Schlussakkord / Final Accord (1936 Douglas Sirk)

Sirk says (to Jon Halliday) it was "rather an important film in my career... I had realized that the theatre and cinema are two completely different media. From Schlussakkord onwards I got right away and tried to develop a cinema style. I began to understand that the camera is the main thing here, because there is emotion in motion pictures. Motion is emotion, in a way it can never be in the theatre." And this is very obvious in some of its dramatic edits, for example the lover suddenly sweeping up the wife cut to a similar shot in the ballet, or the boy's merry-go-round cut to the figurines on the record player. Or the subjective camera when the wife faints, or the direct to camera look where the mother finds her son. And the camera is both static and moving and placed high and low, and the concert sequences, though they arguably weigh the film down a little (it's 1,36) are impressively staged and edited.

Though interestingly much of the film is filmed opera and ballet, and the boy puts on a puppet theatre show. It's like Sirk is harking back to his own days as a theatre director.

It was a big hit, but Sirk was becoming increasingly nervous about Germany. He finally escaped on the pretext of looking for film locations, otherwise he never would have got away.

This is a fine melodrama. It begins (again with great motion and editing) in New York where a man is found dead. The following scene where masqued drunken revellers burst into her apartment is shockingly similar to something that happed in The Tarnished Angels... We learn she has left a son in Germany. Cut to - and the professor of the orphanage happens to be a close friend of a famous conductor, who wishes he had a child. Meanwhile his wife is having an affair with an astrologist.... A famous writer called Oberlànder had written the treatment and objected to Sirk's re-write so took his name off it.

Good cast: Willy Birgel, Lil Dagover, Maria Tasnadi Fekete (the mother), Maria Koppenhofer (head of household), Theodor Loos (professor) and Peter Bosse as the child.

Photographed by Robert Baberske, edited by Milo Harbich, for UFA.

Sirk compared this to the face of the dead soldier in the ice in A Time to Love and a Time To Die

Is this mask predicting doom?

Sirk later came to use mirror imagery often

It was slightly compromised by the subtitles appearing two seconds after the dialogue, so at times a shot / reverse-shot scene would seem like the dialogue belonged to the wrong person! But I'm not complaining, as the film seems to have had no official DVD release, even in Germany.