Dengel, Georg Ludwig Edwin (called Edy)

Director, film producer

Born: 04.02.1901 in Biebrich

died: 28.09.1987 in Hofheim (Taunus)

The son of a coal merchant, film distributor and cinema owner, he founded the production company Axa-Film GmbH in Friedrichstraße at the age of 18 and then shot his first film, "Schloss des Schreckens" (1919), in his home town of Biebrich. This was followed in quick succession by "The Man with the Death Mask" (1920), "The Nest of the Yellow Spider" and "Repps and Wepps" (1925), among others: Gangster films for which he wrote the scripts, directed and played the leading role of detective Fred Repps. He used popular US detective film series as a model. He preferred to find motifs in Wiesbaden, which he passed off as American locations. A brief professional detour to Berlin was followed by further in-house productions in Wiesbaden from 1925, including comedy and adventure series about the comic character Patsy, which he invented, or the western hero Bob Shelton.

The success of his low-budget silent films enabled him to build his own glass film studio with an attached copying plant. He also founded his own distribution company and ran cinemas in Bad Schwalbach and Rambach. He was unable to make the switch to sound film at the beginning of the 1930s (partly due to the expensive conversion and licensing costs) and continued to produce silent short films and documentaries, which were shown in the cinema's supporting program. In the winter of 1928/29, he had already captured the once-in-a-century event of the Rhine being frozen over for long stretches on film ("Der Rhein in Eisfesseln", 1929). In the late phase of the Weimar Republic, he accompanied Reich President von Hindenburg with his camera ("Unser Hindenburg", 1930) and documented "Labor Day" in May 1933, a few months after Hitler's seizure of power. It was only after the end of the Second World War that he resumed his work as a producer and director, making cultural and advertising films and later television productions.