A Tycoon Named Use

The first-night hoopla at Munich's Gloria Palast was pure Hollywood--grunting cops wrestling with crowds, limousines bulging with black-tied men and mink-draped starlets. As for the movie, it was a blatant rehash of Grand Hotel (1932). It was, sneered the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, "pretentious kitsch [trash], a perfection of mediocrity, apotheosis of the single-entendre. Everywhere the box-office sledge hammer. In short, a German film."

But judging from audience response, Gloria Film Co.'s Menschen in Hotel was a Kassenschlager (boxoffice hit). And to Gloria's greying, violet-eyed boss, Use ("Kuba") Kubaschewski, the payoff is all that matters. Hardly had the house lights gone down for the start of the show when the boss sneaked off to her theater-top penthouse to read more scripts, study attendance records, sign checks. At 49, canny Kuba is head of the hottest movie-production outfit in Germany. She has fought her way higher than any other woman in the movie industry--Hollywood included--has ever reached on the management side of the camera.

Basement Beginning. Her story of her career reads like the schmalz she sells. A Berlin postman's daughter. Use was 17 when she went to work as a secretary for UFA, prewar Germany's movie giant. A few years later, when she switched to the Monopol studios, she was already an unbeatable combination of the seemingly in genuous female and the obviously ingenious financier. In 1934, Use was ready to take over, and for years, she practiced the tough trade of running a movie studio; then the Red army moved on Berlin. Use escaped to Bavaria with only a handful of jewelry to keep her going.

With an offer of a job as a movie projectionist, provided she could find some films to project, handsome Use hurried to Munich, batted her eyes at the first U.S. Army film officer she found, soon had her hands on a steady supply of prewar German productions. Two years later, Use borrowed 50,000 marks from a bank, bought 30 installments of Zorro serials from the U.S.'s Republic Pictures, and pieced together two full-length features. She made a million marks from her investment and used her profits to start Gloria Films in a Munich basement.

Homeland Corn. From the beginning, Kuba saw no sense in emulating the few great pictures of prewar Germany, e.g., M, Blue Angel, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. She specialized in Heimatschnulzen (homeland corn)--movies of rural love and village violence.

The Schnulze has paid off so well that Gloria Films has never taken a penny of government subsidy, a rare record in postwar Germany. Its catalogue of 23 films represents only 12% of the German movies now in circulation, but its annual gross ($35,850,000) comes to 30% of the income from German film production. Kuba herself boasts a villa on Lake Starnberg with two cabin cruisers and a speedboat, a villa on the Riviera, a chalet in Switzerland, a stable of expensive cars, a Skye terrier named Putzi and a black poodle named Wutzi. It is all confirmation of her own straightforward formula for success: "All I want to see in my movies is what I enjoy seeing myself--a pretty girl, a handsome man, a little dancing, a little laughter, a few tears, and lots of heart."

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