Werner Hochbaum (7 March 1899, Kiel – 15 April 1946) was a German screenwriter, film producer and director.
“Brüder”, a film directed by Herr Werner Hochbaum ( who was a remarkable film director in the talkie 30’s ), was one of those films which showed the harsh daily life of the working class. The film depicts, in a kind of fictional documentary, the 1896 Hamburg dockworkers' strike: the workers receive meagre wages for hard work and live under miserable conditions and finally go on strike (to make matters more personal, one of the strikers has a brother who is a policeman). Even though the inspiration for the story was an event that took place in the XIX century, things had little changed by the troublesome twenties so the story had a perfect contemporary ring.
Musician Robert Sand is released from prison in April 1933, after serving five years for manslaughter. Disappointed not to find his wife Marie waiting for him outside the prison gates, he heads into the city. At the same time, Marie makes her way in the other direction. For one portentous day, they look for each other in the noisy city of Berlin. Doubt, mistrust, and jealousy begin to germinate in Robert’s mind.
In Vienna of 1913 a young woman coming from vaudeville theatre circles stands before the wedding with a construction draftsman; this must move to the military and sends his bride on the country, so that she cannot be enticed to the stage. However, she does it and gets by an officer's love affair so in confusion that she commits suicide. - This end environment-close and differentiates of produced melodrama was rejected by press and audience vehemently; the new second film end with the rescue of the desperate was supplied later, so that in this version only a bittersweet common melodrama with excellent actors and good photograph was left. In the rental company copy is the second version of the end jointly contain.