A tall, unhurried German who spent the postwar decades making men in uniform look like men rather than monsters, and his last years being hired for the presence alone. His Bond villain is the best known and the least of him.
Fi1m perspective
Karl Stromberg eats alone. In The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) the shipping magnate sits at the end of a long table inside his sea base while sharks pass behind the glass, and Curd Jürgens plays him, as we said in our review, as a man bored by everything but fish. What reaches the screen is mostly the boredom. It is a strange thing to be the villain of a Bond film and the least animated person in it, and Jürgens manages it without visible effort.
He had been a journalist first, and took to the stage in Vienna in the mid-1930s before film found him. The part that made him was General Harras in Des Teufels General (1955), a Luftwaffe officer played as a divided man rather than a cartoon, and it set the shape of the next decade. ...And God Created Woman (1956) put him opposite Brigitte Bardot for Roger Vadim and made him known outside German-speaking Europe. Then came the U-boat captain of The Enemy Below (1957), and The Longest Day (1962), and a long run of English-language films that needed a German officer with a conscience and knew where to find one.
He was clear about why that work mattered. 'It was the first film after the war in which a German soldier was not portrayed as a freak,' he said of The Enemy Below, and the uniformed parts he took through the late 1950s and 1960s did a good deal to change what a German on a Hollywood screen was allowed to be. He was tall and broad and did not hurry, and a stage-trained voice let him hold a room while barely lifting it. The stillness, in those years, read as a man thinking before he spoke.
The difficulty came later, and Stromberg is a fair example of it. The complaint about his last films is that the performances went mechanical, that he was booked for the presence and delivered the presence and not much more. He said he found villains more interesting than heroes, and we believe he meant it, but in Ken Adam's dining room we could not find the enjoyment anywhere. We wanted him to relish being wicked, and after a few minutes we noticed we were watching the sharks, because he gave them nothing to compete with.
Bond is the film you will have seen and the one you will click through to, and it is a perfectly good evening. It is not the place to judge him. By most accounts the officers of the 1950s are where the stillness was a decision rather than a habit, and where the size of the man was doing something other than filling the frame.
Biography
Curd Jürgens (1915–1982) was a German-Austrian stage and film actor. He was usually billed in English-speaking films as Curt Jurgens.
Born in Solln near Munich, he began his career in the 1930s with stage work in Germany and Austria. After the Second World War he became an Austrian citizen and performed regularly at the Burgtheater in Vienna.
He is known for roles including Eric Carradine in ...And God Created Woman (1956), Kapitän von Stolberg in The Enemy Below (1957), Major General Günther Blumentritt in The Longest Day (1962), and the Bond villain Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Other credits include Battle of Britain (1969) and Lord Jim (1965).
