Schlu%C3%9Fakkord

Schluakkord Final Accord or better Final Chord sometimes anglicised Schlussakkord is a German film melodrama of the Nazi period, the first melodrama directed by Detlef Sierck, who later had a career in Hollywood as Douglas Sirk and specialised in melodramas. It was made under contract for Universum Film AG UFA, stars Lil Dagover and Willy Birgel and also features Maria von Tasnady, and premired in 1936. It shows stylistic features later developed by SierckSirk and makes symbolic and thematic use of music.

At a New Years Eve party in New York, Hanna Mller Maria von Tasnady is informed that her husband has been found dead in Central Park, presumably a suicide. The couple had left Germany because he had embezzled money. Meanwhile, the young son they left behind in an orphanage, Peter, is adopted by Erich Garvenberg Willy Birgel, a famous conductor, and his wife Charlotte Lil Dagover, who is having an affair with an astrologer, Gregor CarlOtto. Hanna Mller goes to the orphanage to enquire after her son and Erich Garvenberg hires her as a nanny. They grow close through their love for the boy. Charlotte Garvenberg learns of Mllers husbands criminality and fires her. Mller returns to abduct her son, but Charlotte, who is being blackmailed by CarlOtto, overdoses on morphine and dies. Mller administered the drug and is suspected of murder, but at the trial a maid reveals that Charlotte had said she was committing suicide. Hanna and Erich Garvenberg can now marry.The film contrasts American with German culture and a decadent past the Weimar Republic with a healthy, hopeful present the Third Reich that reaffirms the values of the old preWeimar Germany. The interiors, by Erich Kettelhut, a codesigner on Metropolis, have symbolic force in particular, Charlotte Garvenberg is surrounded by mirrors, suggesting narcissism, preoccupied with her own happiness at the expense of her husband or other integration into society, so that her fate in the film in a way, rehearses the conditions under which Weimar culture came to an end, in selfishness, erotic obsessions and empty rituals. In contrast Erich Garvenberg and Hanna are both guided by duty, and Garvenberg is a decisive leader and Hanna is able to draw strength from her rootedness in German culture and her healthy maternal feelings. ........

Source: Wikipedia