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The Nordic origins are acknowledged early on with a pitch of Dreyer's Præsidenten in the courtroom, the wronged heroine is so pious that she throws away her case rather than have the employer who impregnated her perjure himself. A sad, wispy maid (Hansi Knoteck) on the margins of the scornful town, the girl from the marsh, "I won't cry anymore." She's hired by the young farmer (Kurt Fischer-Fehling) with a jealous fiancée (Ellen Frank), she's homesick and afraid of ghosts but gradually steeled by love. (The camera slips into a sudden, lyrical pirouette as the main characters share a moment in the barn, taking note of wooden equines and linked sausages up on the rafters before imagining the couple as shadows on the wall.) Rural traditions are observed, Father (Friedrich Kayssler) utters one word every other day, Mother (Jeanette Bethge) is handy with metaphors: "Marriage is like bacon. It's still good if it's meager, but it's not real bacon." Douglas Sirk already sharp on outcasts and ceremonies, with a sure technique indoors and outdoors. A song and a brawl and a potential murder during the bachelor party at the local tavern, the screen is a mirror that shatters (Summer Storm). "Church is for those who wait," among them is the bride exasperated with the postponement, rituals outside (band in full swing, maidens holding floral arches) go through the motions. The girl rides to the rescue, the boy ditches the community, the melodrama finds harmony. "A loving heart is a foolish heart," Sirk wouldn't have it any other way. With Theodor Loos, Eduard von Winterstein, Lina Carstens, and Erich Dunskus. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |