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A frenzied evocation of New York City kicks things off, amid the streamers and noisemakers of New Year's Eve is a dead man on a Central Park bench. (Masked revelers burst through the door in an unmistakable foreglimpse of The Tarnished Angels.) The young widow (Mária Tasnádi Fekete) wastes away in her sickbed until she hears Beethoven played by the Berlin Philharmonic, crashing waves and a miniature Statue of Liberty by the radio figure in a series of dissolves, "an experiment in musical correspondence." Meanwhile in Europe, the maestro (Willy Birgel) struggles with the tin ear and straying attention of his wife (Lil Dagover). "He turns every concert hall into a church," she complains, preferring the company of the astrologist-gigolo (Albert Lippert). The couple adopt a tyke (Peter Bosse) whose mother had incidentally left for America, she returns as his babysitter. Blackmail, poison, mirror shots follow, along with a rehearsal for the Written on the Wind tribunal. "Where is the court supposed to draw the line between reality and dream?" Melodrama means music plus drama, says Douglas Sirk, his form is melodically charged even when Tchaikovsky or Handel are not playing. The erudite staging offers a tiny proscenium for a romper-room production of Snow White, followed by vengeful trilling at a real theater, the heroine plays audience to both while contemplating the opera of her own dilemma. The lavish household comes with a severe servant (Maria Koppenhöfer) for the benefit of Hitchcock's Rebecca, her climactic testimony occasions a canny split-screen effect. Marble angels herald mother and child at the close, a happy ending revised by Bergman in To Joy. "If there were no more miracles, who would be able to stand being alive?" In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |