Albrecht Schoenhals or Alberto Schoenhals or Albrecht Schönhals ~ This is a vintage original cigarette card form the Lloyd Cigarettes series Bunte Filmbilder issued in 1936. This is card #66. It is about the size of a US baseball card. This particular example is in excellent condition.

Albrecht Schoenhals was born in Mannheim in 1888. He came to the screen rather later than most and was already 46 when his first film was released. Although he made over twenty films in Italy and Germany during the Nazi era and played Dr. Dos Passos in two 1942 films, it is for post-war films that Schoenhals is best remembered. In 1949, Schoenhals took the male lead in the Hans Deppe film Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe (Don't Play with Love) opposite Nazi era heartthrob Lil Dagover. In 1963 he had a supporting role in the Krimi classic Dr. Mabuse Vs. Scotland Yard.

But, it was his last film, 1969's The Dammed (La Caduta degli dei), that was probably the best of his entire life. Schoenhals plays Joachim Von Essenbeck in this brooding, operatic movie about Nazism that makes Cabaret look like wholesome family fare. The family in The Damned is a symbol of German society circa 1934. The Krupp-like steel magnate Baron von Essenbeck represents the spineless establishment. The Nazis kill the baron, then frame one heir apparent, a socialist (married to the stunning Charlotte Rampling). A bearish, boorish Essenbeck representing the SA, the Nazis' early goon squad, takes the reins. But Hitler murdered the SA in the 1934 "Night of the Long Knives," providing The Damned with its bravura action scene, a Nazi massacre at a gay SA orgy. The winning Essenbeck is the murderous, pedophilic, transvestite, mother-rapist Martin (sharp-featured Helmut Berger), who represents Nazism. Though he's better in director Luchino Visconti's 1971 Death in Venice, Dirk Bogarde is classy as Martin's stepfather. The Damned got an Oscar screenplay nomination, and Vincent Canby called Berger's Martin "the performance of the year."

Dr. Mabuse Vs. Scotland Yard (1963)