Life can be so beautiful

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Movie
Original title Life can be so beautiful
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1938
length 85 minutes
Age rating FSK 0
Rod
Director Rolf Hansen
script Jochen Huth
production Sound film studio Carl Froelich & Co.
music Hansom Milde-Meissner
camera Reimar Kuntze
cut Gustav Lohse
occupation

Life can be so beautiful is a German film by Rolf Hansen from 1938. It is based on the play Ultimo by Jochen Huth , who also wrote the screenplay. In 1950 it was published under the title Eine Frau fürs Leben .

action

Flashbacks tell the young marriage of the insurance agent Hannes and his pregnant wife Nora. The two live in a cramped furnished room, the neighbors are scheming and the financial situation is difficult. The extremely frugal Hannes does not get enough contracts and misses his target as an insurance agent. The disappointed Nora therefore tries to work from home and works until late at night, which, however, puts a strain on the relationship. When she gets a permanent position, she is harassed by a manager. Weary and jealous for no reason, Hannes keeps turning away from her. After falling from a staircase, Nora had a premature birth, and Hannes and Nora were reconciled at her sick bed.

production

The shooting took place from August 11, 1938 to October 1938 in Berlin and the surrounding area. The film is in the tradition of the dreary, realistic milieu films of the Weimar Republic and thus largely did not correspond to the National Socialist film policy . In order to get it through the film inspection office anyway , it was shortened by about a quarter of its original length. Among other things, a sequence in a new building district in Berlin where Hannes and Nora would like to rent a single-family house was removed. Alluding to the marriage loan introduced by the National Socialist government , Hannes speaks the following sentence: "Marriage loan - do you think I want to start our marriage right from the start with debts and payments !?"

In the spring of 1938, the intended title of the film was based on Huth's play Ultimo ; when filming began, it was changed to A Human Being Born . At the end of September he was called Glück auf Installment , after that Life could be so beautiful . Under the title Life can be so beautiful , the film ran for a few days in Vienna after its approval on December 20, 1938. On January 5, 1939, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels issued a press release: “The Ufa film Life can be so beautiful has been banned. It contradicts the principles of population policy of National Socialism and is in part directly opposed to them ... "

After the end of the war, the author and director tried to restore the original version, but only partially succeeded. The premiere of the fragment took place on February 9, 1950 under the title Eine Frau fürs Leben in Hamburg. The film was released in the GDR in 1962 as Life can be so beautiful . It was not until 1990 that a copy, restored in the GDR State Film Archive, was presented to which a few previously missing scenes had been added. In it, the young couple can be seen in a furniture store as well as viewing the house in the new building district.

criticism

In Reclam's Lexikon des Deutschen Films (1995), Thomas Kramer praised the “subtle-realistic, not embellished, but extremely sober description of everyday life and milieu”, which made “the social contradictions between state ideology and social reality” visible. The two main actors would have offered the best dramatic performances of their careers in the "extremely sensitive interpretation of the spouses".

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ F.-B. Habel: Cut up films. Censorship in the cinema , p. 62
  2. ^ Karlheinz Wendtland: Beloved Kintopp. Born in 1937 and 1938 , p. 224