1POPULAR CINEMA

Delineating the formative influence of Weimar culture on Sierck, Jon
Halliday nonetheless evokes the highly politicized theatrical and musical
experiments in “the traditions of Weill, Ophuls, Brecht, and Sternheim.” 12
Where Sierck’s activities during the Third Reich find any mention at all, his
work tends to be associated with various forms of aesthetic resistance. Despite
growing institutional and ideological pressures, the director was allegedly
able to maintain a sense of artistic integrity, for instance, by infusing
conventional material with new meanings. Final Chord, Halliday claims,
forced Sierck to “accept an atrociously mawkish story, loaded down with
‘melodrama,’ and turn it into something new.” 13 In his own words, the UFA
may have been ultraconservative, but its corporate structure still protected
the creative personnel from direct political interference: “It was still a privately
owned company, and there weren’t any Nazis in it at the time. . . . In
1934–35 the situation in the movies was still a lot better than in the theatre.”
14 Sierck spoke from personal experience when he differentiated between
the profit-driven film industry and the heavily subsidized repertory
theater, a driving force in the project of cultural renewal and an important
testing ground for Nazi cultural initiatives before 1933. However, Halliday
translates these institutional differences into aesthetic practices and interprets
them as a sign of independence; hence his conclusion: “It is striking
then within the overall highly oppressive political context of Germany that
there was considerable freedom of maneuver on such matters as re-writing
the script, lighting, camerawork, and casting.” 15
In their search for solutions to the creative crisis after the forced coordination
of the industry, studio heads after 1933 turned increasingly to the
melodrama, a genre neglected during the early sound period, in order to
raise the quality of productions and attract more middle-class audiences.
The training of a new generation of directors with original ideas and distinct
styles was perceived as an important step in this direction; so was the
increased emphasis on marketing. As part of this initiative, Final Chord premiered
on 27 June, on the occasion of the annual convention of motionpicture
theater owners in Leipzig, and again for nationwide release on
24 July in Berlin’s famous Gloria-Palast. The film was a commercial and
critical success, a fact that helped Sierck in his later negotiations with the
UFA studio. Nonetheless, most reviewers ignored the emerging director and
focused instead on the two leading actors, Willy Birgel and Lil Dagover.
Based on their performances, Lichtbildbühne praised Final Chord as “the
most honest, most decent and, in its form, most compelling film of the last
112 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich