Master of the World (1934 film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Master of the World.

Master of the World

Directed by	Harry Piel
Written by	Georg Mühlen-Schulte
Starring	Walter Janssen Sybille Schmitz Aribert Waescher Willi Schur
Music by	Fritz Wenneis
Cinematography	Ewald Daub
Release date(s)	1934
Running time	90 min.
Country	Germany
Language	German
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

The Master of the World (known as Der Herr der Welt in the German original) is a German science fiction movie made in 1934 (released in the US in 1935). Its themes are the replacement of human labor with robotic replacements, and the threat to humanity by robots used as war machines. It was directed by Harry Piel and made by Ariel production.^[1]

[edit] Synopsis

Walter Franck, playing "Wolf", as the half-crazy assistant to Walter Hanssen's "Dr. Heller", an inventor of robots, murders his master, and attempts to take over the world with his death-ray equipped robots. He is prevented from attaining his goal by Siegfried Schuerenberg's "Baumann", a mining engineer, and dies at the hands of the robot creations.^[1]

In the happy end of the movie, robots have been transformed into industrial laborers, thus freeing humans for a more worthy and humane life of working on small farms, with the movie showing the influence of Nazi Germany's idealisation of the common farmer and his rural life.^{[citation needed]}