The Final Chord

"Schlußakkord" was the movie preceding "La Habanera" when Douglas Sirk was still Detlef Sierck and it is par excellence the movie which predates his great melodramas of the fifties.Not that the subject was very new:A young, impoverished German woman named Hanna (Maria Von Tasnady) gives her infant up for adoption ;when she comes back to her native land ,her son is now living in a rich family ,the man is a conductor and his wife ,a frustrated woman ,plays around until she gets this child she longed for;the biological mother takes a job as the brat's governess but of course the posh woman abetted by her former nanny ,a sinister-looking matron Rebecca's Mrs Danvers style , comes to hate her and dismiss her.Those who like stuff such as "the old maid" or "to each his own" or " a stolen life" should have a wonderful time watching this work.

There are sequences which predate Sierck's future works: a drunken guy wearing a carnival mask entering the heroine 's room at a dramatic moment makes one think of this skeleton bursting into an apartment in "tanished angels" (1957);the trial predates that of "written on the wind"(1956) with its new developments;and the final is almost as pompous as the ending of "imitation of life" (1959).

The shows are omnipresent:concerts (Beethoven's 9th symphony which cheers up the heroin far away from her land;pretty soon Sierck would have to leave it too) ,stage dramas ,heavenly choirs -the camera shows a statue of the Virgin babe in arms before filming the mother and child reunion;even more remarkable is the brat's little "show" : telling the story of "SnowWhite and the six dwarfs" -because a dwarf is missing- becomes a "tale in the tale", for as the young princess bites into the poisoned apple,his true mom is about to have a bad time.