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This 1937 black-and-white movie was the penultimate film directed by Detlev Sierck in Germany before he emigrated to the United States. The film was produced within six months. In Hollywood, Sierck, now Sirk, continued to produce more melodramatic movies, yet on a grander scale. Zarah Leander had been hired by UFA, the German film company, in 1936, and was its new star. This movie shows her beauty and talents as Germany’s answer to Greta Garbo, and further presents her accomplishments as a singer. Bruno Balz, who wrote the text for the title song, would later be sent to a concentration camp - he was a homosexual. A funny scene with the comedian Werner Finck as Söderblom was cut by the censors, but restored after the war. This was the only film for the child actor Michael Schulz-Dornburg who played Juan; at the end of WWII, he was drafted and died at the age of 17 near Berlin in 1945.
The movie was not shot on Puerto Rico but the Canary Islands during the Spanish Civil War. It presents an interesting but fanciful image of Puerto Rico, mixing curiosity about the exotic, fantasy, and prejudice. The shepherds are wearing loincloths, and everybody speaks perfect German. The island appears to be run by selfish, authoritarian and corrupt local businessmen and landowners, and the movie is critical of the United States as the responsible party. In the film, habanera music (music that actually originated from Cuba) represents the soul of the island, its "erotic pull", it captivates and enchants Astrée for some time, but in the end she is happy to return home. The lesson for the contemporary German moviegoer was clear: it is better to stick to your roots. The film plays into the Nazi propaganda trying to repatriate Germans. With the demise of UFA, the rights of the film belong to the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation.
Read more about this topic: La Habanera (film)
Famous quotes containing the word comments:
“My note to you I certainly did not expect to see in print; yet I have not been much shocked by the newspaper comments upon it. Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father’s curse, mother’s moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)