LegacyErich Pommer
Born in 1889, Erich Pommer was Berlin’s very own “boy wonder,” a producer whose impact at UFA Studios in the early 1920s matched that of Irving Thalberg at MGM a few years later. From The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920) to Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922), from The Last Laugh (1924) to Metropolis (1927), he oversaw the films that won German cinema an international reputation for the first time.
The young Alfred Hitchcock, who worked at UFA in the early 1920s and whose 1939 film Jamaica Inn was produced by Pommer, recalled being astounded by the sheer scale of the studio operation put in place by the German producer. “The studio where I worked was tremendous, bigger than Universal is today. They had a complete railroad station ...
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