Blu-ray Review: Douglas Sirk’s The Girl from the Marsh Croft and The Final Chord

These two films show that Douglas Sirk’s genius bore fruit decades prior to his mid-1950s masterpieces.

The Douglas Sirk CollectionLong before Douglas Sirk burnished his legend in 1950s Hollywood with a series of brilliantly subversive hothouse melodramas, he made a series of films under his real name, Detlef Sierck, for the legendary UFA Studios. Despite his success in the U.S. and eventual canonization into the pantheon of great directors, his early German work still remains surprisingly underseen outside of his native country.

Once can already sense Sirk’s flair for melodrama and fascination with social outcasts and pariahs alike in his second feature, The Girl from the Marsh Croft. Set in a tight-knit farming community in northern Germany, the 1935 drama focuses on the tribulations of a young maid, Helga (Hansi Knoteck), who’s dismissed by her employer and shunned by her community after having a child out of wedlock. She receives sympathy from Karsten (Kurt Fischer-Fehling), a young man who admires her for publicly standing up for herself and soon hires her, but is left to contend with Karsten’s privileged fiancée (Ellen Frank), who refuses to marry him unless he fires Helga.

While The Girl from the Marsh Croft is a prototypical heimatfilm, with cinematography that often lingers on the lush beauty of rural Germany, it also touches on themes that would come to define Sirk’s Hollywood work, such as the crushing weight of societal expectations. The kindly Karsten and the naïve yet moral Helga even form a friendship that, while not romantic, is reminiscent of the one between the main characters in All That Heaven Allows. Here, though, it’s religious hypocrites who chip away at the happiness of two people defying their town’s rigid mores. At one point, a minor character comments that “a loving heart is a foolish heart,” and more than anything, the moment indicates that Sirk’s familiar concern with the impulses that get people in trouble is firmly in place in his early work.

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If the seeds of Sirk’s future greatness are sown in The Girl from the Marsh Croft, they’re already in bloom by the time of his intercontinental melodrama from the subsequent year, The Final Chord. Following Hanna (Maria von Tasnady), a woman who was forced to give her son up for adoption and leave Germany for America after her husband committed insurance fraud, the film is a deeply moving tale of maternal love and social morality that foregrounds Sirk’s self-professed understanding of melodrama in the most literal sense: music plus drama.

A wild, almost surrealist, opening depicts the widespread debauchery of New Year’s Eve festivities across Manhattan, ending with Hanna being informed of her husband’s suicide. The moral depravity that The Final Chord hints at in this sequence is mirrored back in Germany in the hedonism of the selfish, turbulent Charlotte (Lil Dagover) and her affair with a sleazy astrologer turned blackmailer named Gregor (Albert Lippert). After Charlotte and her husband, the highly respected orchestra conductor Garvenberg (Willy Birgel), adopt Hanna’s son (Peter Bosse), we’re primed for the inevitable showdown between the two women, which comes to fruition when Hanna returns to Germany to work as her son’s nanny.

Sirk amplifies the conflict between narcissistic indulgence and selfless compassion with interstitial shots of ocean waves as The Final Chord bounces back and forth between continents. There are also several forceful musical interludes, none more powerful than when a radio performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony being broadcast in Germany seemingly shakes Hanna out of her depression and prompts her return to her homeland. For Sirk, it’s music and love that possess the regenerative power needed to combat moral turpitude, so it’s unsurprising that the bond between Hanna and Garvenberg is ultimately presented as a beacon of light in a world full of schemers and scoundrels.

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Image/Sound

Kino hasn’t listed any information about the sources used for this release, but it’s unlikely that the transfers came from any sort of restoration. There’s a considerable amount of scratches and flickering throughout The Girl from the Marsh Croft, while the contrast is lacking overall. Most of the time, the image is relatively sharp, but certain shots and sequences are a tad soft and milky. The transfer for The Final Chord fairs considerably better, and while there’s still a bit of damage on display, it’s far less noticeable. The image is more stable, grain distribution is more consistent, and the blacks are richer. On the audio front, the presentation on The Girl from the Marsh Croft is quite rough, with frequent hisses and pops and static that’s present whenever there’s no dialogue or music. The Final Chord also fares better here, with the dialogue sounding less tinny and the background static is far less aggressive.

Extras

Kino has commissioned two new audio commentaries for this release, one for each film. German film historian Olaf Möller provides an informative commentary for The Girl from the Marsh Croft, but it’s also dry and prone to long stretches of silence. Nonetheless, Möller manages to cover a good deal of ground, touching on the German film industry in the 1930s, the backgrounds of various actors, and the film’s themes. Film historian Anthony Slide’s track for The Final Chord is more lively, offering a lot of historical background on both Sirk and his players as well as some choice aesthetic analysis that compares and contrasts some of the director’s camera movements and musical choices with his later Hollywood films.

Overall

The transfers here are pretty uneven, but bless Kino for releasing these all but forgotten films, which show Douglas Sirk’s genius bore fruit decades prior to his mid-1950s masterpieces.

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Score: 
 Cast: Hansi Knoteck, Kurt Fischer-Fehling, Ellen Frank, Willy Birgel, Lil Dagover, Maria von Tasnady  Director: Douglas Sirk  Screenwriter: Philipp Lothar Mayring, Kurt Heuser, Douglas Sirk  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 181 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1935 - 1936  Release Date: February 22, 2022

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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