Up until 1933, German studios retained a preeminent position both in European and in world film production. Pictures such as Josef Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, Fritz Lang's M, and Leontine Sagan's Maedchen in Uniform were spectacular successes both critically and at the box office. After the rise to power of the Nazis, the story changed drastically. Apart from the possible exception of Leni Refienstahl's Triumph of the Will and Olympiade, it is difficult to come up with significant examples of German film art made during the Nazi period. But no one should imagine that the reconstituted movie industry-basically under the control of Goebbels-simply went over to making propaganda vehicles. As Jan-Christopher Horak explains in his useful liner notes to this excellent Kino Video DVD of Detlef Sierck's 1937 soap opera La Habanera, "Much more successful [than propaganda pieces like SA Mann Brand] were star studded historical epics, spy and adventure films, and comedies that transported Gesinnung (ideology) in the subtext." Among the popular genres was the kitschy romantic melodrama, which had antecedents in pre-Nazi hits such as The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna (1929) and Dreaming Lips (1932). La Habanera, which has similarities to Pola Negri's intended comeback picture, Tango Notturno (1937), is very much in this vein, telling the story of a Swedish visitor to Puerto Rico, Astree Sternhjelm (Zarah Leander), who runs away from the ship that is supposed to take her home and unwisely marries a local aristocratic landowner, Don Pedro de Avila (Ferdinand Marian). After ten years of unhappy conjugal union, Astree only wants to flee the steamy tropics back to the snowy wastes of her homeland, taking her son along with her. At this point, an old flame of hers conveniently appears, a Swedish doctor who has come to the island to study the mysterious "Puerto Rico fever," a fatal epidemic whose existence local officials as well as Don Pedro want to cover up. La Habanera may well be indebted to two older American films. The most evident parallel is with John Ford's adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith (1931), whose last third depicts the protagonist's attempt to subdue an outbreak of the plague on a Caribbean isle. However, a less obvious but more tantalizing debt could be owing to Josef Von Sternberg's The Devil Is a Woman, apparent both in details of the mise en scene and in La Habanera's thinly veiled attempt to pass off Zarah Leander as a successor to Marlene Dietrich. Even the vainly proud Don Pedro, a rather improbable denizen of Puerto Rico in 1937, seems cut from the same cloth as Lionel Atwill's Don Pasqual in the earlier movie. The Devil Is a Woman was based on a novel by Pierre Louys dating back to 1898, and the action of La Habanera-its up to date setting notwithstanding-clearly harks back to the same era. The film's saga of a woman who stakes all in the pursuit of passion as much as the scenes of picturesque natives at play in the fields and of colorful local customs like bullfighting are clichés of etiolated fin de siecle exoticism. Yet was not the current of aestheticism that plays so conspicuous a role in the films of Douglas Sirk-as the director was called after his emigration to the United States-itself a prominent feature of the same era? Moreover, it would not be hard to find evidences of aestheticism in the sense of a fascination with beautiful appearances and of a desire to create a work of purely artistic value in the earlier films of both Lang and F. W. Murnau, not to mention in the work of lesser directors like G.W. Pabst. This association with the past may explain the virtual allergy to anything tainted with aestheticism on the part of émigré directors like Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger. Indeed, Walter Benjamin, probably thinking of the sinister example of Stefan George, characterized Nazism itself as "the aestheticization of politics." However, Sierck's aestheticism in La Habanera like that of the later Sirk in Written on the Wind represents an anachronistic Schlussakkord and not a plangent Fascist overture. But if Sierck/Sirk's conscientious dedication to aestheticism may have itself immunized him to seductions that figures of the caliber of Gottfried Benn or Emil Nolde found themselves unable to resist, it also marked a limit to his artistic development. Here the comparison with The Devil Is a Woman, which still possesses some of the efficacy of a gesture of defiance against the hypocrisy and repression of bourgeois society, is revelatory. It, like the director's other collaborations with Dietrich, opens up an essentially tragic perspective. Life is an ongoing disaster for Von Sternberg just as it was for the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but a movie director could not so easily fall back on Joyce's modernist faith in art. Even if the blind rush of life can be momentarily suspended in a moment of artistic vision, what happens when the artist preserves that moment in an intrinsically ephemeral medium? It can hardly have escaped Von Sternberg's attention that he was raising no "monument more lasting than brass" but one made of silver nitrate. Nothing of Von Sternberg's ironic consciousness penetrates the closed world of La Habanera. At the end of the film, Astree-her Puerto Rican adventure hermetically closed off with the death of Don Pedro-departs the island for Sweden, just as the audience will soon leave the theater, having finished off its own night in the tropics courtesy of Ufa. In many of the scenes-for example, Leander's rendition of the title song-Sierck achieves a polish any director might well envy. Nonetheless, his triumph culminates in perfectly executing this wretched material, not in transcending it. The paradise that becomes a hell for the heroine was no doubt intended to be one of art for the spectator, but it remains a museum recreation of the Golden Age.
"BOLERO" [or "Death In Puerto Rico"]
RATHER a Fun romp of the 'forbidden senses' during the latter part of the 1930ties seen through the eyes of the stunning Zarah Leander as the love-torn fraulein defying covention and 'somewhat' eloping with the flasing-eyed, handsome foreigner, only to become somewhat a bird in a gilded cage ... with little son [in lederhosen?] intow.
BEAUTIFULLY restored this is a superb example of Doug Sirk's story telling artistry. The costumes are of special note - period perfect - 1936 - 37ish, and paintakingly executed [although in black and white - the fabrics are especially interesting....]
[So are the kitchy hairstyles for Miss Zarah - kind of a mix of Princess Leia meets Carmen - but all in all just perfect!]
A must for the serious student and collector.
Very early Douglas Sirk film
This odd pastiche of medical drama, political thriller and romantic melodrama is of curio value for two reasons. Fans of director Douglas Sirk (here still working in Germany under the name Detlef Sierck) will enjoy the chance to see him plying his trade 'way back during the Depression, and it's also an interesting example of pre-War, post-Weimar German cinema. Still, it's also quite cluttered and muddled in the plot department, and filmically its main strength is in the crisp black-and-white cinematography; the acting and the script are a little sketchy. Sirk is moderately successful trying to stir the romantic angle up into his usual hysterical fever pitch, but there isn't all that much to work with. The plot -- about an impulsive, romantic-minded Swedish gal who gives up her safe European home to live in the passionate, but ultimately grimy and dispiriting island nation of Puerto Rico -- can be seen as allegorical and topical, particularly with an awkward medical subplot showing science being distorted and bent to the will of political power, but it's still not very compelling or fun to watch. It's also hard to tell exactly where the filmmakers are coming down on the commentary about the relationship between developed nations and the Third World -- Latin America seems pretty uniformly looked down on by the "good guys" in this flick, and it certainly is funny how everyone on the island speaks German so fluently. Deutshe starlet Zarah Leander, who sings several stilted musical numbers, also doesn't do much for me; most of the acting seems hurried and unsubtle. I'd tag this as more of a treat for film scholars, rather than movie fans.
Lang's version of Molnar's stage play, "Liliom" is quite wonderful, and one of the best films he directed during his long period of exile. However, Kino's DVD transfer is a disappointment and should be avoided. Buy the VHS version instead, particularly since the DVD looks as if the VHS was merely reproduced with a further loss in duplication. Kino almost always produces good to excellent DVD transfers, so this one is doubly troublesome; the contrast is poor, important details are lost, and the overall image is fuzzy and as soft as whip cream. This should be a five star but the poor quality of the transfer brings it way down. I bought it because I had to see it, but I only saw part of the lovely film that Lang originally put on the screen. More Info about this DVD Director(s): Fritz Lang DVD Release Date: Released the 30 March 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
List Price: $29.95 Your Price: $26.96YOU SAVE $2.99!
Buy it
Consistently cited by critics worldwide as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's bittersweet drama of life, love, class, and the social code of manners and behavior ("the rules of the game") is a savage critique undertaken with sensitivity and compassion. Renoir's catch-phrase through the film, "Everyone has their reasons," develops a multilayered meaning by the conclusion. A young aviator (Roland Toutain) commits a serious social faux pas by alluding to an affair on national radio. To avert a scandal, the cultured Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), husband to the aviator's mistress, Christine (Nora Gregor), and a philanderer in his own right, invites all to a weekend hunting party in his country mansion. The complicated maze of marriages and mistresses (social register... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Nora Gregor - Marcel Dalio Director(s): Jean Renoir DVD Release Date: Released the 20 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $39.95 Your Price: $35.96YOU SAVE $3.99!
Buy it
This brooding, operatic movie about Nazism makes Cabaret look like wholesome family fare. The family in The Damned is a symbol of German society circa 1934. The Krupp-like steel magnate Baron von Essenbeck represents the spineless establishment. The Nazis kill the baron, then frame one heir apparent, a socialist (married to the stunning Charlotte Rampling). A bearish, boorish Essenbeck representing the SA, the Nazis' early goon squad, takes the reins. But Hitler murdered the SA in the 1934 "Night of the Long Knives," providing The Damned with its bravura action scene, a Nazi massacre at a gay SA orgy. The winning Essenbeck is the murderous, pedophilic, transvestite, mother-rapist Martin (sharp-featured Helmut Berger), who represents Nazism. Though he's better in... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Dirk Bogarde - Ingrid Thulin - Helmut Griem - Helmut Berger Director(s): Luchino Visconti DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.98 Your Price: $17.98YOU SAVE $2!
Buy it
The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers (Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons (led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda - Linda Darnell Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $11.98YOU SAVE $3!
Buy it
Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel is the very definition of sumptuous: the costumes and sets, the special geography of Venice, and the breathtaking cinematography combine to form a heady experience. At the center of this gorgeousness is Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a meticulous performance), a controlled intellectual who unexpectedly finds himself obsessed by the vision of a 14-year-old boy while on a convalescent vacation in 1911. Visconti has turned Aschenbach into a composer, which accounts for the lush excerpts from Mahler on the soundtrack (Bogarde is meant to look like Mahler, too). Even if it tends to hit the nail on the head a little too forcefully, and even if Visconti can test one's patience with lingering looks at crowds at the beach and hotel dining rooms,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Dirk Bogarde Director(s): Luchino Visconti DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.98 Your Price: $17.98YOU SAVE $2!
Buy it
