Der Juxbaron is the only Ellen Richter production of the silent era not to feature Ellen Richter among the cast. Richter served merely as producer of this screen adaptation of Walter Kollo’s 1913 farce with music, the lyrics for which had been written by Richter’s husband Willi Wolff. The film follows the comic (mis)adventures of a poor street musician, who is roped into posing as an eccentric nobleman. He and his antics are rapturously received by the members of a bourgeois family desperate to mingle with the aristocracy. The daughter of the family – played by a young Marlene Dietrich in her first sizeable supporting role, complete with monocle, necktie, and flapper look – takes a fancy to the baron (in reality, merely a “joke baron”), assuming him to be immensely wealthy. The “joke baron” of the title is played by actor-director Reinhold Schünzel, who up to the mid-1920s was often typecast as a villain (as in Richter’s Der Flug um den Erdball), only to become later one of Weimar Germany’s most popular comic actors, as well as a director of several highly successful comedies.
Der Juxbaron presents itself as a classic comedy-of-errors, a light-hearted mixture of theatrical set pieces, flirtations, music, and carnival. Berlin-based critic Erich Palme noted in Lichtbild-Bühne (07.03.1927): “The authors Robert Liebmann and Willi Wolff have incorporated a wealth of good and bad jokes, new and old ideas. Willi Wolff, the director, helmed the proceedings with a firm grip on punchlines and situations, without caring whether all the subtleties of modern film direction had also been applied. (…) The audience simply cannot stop laughing.”
The production of Der Juxbaron coincided with a highly critical period in the history of Germany’s largest film company, Ufa. To rescue itself from the brink of bankruptcy and at the same time get access to American dollars, the Berlin-based company entered into a joint venture with its American competitors Paramount and M-G-M. Under the name “Parufamet”, they formed a new distribution outlet to boost the release of the three partner companies’ most prestigious films in Germany. While Ufa struggled to complete its super-productions, like Murnau’s Faust and Lang’s Metropolis, both of which had gone way over schedule and budget, the German company commissioned a spate of low- and medium-budget genre films in order to fulfil its contractual obligation to provide 20 new films each season for distribution by Parufamet. In this situation, Ellen Richter proved to be a reliable supplier of both inexpensive and popular films for Ufa and Parufamet. – Philipp Stiasny

The print  The Bundesarchiv’s print of Der Juxbaron was struck at the archive’s own in-house photochemical lab in Berlin in 1999 from a safety duplicate negative produced in 1984 by the former Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR (State Film Archive of the GDR).