When her husband, an embezzler who fled to New York, commits suicide, Hanna (Maria Von Tasnady) returns to Germany to find her small son. The boy is now in the care of an orchestra conductor (Willy Birgel) and his faithless wife Charlotte (Lil Dagover), who is locked into an affair with a villainous clairvoyant (Albert Lippert). Hanna takes a job as governess to her son and, after many highly charged complications, a harmonious resolution is found.

Sirk’s full-blown melodrama shows him intensifying the conventions of the genre: Beethoven, clairvoyants and court-room drama all contribute to the emotions in which he ruthlessly implicates his audience. A crucial work for Sirk’s development of his cinematic style and as a director of melodrama in America.

Germany, 1936.
Black and white.
English subtitles.
102 mins.
16mm print.