Boefje

Boefje (1939)

Twelve year old 'Boefje' spends most of his time in the alleys, on rooftops and in the harbor of Rotterdam. A local clergyman takes pity on him and attempts to teach him good manners.

Date of release
1939-10-04
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Crime, Drama
Director
Douglas Sirk

Casting

Interesting facts

Boefje is a 1939 Dutch children's comedic melodrama directed by Detlef Sierck. The film is based on a classic 1903 Dutch children's book of the same name, written by journalist Marie Joseph Brusse.

Production

German director Detlef Sierck fled the Nazis in 1937. He went first to Italy, then France, and shot this film in Holland just before leaving for America with his wife in 1939. Sierck left before editing was completed, without seeing the finished film, and went to work in Hollywood under the anglicized name of Douglas Sirk.

The lead role of Jan Grovers, a 12-year-old boy, is played by a 46-year-old woman, Annie van Ees, who had played the same role on the stage more than 1500 times, beginning in 1923. Boefje would be her only screen performance.

The film was scheduled to screen at the first ever Cannes Film Festival, in competition for the Palme d'Or, but the festival was postponed and then cancelled when Germany invaded Poland on the festival's opening day, September 1, 1939.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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