Born January `16, 1890 in Königinhof, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, now Dvur Kralove, Czech Republic, future Oscar winner Karl Freund moved with his family to Berlin when he was 11. In 1905, when he was 15, he went to work as a projectionist. Two years later he was a newsreel photographer. He was then drafted into the Imperial Army in World War I but was released after three months.

A cinematographer on over a hundred films, Freund is the inventor of the unchained camera, an innovation in early film. For the first time, the camera was free of the tripod and could move around the set. Because it was no longer confined to one position, thousands of new shots were possible. The 360-pound Freund was known to wear the camera on his stomach and walk around while it was filming. He would also put the camera on a cart that moved along a track. Several other innovative ways of moving the camera were introduced by Freund, including putting the camera on a crane.

Freud married Susette Liepmannssohn in 1915 in 1915 with whom he had a son. They divorced in 1918. He married second wife Gertrude Hoffman in 1920, with whom he would remain married for life.
Among Freund’s early films were Paul Wegener’s The Golem (1920), F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), and Frtiz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). He also directed ten shorts for German studios His only known film as an actor is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Michael (1924) in which he plays a sycophantic art dealer who saves the tobacco ashes dropped by a famous painter.

Freund emigrated to the U.S. in 1929. His breakthrough was Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Oscar winner, All Quiet on the Western Front, for which he went uncredited. In addition to his work as a cinematographer, he directed ten films, including 1931’s Dracula, 1932’s The Mummy, and 1935’s Mad Love, his last.

Working full-time at cinematography from 1936 on, Freund’s films in the latter part of the decade included The Great Ziegfeld, Camille, The Good Earth for which he won an Oscar, and Golden Boy. His 1940s films included Pride and Prejudice, Blossoms in the Dust, for which he was again nominated for an Oscar, The Chocolate Soldier for which he was also nominated for an Oscar, The War Against Mrs. Hadley, Cry Havoc, A Guy Named Joe, The Seventh Cross, Without Love, and Key Largo.

1950’s Bright Leaf would be Freund’s last film, after which he turned to TV where he worked extensively on such series as I Love Lucy, Our Miss Brooks, and December Bride. While working on I Love Lucy, he developed the 3-camera system for filming TV shows which is still in existence today.

Freund won a second Oscar at the 1954 awards for the design and development of a direct reading brightness mirror. He died on May 3, 1969 at 79.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

METROPOLIS (1927) , directed by Fritz Lang

Released toward the end of the silent era, Lang’s influential science fiction masterpiece took a year and a half to film with much of the painstaking work done by Freund and fellow cinematographers Gunther Rittau and Walter Rurrmann. The film’s justly celebrated multi-exposed sequences were not created in a lab but during the filming on set. The film was rewound in the camera and then exposed again right away. This was done up to 30 times. Alfred Abel as the city mastermind, Gustav Frolich as his son, Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the mad inventor and the enigmatic Brigitte Helm in a triple role were the stars.

THE GOOD EARTH (1937) , directed by Sidney Franklin

This was one of the major films of its day from the Pearl Buck novel about Chinese peasants that became required reading in U.S. schools for decades. Freund’s meticulous cinematography earned him one of the film’s two Oscars. The other was for Luise Rainer as Best Actress for her portrayal of the soulful peasant wife O-Lan. Rainer doesn’t have much to say but her lack of dialogue is more than compensated for by Freund’s frequent closeups. The Viennese teardrop, as she was called, conveys an authenticity to her portrayal of the Asian heroine in ways that Paul Muni as her husband and other non-Asian actors in the film do not.

BLOSSOMS IN THE DUST (1941) , directed by Mervyn LeRoy

Freund received his only Oscar nomination for a color film for this biographical film about children rights activist Edna Gladney played by Greer Garson who earned the first of five consecutive Oscar nominations for her performance. It was the first of eight films in which Garson co-starred with Walter Pidgeon who played her husband. In the film’s most famous scene, Garson as Gladney is instrumental in having the word “illegitimate” removed from Texas birth certificates. Gladney’s proceeds from the film were put back into the orphanage she had founded years earlier. Felix Bressart, Marsha Hunt, and Fay Holden co-star.

KEY LARGO (1948) , directed by John Huston

Except for a few opening shots, this film set in the Florida Keys during a hurricane, was memorably filmed on a soundstage by Freund. It was the fourth and final film Humphrey Bogart, in one of his best starring roles as a World War II veteran, made with wife Lauren Bacall. It was the fifth he made with Edward G. Robinson, who had been the star of the previous four. Claire Trevor, who received her first Oscar nomination for 1937’s Dead End, received the film’s only Oscar nomination and win for her portrayal of gangster Robinson’s moll. Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Gomez, and Marc Lawrence co-starred.

A BRIGHT LEAF (1950) , directed by Michael Curtiz

A sort of Southern version of Anthony Mann’s western, The Furies, the setting here is tobacco country in the early days of the 20th Century. Freund’s last theatrical film was also Lauren Bacall’s last film under her Warner Bros. contract. She plays a thinly disguised madam of a house of ill repute opposite Gary Cooper as an aristocratic tobacco tycoon. Patricia Neal plays the cold other woman that Cooper chooses to marry. Donald Crisp co-stars as Neal’s vicious father whose hold on the tobacco industry is dwindling. Veterans Gladys George and Elizabeth Patterson play Bacall and Neal’s confidantes, respectively.

KARL FREUND AND OSCAR

• The Good Earth (1937) – Oscar – Best Cinematography
• Blossoms in the Dust (1967) – nominated – Best Cinematography – Color
• The Chocolate Soldier (1941) – nominated – Best Cinematography – Black-and-White
• Technical Award (1954) – Oscar – For the design and development of a direct reading brightness mirror.