A 1935 opera singer romance where duty and desire crash harder than any ocean liner.
Tenor Enzo Curti, a widower with a young child, falls in love with a secretary from New York. Liselotte has experienced disappointment in her first love, Helmut, an ocean liner officer. She marries Enzo Curti, but later, when she meets Helmut again, she experiences emotional stress as love struggles with a sense of duty in her heart.
Acting
Magda Schneider's trembling restraint breaks your heart.
Production
Glossy UFA aesthetic disguising raw emotional chaos.
Score
Beniamino Gigli's actual tenor voice, no dubbing.
Director
Augusto Genina
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Magda Schneider was Romy Schneider's mother; this role's repressed suffering eerily prefigures Romy's own trapped-woman films with Visconti.
Augusto Genina shot three versions simultaneously — German, French, and Italian — with Schneider only in the German cut, replaced by other stars elsewhere.
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