Harald Reinl (8 July 1908 in Bad Ischl, Austria – 9 October 1986 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain) was an Austrian film director. He is known for the films he made based on Edgar Wallace and Karl May books (see Karl May movies and Edgar Wallace movies) and also made mountain films, Heimatfilms, German war films and entries in such popular German film series as Dr. Mabuse, Jerry Cotton and Kommissar X.
His directing output includes more than 60 titles. With his Edgar Wallace and Karl May adaptations, Reinl advanced to become one of the most successful directors in German cinema in the 1960s: with the four Karl May films he made between 1962 and 1965 alone, Reinl reached 32 million viewers.
A talented filmmaker in terms of his craft and an almost infallible sense of the audience's taste, which he always catered to, Reinl became one of the most successful directors of post-war West German cinema. Even though his orientation was always a commercial one and he rarely created anything artistically significant, his films left their mark on the most diverse genres of the German-language cinematic landscape.[2]
Reinl began his career as an extra in the mountain films of Arnold Fanck. He worked as screenwriter on the film Tiefland directed by and starring Leni Riefenstahl. Reinl's first movie as director was the mountain film Mountain Crystal (1949). He was Oscar nominated for his documentary feature Chariots of the Gods (1970).
By the 1970s, he had semi-retired to the Canary Islands. In 1986, in his Tenerife retirement home, he was stabbed to death by Daniela Maria Delis, his alcoholic wife and a former actress from Czechoslovakia.[3]
Media related to Harald Reinl at Wikimedia Commons
