The divided heart
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The divided heart |
| Original title | The Divided Heart |
| Country of production | United Kingdom |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1954 |
| length | 87 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Charles Crichton |
| script |
Jack Whittingham Richard Hughes |
| production | Michael Truman |
| music | Georges Auric |
| camera | Otto Heller |
| cut | Peter Bezencenet |
| occupation | |
| |
Divided Heart is a 1954 British drama film directed by Charles Crichton and starring Cornell Borchers and Armin Dahlen .
action
Yugoslavia 1942. During the Second World War , the young mother of three, Sonja, loses her husband and two daughters under the German occupation. Only her little son Toni has stayed with her, but he too gets lost in the chaos of war. When he was three years old, Allied authorities picked him up in 1945 and put him in a camp for “ displaced persons ”. In the search for his parents you did not find anything, it is assumed that his immediate relatives did not survive the horrors of war. And so the child is first taken to an orphanage, from which it is taken out and adopted by a childless German couple. After almost a decade after the war, the little Yugoslav boy became the German Toni, who lived a very sheltered life in the Alpine region under his two adoptive parents Inga and Franz with all the amenities - including ski excursions in the mountains - that he could offer.
One day Toni's birth mother is found; she survived the war and has been desperately looking for the only child she has left ever since. Sonja goes to Germany, firmly believing that she can easily pick up her child "from the strangers". But this is easier to believe than done, because Inga and Franz do not just want to give up “their” son, who has grown dear to them like a biological child over the years. A tussle begins about Toni, in which each of the two sides believes to be in the right and to have to enforce their rights at all costs. Finally, the case is referred to a court that is supposed to try to pass a Solomonic judgment that is entirely for the benefit of the child. Despite all concerns - the birth mother is de facto destitute and homeless - the chief judge decides in favor of the claims asserted by the biological mother and gives her back to Toni.
Production notes
The Divided Heart was created in mid-1954 at Ealing Studios in London and Tyrol and was premiered on November 9, 1954. The German premiere took place on July 1, 1955. The story was based on a true incident.
Ten-year-old half-Brazilian Michel Ray made his remarkable screen debut here as the focal point of the story's adopted child Toni.
Edward Carrick designed the film structures . Gerry O'Hara and Tom Pevsner assisted director Crichton. Geoffrey Faithfull was an unnamed second cameraman.
Reviews
“It takes more than Solomon's wisdom to solve the burning problem posed in ' The Divided Heart '. (…) This is a dark, heartbreaking problem as portrayed in this film with an extraordinarily sensitive understanding and conscientious integrity. And the fact that it cannot be resolved for the good of all concerned is evidenced by the reaction of the viewer. The end leaves us unsatisfied. (…) Indeed, the apparent intention of the author Jack Whittingham is not to reach a comfortable climax for this bleak dilemma that he has created. (…) And this absolute intention was achieved in a very amazing way. ' The Divided Heart ' touches one's own sense of justice almost as cruelly as that other film about a child who has become homeless, ' The Search '. The tragedy is all the more touching as Mr. Whittingham has traced the situations of both parties around the claim to the young guy without showing any preference or prejudice. (...) With everything this film is very successful and played extraordinarily well. Cornell Borchers and Armin Dahlen as the foster parents, Michel Ray as the deeply troubled boy and Yvonne Mitchell as the birth mother are full of empathy. "
"Intelligent study of a dilemma that the foster parents and the foster child are exposed to by the birth mother who was believed to be dead and who is now demanding her son back."
"Effective 'women's film' set in Europe, which conveys an authentic feel for the feelings and problems in the early post-war period."
"Contemporary drama that seriously, tactfully and with a conciliatory tendency seeks to solve the problem of international understanding at the family level."
Individual evidence
- ↑ Report about the two mothers Pavla Pirecnik and Josefine Sirsch and "their" controversial son Ivan / Dieter in Life magazine from October 13, 1952
- ↑ The Divided Heart in the Lexicon of International Films
Web links
- full review in the New York Times
- The divided heart in the Internet Movie Database (English)