KREUGER FILM            Back to project presentation

Personal Questions.
Questions of Art.

Why make a motion picture based on the life of Ivar Kreuger?
What is interesting enough about this man and his time to motivate people to come together and create a motion picture?
Was he murdered?

IN the book "the burned diary of Ivar kreuger" tomas brusell tries to give Possible Answers.

First of all: Ivar Kreuger had the power to get what he wanted and he had the power to give others what they wanted too.
He really did what Giordano Bruno was accused of, and August Strindberg dreamed of - he made gold. And gold can make thing happen and needs can bee satisfied.

Let's recreate two hours of the life of Ivar Kreuger - a man who had intimate friends in a long row of governments and private corporations and who had the stamina to meet the hawks on the economical battlefield and invest in Peace during the turbulent years between the World Wars!

Two hours of Ivar Kreuger - discreet friend of Albert Einstein and Fridtjof Nansen, discreet friend of many other lovers of stability and fair living conditions for people all over the world.

A motion picture about a man who was a keen collector of the most valuable and beautiful things on planet Earth.
As you collect fossils by the shorelines of your sommer paradise,  Ivar Kreuger collected Real Estate, Mines, Forests, Power Plants, Monopolies, Art (Rembrandt, Courbet, Munch, Zorn, Milles etc), Libraries, Gardens, Yachts, Cars, Jensen and Ängman silver, jewelry, gold coins and guns...yes, guns. He had a  collection of Afghan handguns. He possessed the hated first Slide Bar Repeating Rifle of Browning, a weapon of mass killing. He hated Browning's ever since and always ordered weapons of other brands.

In his youth he lost his loved one. 
The one and only died in pneumonia in her home in Norway while he was in South Africa, buildig the Carlton Hotel, investing in the dimond industry of Barnato and Rothschild, busy making his first fortune for her sake.
When he slowly returned to life, after her chocking death, he no longer were monogamous and began living a life of a sailor. 

He became the richest man in the world.

He spent several months a year on Atlantic crossings - in titanic luxury.
In New York and Paris he designed Winter Gardens and lived in splendor on top of the most exclusive buildings.
 

He was a man interested only in "the real thing" - no forgeries or fakes ever fooled him.

To withstand the pressures of the haute finance of armament he bought information in the small passages of jazz clubs and speakeasies.

In New Orleans, in the beginning of the twentieth century, he met the jazz music of the liberated slaves and came to love jazz music ever after - he had no problems, what so ever, to fit in on Connie´s Inn in Harlem, New York or Schlesischer Bahnhof in Berlin. Lois Armstrong became his favorite musician.

In 1932 he also fitted in in the White House and other houses of political and financial power and were the inspiring leader of the largest financial syndicate the world to that date ever had seen, consisting of, among many others, Lee, Higginson & Co., National City Company, Guaranty Trust of Newyork, Dillon, Read & Co., Brown Brothers & Co., Clark Dodge & Co., N.M. Rothschild & Sons, Deutsche Bank, Warburg & Co., Mendelssohn & Co., Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft, Hope & Co., Schweizerischer Bankverein, Banque de Commerce de Bâle, Pictet & Cie, Société Générale de Belgique...

Stalin were furiously anti Kreuger who exposed a dangerously well functioning form of international capitalism. Ivar Kreuger were on the brink of saving the NEP - the New Economic Program in the Soviet Union which wisely allowed some private business and had obvious success in the beginning of 1928. 
Stalin hated that!
He stated:" No private economy is possible in a true bolsjeviker state!"
And with his blow on NEP Stalin was the de facto dictator of the Soviet Union and the Polite Bureau had to accept that and reject the biggest, and most generous, loan offer in history from the Kreuger Trust in association with above mentioned companies and national banks. 

Two hours of the life of a Magnate, in an orgy of flowers, jazz music, film stars and celebrities of the roaring twenties and the beginning of the thirties, when he tried to escape the public eye using completely diffrent methods than Charles Lindbergh, who avoided  reporters and photographers as shrewdly as Ivar Kreuger did.

The illusive Magnate Ivar Kreuger seemed to be able to do the impossible and thus eventually had to be stopped on the 12 the of March 1932, the funeral day of Aristide Briant - the illustrious French minister, in the center of Pan European Politics all through the twenties, a Nobel Price winner and Kreuger supporter. Central Paris is crowded with mourners where Ivar Kreuger is murdered - poisoned and stabbed in the heart. The enemy is working from within the empty apartment
beneath Kreuger's own. The security of Ivar Kreuger, his anonymity, does no longer work. The murderers know where he is.
On that day the European Peace died too. 

Two hours of contrasts - peace and war, love and hate, guns and roses - Ivar Kreuger in an outstanding act of balance.

Salieri was inferior of Amadeus and Morgan was inferior of Kreuger.
Stalin was the arch enemy.

The rest is sinister Machiavellian planning.  Two men and two opposite systems in cooperation against the generous and peace keeping leader of the Kreuger Trust!

The question of murder is there to make a true drama - two hours of it.

THE KREUGER MOVIE 

 

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