After choosing Hitler over Hollywood as the lesser of two evils (at least for getting a film made), G.B. Pabst found himself the most acclaimed filmmaker in mid-‘30s Nazi Germany, but not the most popular. That would have been Willi Forst after the one-two punch of MASKERADE/’34 and MAZURKA, rare international successes out of the Reich, using his patented mix of romance, melodrama and music. (Both films quickly/faithfully remade by Hollywood.*) MAZURKA stars silent film diva Pola Negri as a rising young operatic soprano wined, wooed and wrangled into bed by Albrecht Schoenhals’s womanizing piano virtuoso. A sorry tale reluctantly told in flashback twenty years after the fact by a sadder-but-wiser Negri, on trial for his murder. Now a Music Hall chanteuse she recognized her seducer starting the same routine with a young woman, a fresh young thing just about the age the daughter she gave up all those years ago would now be. Yikes! Where’s Douglas Sirk when you need him? Technically a bit rough around the edges, Forst likes tricky editing and optical printer tricks the German film industry couldn’t handle as smoothly as Hollywood did at the time. (A recent restoration may iron out some of these faults.) Negri, thicker than she was in her heyday, but still a powerhouse, and surprisingly non-demonstrative/modern in her acting choices, leagues ahead of the acting going on around her. The film largely holding up right thru its secret mother/grateful daughter renunciation scene.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: *Over at M-G-M, MASKERADE became ESCAPADE/’35 while MAZURKA landed at Warner Bros. as CONFESSION/’37, probably the best of Kay Francis’s post-Production Code vehicles. Ironic as Warners stopped German distribution in 1934, the year before MAZURKA was made, after one of their reps was attacked in the street for Jewish connections. Even more ironic, CONFESSION was directed by German/UFA emigré Joe May. Off the record, I prefer it. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/confession-1937.html
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