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From the Adelphi Theatre to Parramatta Prison to the chapel, a matter of institutions. London via foreign studio (cp. Carné's Drôle de drame), "dubious aristocrats" abound, one is the royal captain (Willy Birgel) who forges a check before heading off to the colonies Down Under. The sacrificial lamb is his beloved, the scandalous singer (Zarah Leander) who takes the fall for him while Brecht-Weill organ grinders sound off outside the courthouse. Heat and gossip dominate the Sydney outpost, where he has set up camp in the governor's house while she aches in the penitentiary. A crise de conscience, an expired escape. "There's only one crime, ignorance, and only one virtue, beauty." Douglas Sirk on the Victorian epoch and near the start of the Second World War, new shores make for a distant purgatory that crystallizes ongoing hypocrisies and rituals. So it goes with the "love parade" sequence, for female prisoners a lateral move—one by one they step out of shadows and into a spotlight before a clammy audience of potential husbands, Leander finds herself hitched to the earnest farmer (Viktor Staal), covered wagon and all. (The aborigine welcoming band at the ranch has its mirror reflection in the can-can dancers at the lowdown music hall.) Mamoulian's We Live Again, a parallelism with Ophuls, the path to Hitchcock (Under Capricorn) has been noted. "Ich steh' im regen und warte auf dich," she croons, the downpour finally comes, "I've waited too long." The heroine cannot get back behind bars and falls asleep in church, she wakes up to her own wedding, two decades before Imitation of Life here's the choir exalting the happy ending that isn't. With Edwin Jürgensen, Carola Höhn, Erich Ziegel, and Hilde von Stolz. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |