Frederick Kohner: Draft screenplay Burning Secret (1938)
Frederick Kohner: Draft screenplay Burning Secret (1938)
[ein Projekt], „durch das wir […] einer Anzahl von deutschen Flüchtlingen die Gelegenheit geben wollen, hier wieder auf die Beine zu kommen und durch eine gute Produktion zu beweisen, was sie können.“
[[A project] “through which we […] want to give a number of German refugees the opportunity to get back on their feet and show what they can do through a good production.” (ed. trans.)]
Paul Kohner, letter to Stefan Zweig, 1938
The melancholy of farewells was the underlying tone of Brennendes Geheimnis in 1933, a film version of Stefan Zweig’s novella of the same name. Frederick Kohner had written the script and the film was directed by director Robert Siodmak. The film, which tells the story of a secret holiday affair through glances, was banned shortly after its première. Five years later the Kohner brothers lobbied for a re-make of the film. In 1938, Frederick Kohner was working on a new version with the title Burning Secret, for which film agent Paul Kohner was looking to engage primarily emigrants. The re-make draft hewed closely to the original. Here again the story was to take place before the panorama of a morbid society around the turn of the century which Frederick Kohner had added as the backdrop to the novella back in 1931. It would also retain a visually arresting encounter told only through glances in a mirror. Burning Secret was never made.
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