SGE#30: Der Neue Kanon des deutschen Films (2017)

This film was shot in Ufa-Ateliers Neubabelsberg, intermittently from late January 1930 through early March of the same year. In all, the shooting added up to 15 days. On March 24th 1930, the Censors (Filmprüfstelle Berlin) authorize it for projection (document: B. 25457, Jf). Richard Oswald's first full sound film, it premiered on April 3rd 1930. Breaking with the then popular wine, women and song genre by filling most of the main roles with leading stars from Berlin's cabaret scene (in particular Max Ehrlich, Siegfried Arno, Paul Morgan and Paul Graetz), this film immediately met with enormous public acclaim. Steffi is in love with the unemployed musician Pepi. Still, her father the musical instrument retailer, Ignaz Korn, wants her to marry one of his card playing buddies, the butcher Burgstaller. When the typesetter, Cäsar Grün, purposely misprints a winning lottery number in the newspaper, Korn and Burgstaller, thinking they have won, pay the drinks for everybody in the Bock Café and then give away their businesses. Once the misprint is corrected, there is great disappointment and despair. However, in the end, orderly relationships are re-established on all sides ...and, back at the musical instrument shop, Pepi and Steffi are sitting together blissfully, their wedding announcement in hand.

A husband takes his wife to a nightclub in Berlin. While there he breaks the news to her that he thinks they should divorce, and leaves her with a young girl on his arm. Angry and humiliated, the wife picks up a young nobleman and takes him home with her. Unfortunately, he turns out to be an international con man who drugs her drink and steals her jewelry. Luckily, the police have been following him and arrest him before he can get away. Meanwhile the husband is starting to have second thoughts about leaving his wife. Complications ensue.

A small time crook keeps trying to reunite with a woman who briefly sheltered him while he was on the run from the law.

A misfit, working in his uncle's clothing store, keeps doing the wrong things.

Vienna, at the height of the Great Depression. Like so many others, Hans has no work, no money, nowhere to live. Having lost his livelihood as a taxi driver, he decides that the only solution is to kill himself. But just as he is about to drown himself, he sees a young woman dive into the river, obviously with the same intention. Without a thought, Hans pulls the woman out of the water and does his best to comfort her. Her name is Anna and she is only 18, but like Hans she no longer has the strength to go on living.

Heinrich George plays Henner who lives with his wife and child on a tugboat, going on the river to Berlin. There he meets the attractive Gescha (Betty Amann), and a story of love, betrayal and sadness ensues.

After serving five years in prison, Robert is released. Since his wife Marie is late to pick him up and misses him they start looking for each other. Robert sees a man drop a note in Marie's letterbox, and in a jealous rage follows him.

Anita, famous actress staying at the Savoy hotel, is singing at the balcony when her fur cape falls down onto Baron Wollheim. In returning it she takes him for a waiter. As long as he can stay near her he's not willing to discourage her.

When a young woman loses her mother's money due to a bank failure, a middle aged benefactor comes to her protection.But the man has hired an attractive ex officer to tutor his sons.

A story of the romance of Maria Baschkirtzeff and Guy de Maupassant beginning with their first meeting leading to other meetings and the development of their ill-fated romance.

A valet tries to uphold the principles of the old aristocracy he serves, a bit difficult when his master the Earl falls for a sketchy lady while the son gets a commoner woman pregnant and then runs off to the Middle East.

An actress breaks her engagement to a theater director who wants her to give up her career.But, still attracted to him, she masquerades as her twin sister to win him that way.

Biography of the life of the circus performer Alfredo Codona.

A young soldier in an army camp near a small Swiss village gets into an argument with his sergeant, which winds up in a fight. The soldier, believing he has killed the sergeant, flees to Zurich, determined to disguise himself and cross the border into France. However, things don't work out quite as he had planned.

Amidst the Nazi invasion of France in 1942, a young girl is evacuated to Switzerland but is still haunted by the terrors she has witnessed.

A gang of thieves plans to hit of a warehouse filled with precious stuff.

Brandner Kaspar does not want to die, there is still so much to do and experience on earth. When death appears and wants to get him, Kaspar plays with him for his life - and wins.

Featuring one of the era's most beloved male idols, Hans Albers, as the doctor losing control of his dark side, is Viktor Turzanskij's rarely-screened Jekyll-and-Hyde version Vom Teufel gejagt. For added depth and relevance, a colleague who, years before, had assumed the doctor's guilt when an experiment went badly returns to continue their earlier research-besides, his name is tarnished anyway, where else could he go? It's difficult to not see this very elegantly dispassionate piece (a curious predecessor to the soon rising Arztfilm-wave) as an attempt to discuss its star's and auteur's involvement with the Nazi-era film industry: Albers starred in Herbert Selpin's world-weary anti-British epopee Carl Peters (1941), and Turzanskij directed (and co-wrote) the edgy anti-Polish, anti-labor drama Feinde (1940).

Toxi, an Afro-German girl, is left at the doorstep of the Rose family assembled for a birthday party. When they find a suitcase with Toxi, they realize that she has been abandoned.

A German lady spy nicknamed The Gnat meets a man who'd saved her life, he's now dealing in the criminal weapons trade.She is torn between duty (she warns him about what he's doing) and gratitude,and risks danger herself in the conflict.

Purely by chance, ballet superstar Sylvia Verena discovers that Angelika Helmer has real talent. The child, however, cannot speak and hasn't been able to since falling down as a young child.