Paul L. Stein
1892 - 1951Paul Ludwig Stein (4 February 1892 – 2 May 1951) was an Austrian-born film director with 67 films to his credit. Stein began his career in Berlin in 1918 and worked exclusively in the German silent film industry until 1926, when he first went to Hollywood, and spent the next five years commuting between Germany and the U.S., where he worked with stars such as Jeanette MacDonald, Lillian Gish and Constance Bennett.
In 1931, Stein relocated to England after gaining a contract with British International Pictures, where he was assigned a number of big-name prestige productions, including some of the popular operetta films of the mid-1930s. These included Blossom Time and Heart's Desire starring his boyhood friend Richard Tauber, who also made cameo appearances in two of his post-war films Waltz Time and Lisbon Story. For most his career, Stein's credits tended to be films primarily aimed at female audiences, although later he also directed crime and spy thrillers. Stein remained in England for the rest of his life and career, becoming a British citizen in 1938.
Der Film im Film
Friedrich Porges
Ernst Deutsch, E.A. Dupont
The only surviving excerpt of a documentary on film production in Weimar Germany, featuring the different personalities of several famous directors of the era at work on the set including Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, and E.A. Dupont.
The Film in the Film
A Woman Commands
Paul L. Stein
Pola Negri, Roland Young
In order to keep his lover, Maria Draga, in luxury, Captain Alex Pastitsch contracts huge debts which threaten his military career. To save Alex's career, his superior officer, Colonel Strádimirovitsch has an idea of how to fix it.
A Woman Commands
Der gelbe Schein
Victor Janson, Eugen Illés
Pola Negri, Harry Liedtke
"The Yellow Ticket" (aka "The Devil's Pawn") was directed by Vicor Janson and Eugen Illes as a German project shot partially in Warsaw. A story of a Jewish girl forced to hide her identity in order to attend medical school in St. Petersburg, the movie is a melodrama of multiple oppression. Lea, as played by Negri, is at a disadvantage as a woman, an orphan and a Jew -- and yet has immense persistence and an insatiable ambition of becoming a doctor. The film includes more than one plot twist (the final one further complicating the issue of Lea's identity), but it's first and foremost a testimony to a spirit impossible to suppress.
The Yellow Ticket
The Twenty Questions Murder Mystery
Paul L. Stein
Robert Beatty, Rona Anderson
The story evolves around a radio panel game show "Twenty Questions." The panel is challenged with an anonymous question. The answer leads to a series of murders in which the killer uses the program to name his victims in advance. Two reporters spot a link between them and enlist the aid of the panel in trapping the guilty party.
The Twenty Questions Murder Mystery
