Schlußakkord (Detlef Sierck [Douglas Sirk], 1936)

This, Sirk told Jon Halliday, was his first melodrama (Sirk on Sirk, p. 45), and it certainly has all the ingredients – a complicated kind of love square, a suicide, blackmail, a kidnapping, the trial of an innocent woman – not to mention a judicious dose of the improbable: a woman implores the head of the orphanage to which she has given up her child that she has to be reunited with him, and just at that moment the child's new foster father, a famous conductor called Garvenberg (Willy Birgel), telephones to say that he's looking for a nanny... But while it may not be entirely credible, it's very far from being risible. Performances are big but not without delicacy (though perhaps Lil Dagover of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari fame as the conductor's wife is a little broad by modern standards), and the narrative sidesteps the most obvious maneouvres, even going out of its way at times to telegraph them as if to chide us for underestimating it; a Sleeping Beauty motif is introduced only to be deliberately undercut, for example. The music is tremendous, and given generous attention – no contemporary underestimation of the audience's patience here. Transitions and connections are handled with particular imagination: the distance between Germany and New York is emphasised by shots of the Atlantic at the same time as simultaneity is emphasised by having the characters in New York listen to a radio broadcast of the very same performance of Beethoven's Ninth that Garvenberg is conducting. Music is accorded a very great power in the film, and yet one transition (just after that mentioned in the previous sentence) manages to ask whether there is anything in common between lovers of Beethoven and afficionados of a pseudo-scientific astrology. (The visual style likewise manages to move between the efficient and the grotesque with elegance.) Both the connections and differences between this and Sirk's acclaimed American melodramas are fascinating (of course, we should not ignore the fact that the film was made in Germany during the Third Reich; a number of scholars such as Linda Schulte-Sasse and Andrew G. Bonnell have pondered this), and it would be great to see a proper restoration, rather than the VHS rip that I watched.

PS For a detailed look at the film, Linda Schulte-Sasse's 1998 article "Douglas Sirk's Schlußakkord and the Question of Aesthetic Resistance" (The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 73:1, 2-31) is highly recommended. A couple of thoughts I had in reaction to it follow (which will, I'm afraid, make little sense if you haven't seen the film and might also be guilty of a spoiler or two).

Schulte-Sasse is quite right to point out (p. 10) Garvenberg's fantasy of a world with "no women, nothing but Bach, Haydn and Mozart". Charlotte's incomprehension of music and desire for attention from her husband may recall misogynist tropes of the irrational woman enslaved to her desires, but it is not reducible to them; she really does love her husband (though she wants her lover too). Her death might even be seen to express this, in some ways (it certainly brings out the real love in her maid, who had previously become rather a cartoon antagonist for the mother). The conductor's one attempt to compromise (when he attempts to cancel a concert in order to attend to Charlotte) is blocked, and so at the end he achieves a satisfactory "final arrangement" ("Schlußakkord" means either this, or the final chord in a piece of music) having had to direct hardly any agency toward achieving this goal. Thus there is perhaps an irony in the final pan up from the reunited son and mother to the stone angels with their brass trumpets. Do we put the emphasis on the angelic, or on petrification?