Six years before being cast as Colonel Wilhelm Klink in Hogan's Heroes, Werner Klemperer took a dramatic turn as a Nazi attache who is just finding out about Adolf Hitler's suicide while aboard "The Haunted U-Boat" in this first season entry of One Step Beyond:
I don't know if the casting directors of Hogan had this in mind when casting Klemperer, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Rating: A.
4 comments:
Nobody seems to remember this:
Before he was cast in Hogan's Heroes, Werner Klemperer never played comedy - ever.
Most of his roles were as really mean villains, like the one he's playing here.
As I recall, Klemperer had to really sell himself to the Hogan producers, who didn't believe that he could play a simple pompous fool without making him menacing.
Klemperer proved them wrong, though - to the point that post-Hogan, he almost never played an out-and-out villain again.
I have to check his IMDB file to see what he did, aside from conducting orchestras, post-Hogan.
I do remember he was also one of the prisoners in the classic film, "Judgement at Nerumberg".
When I first saw that film, I thought of him as a more serious Col. Klink and what might have occurred to him when the war was over.
Klemperer, along with John Banner & Bob Crane, appeared in a film with Elke Sommer, "The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz", which I have yet to see, incredibly.
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