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We are having a party, myself and I
Hardy Krüger has died. At a respectable and unsurprising age, but I am still feeling slightly bereft.
I imprinted on him almost before I knew to care about actors. It took me years to recognize Heinrich Dorfmann in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as a deliberately difficult character with his monofocus and his cold equations and his slide-rule arrogance that's just as dangerous as the threatened traditionalism of the seat-of-the-pants pilot played by James Stewart because he was my favorite character from the first time I saw the film and the one I still gravitate toward among its embarrassment of character actors, sand-blond in his rimless octagonal glasses and his relentless faith in engineering. He's the outsider, the one German in a cast of predominantly British and Americans, his nationality thrown in his face with the war he was too young to fight in: "That's it, then, that's why they never won—they didn't have old Heinrich!" He's intelligent and anoraky and his people skills are so terrible that calling them ass would be an insult to the human posterior. If only the rest of the survivors knew, his chilly, rational, logical plan is even crazier and more quixotic than it looks. I spent my childhood building model rockets and the occasional plane and I loved him. I don't know how many times I had seen the film before it occurred to me to wonder whether I was supposed to.
For that degree of love, I saw the actor in surprisingly little else. He was marvelous as Oberleutnant Franz von Werra in The One That Got Away (1957), effortlessly and ironically drawing the audience into the adventures of the only Axis POW to escape successfully from Allied custody during World War II. I'm not sure it counts that I saw him in A Bridge Too Far (1977) because everyone was in A Bridge Too Far, but his name in the cast list was one of the reasons I sought it out. I have been trying for years to get hold of Blind Date (1959) not just because it's a late noir by Joseph Losey, but because Krüger sings in it. My mother has always spoken fondly of Sundays and Cybèle (1962). In recent years I was glad, if that's the right word for something that should not have been necessary, to see that he had become an activist against the rise of fascism and the far right, citing his own experiences as the child of Nazis and a teenage conscript into the Wehrmacht. I liked knowing he was in the world. He isn't and his films are and that's what happens with artists.
I imprinted on him almost before I knew to care about actors. It took me years to recognize Heinrich Dorfmann in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as a deliberately difficult character with his monofocus and his cold equations and his slide-rule arrogance that's just as dangerous as the threatened traditionalism of the seat-of-the-pants pilot played by James Stewart because he was my favorite character from the first time I saw the film and the one I still gravitate toward among its embarrassment of character actors, sand-blond in his rimless octagonal glasses and his relentless faith in engineering. He's the outsider, the one German in a cast of predominantly British and Americans, his nationality thrown in his face with the war he was too young to fight in: "That's it, then, that's why they never won—they didn't have old Heinrich!" He's intelligent and anoraky and his people skills are so terrible that calling them ass would be an insult to the human posterior. If only the rest of the survivors knew, his chilly, rational, logical plan is even crazier and more quixotic than it looks. I spent my childhood building model rockets and the occasional plane and I loved him. I don't know how many times I had seen the film before it occurred to me to wonder whether I was supposed to.
For that degree of love, I saw the actor in surprisingly little else. He was marvelous as Oberleutnant Franz von Werra in The One That Got Away (1957), effortlessly and ironically drawing the audience into the adventures of the only Axis POW to escape successfully from Allied custody during World War II. I'm not sure it counts that I saw him in A Bridge Too Far (1977) because everyone was in A Bridge Too Far, but his name in the cast list was one of the reasons I sought it out. I have been trying for years to get hold of Blind Date (1959) not just because it's a late noir by Joseph Losey, but because Krüger sings in it. My mother has always spoken fondly of Sundays and Cybèle (1962). In recent years I was glad, if that's the right word for something that should not have been necessary, to see that he had become an activist against the rise of fascism and the far right, citing his own experiences as the child of Nazis and a teenage conscript into the Wehrmacht. I liked knowing he was in the world. He isn't and his films are and that's what happens with artists.
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Mow, thank you. He will always look nerdy and sunburned and wonderful to me.