During the war years, German director Helmut Käutner’s apolitical output could be labeled indirectly subversive. He didn’t attack, but elided Nazi Propaganda. Too technically gifted at that most maddeningly difficult of genres, popular musical romance to drop (Herr Hitler loved his musicals & operettas!), this unobjectionable film was banned by Nazi Authorities for a lack of Homeland heroics. (Had it gone into production before Nazi Germany’s Total War policy was implemented?) Cast with popular stars of the day, there’s barely a story to it: salvage ship sailor, currently singing star at a circus-like Hamburg nightclub, meets two old shipmates hoping to get him back to sea, but hopes his new gal is ‘the real thing.’ Alas, she finds true love with another, and the three sailors return to ship. With corny comedy; a wan score (lots of accordion); no lookers in the cast (other than the girl), this seems none too promising. But Käutner gets something going out of very little: a few jealousies, a nightclub brawl, a cozy den of iniquity, quick pans & serpentine tracking, all in beautifully restored, powdery AgfaColor. It’s something to see. Even a wild nightmare for leading man Hans Albers that might have graced a Vincente Minnelli musical. Käutner did try Hollywood on for size in the ‘50s, but little came of it. By then he’d been one of the first German filmmakers back on the job, early as 1946, now taking on all sorts of socially conscious, political topics post-war. If only the material here was a bit better.
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