A highlight of the 1998 Berlin Film Festival was the 75-film retrospective celebrating the Siodmak Brothers, Robert (who died in 1973) and his younger brother by exactly two years, Curt, who has died aged 98. To the surprise of the audiences, the gnomish Curt had travelled from his home in California and was happy to introduce the movies and meet viewers.
Some 25 of the films had his credit, the rest being devoted to Robert Siodmak, who had enjoyed a more elevated career, as is the fortune of directors rather than writers. Curt had contributed to even more films - over 70 in all - than had Robert, mainly as a writer of horror, science fiction and adventure movies.
Curt Siodmak occasionally directed and several of his short stories had been turned into feature films. One of his books, Donovan's Brain, had the unusual distinction of being filmed a number of times between 1943 and 1962.
Curt Siodmak was born in Germany, where his parents had returned from America. His father was a banker and Robert at first followed that profession, freeing Curt to become a journalist. Then in the mid-1920s he contributed to several screenplays for silent German movies, and the die was cast.
The turning point for both brothers came with a remarkable and influential documentary, People On Sunday (1929), which is a minor masterpiece and boasts credits that were rarely equalled in cinema history. Curt Siodmak worked with Billy Wilder on the screenplay, Eugen Schufften and Fred Zinnemann filmed it and the co-directors were Edgar G Ulmer and Robert Siodmak. All enjoyed long and successful careers.
Curt went on to write several more German films, but the Siodmak brothers, who were Jewish, decided to work abroad from the mid-1930s, first in France where Curt wrote La Crise Est Finie (1935), directed by his brother. Curt then moved on to England (Robert stayed in Paris until 1939), co-writing Girls Will Be Boys and It's A Bet, I Give My Heart and The Tunnel. He also worked on the famously uncompleted version of I Claudius (1937), starring Charles Laughton and directed by Josef von Sternberg. After Non Stop New York (1937) for Michael Balcon, he moved to the US and began his career as writer and director.
His first credit was on Her Jungle Love, a romantic adventure with Dorothy Lamour. Two films, both inspired by H G Wells, The Invisible Man Returns (1939) and Invisible Agent (1942) followed, and the remarkable horror movie The Wolf Man (1941), starring Lon Chaney Jr, which helped establish his career. He gained further credibility with the publication in 1942 of the brilliant horror/fantasy novel Donovan's Brain. This was filmed in 1943 as The Lady And The Monster, with Erich von Stroheim; it fared better under its original title in 1953, later became a TV movie, and then another feature made in Britain in 1962, as Over My Dead Body.
Among his other novels Heuser's Memory, published in 1968, was filmed in 1970, and two more of his books, Skyport (1959) and City In The Sky (1974), partly inspired the film adaptation of Ian Fleming's Moonraker in 1978. Other short stories were expanded into screenplays: The Devil's Brood became House Of Frankenstein in 1944 and Girl In Ice became Devil's Messenger in 1962.
Although primarily a writer, Curt Siodmak had a short, mundane career as a director with adventures such as Bride Of The Gorilla (1951), Curucu, Beast Of The Amazon (1956) and No 13 Demon Street (1957) among others. Unlike his brother, he never made the transition into A features and almost all his work was in genre movies.
But the low budget horror films he wrote proved occasionally memorable, standing up well today. The Beast With Five Fingers (1946), starring Peter Lorre and directed by Robert Florey remains wonderfully atmospheric and scary. I Walked With A Zombie (1943) was an elegant and sensitive work, largely the result of director Jacques Tourneur, for whom Siodmak also provided the story for the semi-documentary thriller, Berlin Express (1947).
Curt wrote Son Of Dracula (1943) for his brother to direct, plus The Climax (1944), Frisco Sal (1965) and Tarzan's Magic Fountain (1948). He later wrote the screenplay for the SF picture Riders To The Stars (1954), for Richard Carlson, an actor turned director: they worked together on several films.
Curt's other credits include a German-made adaptation of a Conan Doyle story, Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace (1962), directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee. During the 1960s, as television increasingly led to the demise of small budget movies, Curt Siodmak ended his directorial career with a Swiss-Czech production, Ski Fever (1966). He also looked abroad for work, but only a TV movie in Germany, Die Heiligenschein (1977) was available.
He had remained on the sidelines of mainstream cinema, working in several countries with fine co-writers, actors and directors. Of the six young hopefuls who had made that documentary about ordinary people on a Sunday in Berlin, Curt Siodmak had the least distinguished career.
But his quirky, inventive talent displayed innate professionalism; the whole history of the movies would have been much poorer without such mavericks and journeymen, the backbone of popular cinema.
He is survived by his wife of 75 years, Henrietta; a son, and two granddaughters.