process, three astronauts with a background in research -- Richard Stanton (William Read More

Tales of Frankenstein

Crew: Director

Donovan's Brain

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Lew Ayres, Gene Evans, Nancy Davis, Steve Brodie, Lisa Howard

Synopsis: Felix E. Feist directed this second adaptation of the novel by Curt Siodmak (filmed previously in 1944 as The Lady and the Monster and later in 1963 as The Brain), which tells the story of a brilliant brain specialist (Lew Ayres) whose attempts to save the life of an accident victim result in the Read More

The Magnetic Monster

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Richard Carlson, King Donovan, Harry Ellerbe, Leo Britt

Synopsis: The Magnetic Monster is a truly novel science fiction film, in terms of its cerebral plot and low-key, quietly intense execution. As much a mystery film and a manhunt as a sci-fi-thriller, it pushed lots of suspense buttons for viewers in 1953 and still holds up a half century later. Richard Carlson Read More

Bride of the Gorilla

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Barbara Payton, Lon Chaney, Jr., Raymond Burr, Tom Conway, Paul Cavanagh

Synopsis: This silly, stagebound but entertaining little monster-mash from Universal horror writer/director Curt Siodmak stars burly Raymond Burr as a steward on a rubber plantation whose romantic tryst with the boss' wife (Barbara Payton) eventually leads to the employer's murder. When one of the Read More

Four Days Leave

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Cornel Wilde, Josette Day, Simone Signoret, Richard Erdman, John Baragrey

Synopsis: Cornell Wilde serves as "box office insurance" in this Swiss-filmed romantic comedy. Wilde plays American sailor Stanley Robin, who while vacationing in Switzerland falls in love with Suzanne (Josette Day), the daughter of a local watchmaker. Their romance is threatened by the arrival of French Read More

Tarzan's Magic Fountain

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Lex Barker, Brenda Joyce, Albert Dekker, Evelyn Ankers, Charles Drake

Synopsis: Lex Barker first stepped into the loincloth of the Lord of the Jungle in Tarzan's Magic Fountain. The story gets under way when Tarzan rescues a long-lost aviatrix named Gloria (Evelyn Ankers), who has been kept youthful by the magic fountain of the title. Bad guys Trask (Albert Dekker) and Dodd (Charles Drake Read More

Berlin Express

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Merle Oberon, Robert Ryan, Charles Korvin, Paul Lukas, Robert Coote

Synopsis: On a trip from France to Allied-occupied Berlin, a group of travelers -- a mysterious and very secretive European woman (Merle Oberon), an American agricultural expert (Robert Ryan), a British educator (Robert Coote), a Soviet Army officer (Roman Toporow), and a French official (Charles Korvin) Read More

The Beast with Five Fingers

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Robert Alda, Andrea King, Peter Lorre, Victor Francen, J. Carrol Naish

Synopsis: This movie is an early horror film classic and certainly one that a well-rounded horror movie aficionado should not miss. An invalid concert pianist dies, leaving a will that does not include his personal secretary Hilary Cummins (Peter Lorre) as a beneficiary. Furious, the left-out yes-man cuts Read More

The Return of Monte Cristo

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Louis Hayward, Barbara Britton, George Macready, Una O'Connor, Henry Stephenson

Synopsis: Louis Hayward, star of 1940's Son of Monte Cristo, returns to Alexandre Dumas territory in Columbia's Return of Monte Cristo. This time, Hayward plays the grandson of his namesake Edmond Dantes, who, it will be recalled, was cheated out of his fortune and falsely imprisoned, only to escape and Read More

Frisco Sal

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Susanna Foster, Turhan Bey, Alan Curtis, Andy Devine, Thomas Gomez

Synopsis: In this costume drama, a woman travels from New England to California's Barbary coast to avenge her brother's death. There she becomes a saloon singer in a sleazy bar, the bar frequented by the killer. The bar's owner, and the local crime lord begin fighting over control of coastal operations. The Read More

Shady Lady

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Charles Coburn, Robert Paige, Ginny Simms, Alan Curtis, Martha O'Driscoll

Synopsis: In this crime drama, a former card shark finally gets paroled and decides to take his singing niece to Chicago to make a new start. Unfortunately, the musical niece ends up working at a gangster's nightclub and the gambler, unable to resist the lure of easy money, returns to card playing. Later an Read More

House of Frankenstein

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Boris Karloff, J. Carrol Naish, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Anne Gwynne, Lionel Atwill

Synopsis: In many ways the most endearing of Universal's B-grade "monster rallies" of the 1940s, House of Frankenstein manages within its 70-minute time span to make room for Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange), Dracula (John Carradine) the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.), and a couple of new recruits, mad Read More

The Lady and the Monster

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Vera Ralston, Richard Arlen, Mary Nash, Sidney Blackmer

Synopsis: Lady and the Monster was the first film version of the classic Curt Siodmak sci-fi/horror tale Donovan's Brain. The plot involves the brain of a famous but unscrupulous financier, recently deceased. The brain is kept alive artificially by overenthusiastic scientist Erich Von Stroheim, with the Read More

The Climax

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Boris Karloff, Susanna Foster, Turhan Bey, Gale Sondergaard, Thomas Gomez

Synopsis: The Climax was hurriedly and economically filmed on leftover sets from Universal's super-production The Phantom of the Opera. In his Technicolor debut, Boris Karloff plays Dr. Hohner, a brilliant but unstable theatrical physician who murders a beautiful opera star when she rejects him. Ten year Read More

The Mantrap

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Henry Stephenson, Lloyd Corrigan, Joseph Allen, Jr., Dorothy Lovett, Edmund MacDonald

Synopsis: A retired septuagenarian writes books on criminology based on his experiences as a Scotland Yard officer. On his seventieth birthday, the DA's office pays homage to him by requesting his assistance on a puzzling case. Though the police are sure they have solved the case, it is the old man using Read More

The Purple V

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: John Archer, Mary McLeod, Fritz Kortner, Rex Williams, Kurt Katch

Synopsis: Though technically a Republic "B", the 58-minute The Purple V has glossy production values commensurate to a top-of-the-bill A picture. German expatriate Fritz Kortner plays the largest role, as an anti-Nazi schoolmaster who helps a downed American flyer (John Archer) reached Allied lines with Read More

False Faces

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Stanley Ridges, Rex Williams, Veda Ann Borg, Janet Shaw

Synopsis: Republic's False Faces is a choice example of wartime "victory casting", with all the male cast members drawn from the ranks of the undraftable. Rex Williams plays morose saloon patron Craig Harding, who is on hand during a barroom brawl which leads to the death of songstress Joyce Ford (Veda Ann Read More

Son of Dracula

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Lon Chaney, Jr., Robert Paige, Louise Allbritton, Evelyn Ankers, Frank Craven

Synopsis: Son of Dracula represents a felicitious creative collaboration between director Robert Siodmak and his screenwriter-brother Curt. The story is set in the American south, where the mysterious Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr.) has recently taken up residence. Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton), a Read More

I Walked with a Zombie

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Tom Conway, Frances Dee, James Ellison, Edith Barrett, Christine Gordon, James Bell

Synopsis: RKO producer Val Lewton seemed to thrive upon taking the most lurid film titles and coming up with pocket-edition works of art. Saddled with the studio-dictated title I Walked With a Zombie, Lewton, together with scripters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray, concocted a West Indies variation on Jane Read More

Invisible Agent

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Ilona Massey, Jon Hall, Peter Lorre, Cedric Hardwicke, J. Edward Bromberg

Synopsis: Universal's "Invisible Man" series does its bit for the war effort in this slyly tongue-in-cheek action melodrama. Jon Hall stars as Frank Raymond, grandson of the man who invented the invisibility formula several pictures back. When Nazi agents try to coerce the secret formula out of Raymond, he Read More

London Blackout Murders

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: John Abbott, Mary McLeod, Lloyd Corrigan, Lester Matthews, Anita Bolster

Synopsis: In this thriller set in WW II London during the bombing raids, a surgeon becomes a homicidal maniac during the frequent blackouts. Using his hypodermic needle, he only kills the people he believes are enemies to the Allies. Unfortunately, there is no real proof that the people he has offed are Read More

Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Lon Chaney, Jr., Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles, Lionel Atwill, Bela Lugosi

Synopsis: The fifth film in Universal's "Frankenstein" series goes for the box-office gold by combining two--count 'em, two!--of the studio's star monsters. We all thought that Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), alias The Wolf Man, had been shot dead in his own starring film in 1941, but the opening scenes of Read More

Pacific Blackout

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Robert Preston, Philip Merivale, Eva Gabor, Louis Jean Heydt

Synopsis: Midnight Angel was the title of this Paramount actioner when it was first released in December of 1941. But by the time the film reached the hinterlands, America had entered WW2, and thus it was that Midnight Angel was rechristened Pacific Blackout, which remained its title to this very day. Read More

The Wolf Man

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Lon Chaney, Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Evelyn Ankers, Ralph Bellamy, Bela Lugosi, Maria Ouspenskaya, Patric Knowles

Synopsis: "Even a man who is pure at heart/And says his prayers by night/May become a wolf when the wolf-bane blooms/And the moon is full and bright." Upon first hearing these words, Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney) dismisses them as childish folderol. After all, this is the 20th Century; how can a human being Read More

Aloma of the South Seas

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Dorothy Lamour, Jon Hall, Lynne Overman, Phillip Reed, Katherine de Mille

Synopsis: The South Seas romance is set on the scenic island of Tahiti where the island chief betroths his son to a woman and then ships him to the US to attend Harvard. During the return voyage the lad is befriended by the ship's captain who also protects the beautiful girl the boy meets, but doesn't know Read More

The Invisible Man Returns

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price, Nan Grey, John Sutton, Cecil Kellaway

Synopsis: A semi-sequel to the 1933 Universal horror masterwork The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man Returns stars Vincent Price in the title role. Condemned for a murder he did not commit, Price begs doctor John Sutton to inject him with the invisibility serum invented by Claude Rains in the first film. Sutton Read More

The Invisible Woman

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Virginia Bruce, John Barrymore, John Howard, Charlie Ruggles, Oscar Homolka

Synopsis: Dispensing with the melodramatic excesses of Universal's previous "Invisible Man" films, 1941's The Invisible Woman aims strictly for laughs. Virginia Bruce stars as Kitty Carroll, an outspoken department store model fired from her job by tyrannical Mr. Growley (Charles Lane). Intrigued by an ad Read More

The Ape

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixon, Gertrude W. Hoffman, Henry Hall, Gene O'Donnell

Synopsis: This painfully-bad Monogram feature wastes the talents of two of horrordom's finest -- star Boris Karloff and co-writer Curt Siodmak (who would write the horror classic The Wolf Man for Universal the same year). The goofy plot involves the efforts of one Dr. Adrian (Karloff) to procure human Read More

Black Friday

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Stanley Ridges, Anne Nagel, Anne Gwynne

Synopsis: Told in flashback as Dr. Ernest Sovac (Boris Karloff) is marched into the gas chamber, Black Friday concerns kindly college professor George Kingsley (Stanley Ridges), who is seriously injured when he is caught in the middle of a gangster shootout. Kingsley's best friend Sovac performs an Read More

The Loves of Madame Dubarry

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Gitta Alpar, Patrick Waddington, Owen Nares, Arthur Margetson, Margaret Bannerman

Synopsis: The Loves of Mme. DuBarry was the American title of the 1935 British operetta I Give My Heart, based on the stage musical The DuBarry. German actress Gitta Alpar stars as Jeanne, the young 18th century Parisian milliner who sleeps her way to the uppermost rungs of French aristocracy, emerging at Read More

Her Jungle Love

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Dorothy Lamour, Ray Milland, Lynne Overman, J. Carrol Naish, Dorothy Howe

Synopsis: Sarong-clad Dorothy Lamour made her Technicolor debut in this follow-up to her earlier starrer Jungle Princess. After crash-landing on a tropic isle, aviator Bob Mitchell (Ray Milland) and his mechanic Jimmy Wallace (Lynne Overman) make the acquaintance of the lovely Tura (Lamour). While Bob Read More

Non-Stop New York

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Anna Lee, John Loder, Frank Cellier, Desmond Tester, William Dewhurst

Synopsis: While W.C. Fields poked fun at the asinine notion of a high-speed airplane with an open observation deck in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), the producers of the futuristic British melodrama Non-Stop New York (1937) take this notion quite seriously. The film's setpiece is a streamlined Read More

It's a Bet

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Helen Chandler, Gene Gerrard

Synopsis: In this drama, a reporter loses his job after he writes a story criticizing the police department for their inefficiency in locating missing people. He then takes a wager from a rival reporter who claims that he cannot stay in hiding for a month. If he wins, he will have a new job at a rival Read More

Transatlantic Tunnel

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Richard Dix, Leslie Banks, Madge Evans, Helen Vinson, C. Aubrey Smith

Synopsis: Transatlantic Tunnel is the English-language version of the 1932 French-German speculative drama The Tunnel. Set sometime in the future (complete with two-way televisions, art-deco airships and self-propelled automobiles), the film stars Richard Dix as McAllen, a visionary architect who devotes Read More

Girls Will Be Boys

Crew: Screen Story, Screenwriter

Actors: Dolly Haas, Cyril Maude, Irene Vanbrugh, Esmond Knight

Synopsis: Best known today as the wife of famed caricaturist Al Hirschfield, actress Dolly Haas enjoyed a long and fruitful career in England and Europe. One of Haas' best vehicles is the gender-bending British farce Girls Will Be Boys, in which she plays the granddaughter of the Duke of Bridgewater (Cyril Maude Read More

F.P. 1 Antwortet Nicht

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Hans Albers, Paul Hartmann, Peter Lorre, Hermann Speelmans

Synopsis: This deluxe German/British production was originally released as simply F.P. 1. The story and characterizations take a back seat to the massive sets and state-of-art (for 1933) special effects. The floating aerodrome which provides the film's centerpiece is a truly impressive creation, far more so Read More

F.P.1

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Leslie Fenton, Conrad Veidt, Jill Esmond, George Merritt, Donald Calthrop

Synopsis: This drama is set upon a floating platform, used for oil drilling, located in the Atlantic. The owners of a rival platform are desperate to destroy it. The film was originally made in German and titled F.P.1 Antwortet Nicht. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide Read More

Marion, das Gehoert Sich Nicht

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Magda Schneider, Hermann Thimig, Otto Wallburg, Julius Falkenstein

Der Mann, Der Seinen Moerder Sucht

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Heinz Rühmann, Lien Deyers, Hans Leibelt, Hermann Speelmans

Synopsis: Robert Siodmak's second solo directorial effort was the breathless comedy-melodrama Der Mann, Der Seinen Moerder Sucht (Looking For His Murderer) In the face of ever-mounting debts, Heinz Ruhmann arranges for his own murder to be committed within the next 12 hours. During this period, Ruhmann Read More

Le Bal

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Germaine Dermoz, Lucie Mannheim, Marguerite Pierry, Reinhold Schuenzel, Danielle Darrieux, André Lefaur, Gertrud Wolle, Paul Otto, Vanda Greville

Synopsis: Based on a novel by Helen Nimirosky, The Ball was filmed simultaneously in German and French-language versions. The French adaptation, Le Bal, served to introduce 14-year-old Danielle Darrieux to the picture-going public. Darrieux plays the daughter of a pair of delicatessen owners who suddenly Read More

The Shot in The Talker Studio

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Gerda Maurus, Harry Frank, Paul Kemp, Ernst Behmer

Synopsis: The UFA movie studios are the setting for this intricate murder mystery. Frequent Fritz Lang leading lady Gerda Maurus stars as The Film Diva (that's how she's billed), who is the primary suspect when a murder is committed on the set of her latest epic. The suspects include "The Leading Role" Read More

Mascottchen

Crew: Screenwriter

Synopsis: The German Mascottchen was inspired by the Bromme operetta of the same name. Had the producers waited a few months, they could have included Bromme's songs, and thus spared themselves the slings and arrows of abrasive music lovers. Kathe Von Nagy stars as a Budapest salesgirl who, through luck and Read More