Harry Piel

Biography

After attending elementary school in Benrath and High School in Derendorf, Piel became a cadet in 1909 on a sailing ship, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth. In 1911, however, he finished his cadethood and moved to Berlin in 1912 where he created the "Art Film Publishing House Company" and made, as a director, screenwriter and producer, his first feature Black Blood (1912) with Curt Goetz in the lead role. Further films followed, based on adventure and action.

Soon Piel received the nickname "the dynamite director" because of his penchant for including explosion sequences in his films. These were authentic: Piel had befriended a demolition engineer who was often commissioned to dynamite bridges and other condemned structures slated for demolition. The engineer notified Piel of these assignments in advance: Piel filmed the explosions, then inserted the footage into his films.

In 1915, Piel became bored with just standing behind the camera and he started to act. The first film with him as a leading actor, Die Grosse Wette, was a science fiction adventure, where he had to deal with robots. Unter heißer Zone, 1916 included for the first time scenes with wild animals, which he had partly trained himself and which he used later in other films.

This was followed by a number of films between 1918–1919, in which he played the detective "Joe Deebs" eight times and with the film To the Large Unknown Quantity (1919) began to be credited by the name "Harry Peel" internationally.

In 1927 he cast himself in a double role together with Marlene Dietrich in the film His Greatest Bluff. Also, in 1927 Piel married the actress Dary Holm (1897–1960), who appeared in several of his films

In 1930 he directed the comedy Him or Me (1930), and many successful adventure films were to follow, such as Shade of the Underworld (1931), Johnny Steals Europe (1932), The Ship Without a Port, The Call of the Jungle (1935) and His Best Friend (1937).

In 1933 Harry Piel became a patron member of the SS and also joined the NSDAP.

This, however, did not avert difficulties with the Nazis, and his film "Panic" (1940–43) was banned for its all too realistic air attacks. (It depicted a German hero who traps wild animals in Africa for German zoos. At the film's climax, an air-raid on a German city frees the zoo animals from their cages; when they run loose in the streets, the people are terrified and only the heroic trapper can recapture the beasts. During World War II, this film was suppressed by Reich censors who did not want the German people to believe that Germany was in danger from aerial bombardments.)

Seventy-two negatives of his films, nearly all his silent movies, were destroyed in an air attack. After the collapse of the Third Reich, Harry Piel, who had been a sustaining member of the SS, and had at first concealed this, was sentenced to six months detention and five years professional disqualification. After his denazification, he founded "Ariel Film" in 1950 in Hamburg with which he had only moderate success.

After Gesprengte Gitter (Elephant Fury, 1953), Piel withdrew from the movie-making business and he died in 1963.