The Lady in Black (1912)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The lady in black |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1912 |
| length | approx. 46 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Rudolf del Zopp |
| script | Rudolf del Zopp |
| production | Karl Werner |
| camera | Georg Paezel |
| occupation | |
| |
The Lady in Black is a German silent film melodrama from 1912 by Rudolf del Zopp .
action
A margarite festival is held as part of a charity event for the poor. You can see the young Baroness Alice von Wartenegg on the phone quarreling with her newlywed husband because he is still staying with his friend, the multimillionaire Lincoln, instead of being with her at this party. Lincoln, Alice's husband, and the rest of the community happily head off to the charity event. There is the sales tent of the widow Luise von Bahrensfeld, who since the death of her husband has mostly been called “the lady in black” thanks to her mourning clothes, is the focus of general visitor interest. Since becoming a widow, the lady has dedicated herself entirely to charity. Lincoln is blown away when he sees Luise. The extremely rich man promises her 1,000 marks for her charity fund, should she allow him to kiss her hand. Luise agrees. In the following days, too, Luise gave herself entirely to collecting donations and asked for a charitable gift for the needy and poor on her way from door to door. With Alice von Wartenegg in tow, she also passes Lincoln's house. He is delighted to see his new flame again and, beaming with joy, gives her a larger amount. Then he goes back to his male friends in the drawing room. To her horror, Luise en passant overhears how the gentlemen make her the subject of a wager. Lincoln bets that Luise's cool, ladylike appearance is just a mask and that he will "crack" that facade within three months. His commitment: the best horses in his racing team. Luise is simply horrified.
She stumbles from the drawing room to her young friend Alice, but does not show her shock. But she secretly hatches a plan of revenge against Lincoln. She apparently wants to catch him in order to be able to push him back all the harder in front of his friends in the end. Luise is very strategic: First of all, she writes an invitation to Lincoln to talk about the use of the amount of money he has donated. Lincoln is delighted to see Frau von Bahrensfeld again. He is all the more astonished that the lady in black now seems to have passed her grief phase as a widow, because this time she wears very bright and happy colors. Luise borrows Lincoln's signet ring to seal a letter she has just written. The young widow locks this letter in a box, which she in turn keeps in an underground dungeon near her garden pavilion, where she has kept all her valuable documents.
Weeks go by, and the regular encounters between Luise and Lincoln have resulted in the multimillionaire falling seriously in love with the young lady. He has long since regretted his stupid bet he made with Luise as the subject of the bet. He asks his friends to cancel this bet and as men of honor they give in to this request. In a special letter, Lincoln also thanks Baron von Wartenegg for his chevaleresque attitude towards this unfortunate matter. His wife Alice is instantly jealous again, because she doesn't want anyone to be closer to her husband than she does, and also doesn't want the godly husband to have a close friend. Perhaps she also imagines the advances of another woman behind the letter. Luise, on the other hand, is already looking forward to the moment when she can humiliate Lincoln, who is madly in love, in front of the world, as she has no idea that the bet is being withdrawn. One evening the moment of retribution came; Luise von Bahrensfeld has invited to a general evening party, a social event of the first order.
Lincoln is now venting his feelings, falls at the feet of his former "Lady in Black" and practically begs for her to return his love. She replies: “The man I love must have personal courage. Get my answer, which I wrote down on the day of your first visit and which you sealed yourself with your ring from the pavilion in the garden. Now go into the dungeon in the dark, there is a well known box ”. With the key to the dungeon, Lincoln goes into the nocturnal garden. Although surprised by Luise's strange idea, Lincoln went to the musty, underground vault to fetch the box. At this point, a servant of Luise makes his nightly patrol, sees the gate to the dungeon open and thinks there is a burglar. He decides to checkmate this and locks the gate to the dungeon. Lincoln is now trapped.
Meanwhile, Alice is also looking for letters in Luisen's house, wanting to know which letter her husband had hidden so secretly from her in his wallet. She finds it and is amazed that the sender is Lincoln. She secretly reads the letter and now realizes that there was a stupid bet with Luise von Bahrensfeld as a stake and that Lincoln thanked her husband for having put so heartily into withdrawing the bet. Alice, who has no idea what this is all about, rushes to write to her friend Luise, who is horrified to discover that her entire plan of revenge is obsolete because Lincoln has long since regretted his bet and has shelved it. When the servant arrives and tells his mistress that he has unceremoniously locked the open lair on the pavilion, Luise is extremely excited. She rushes to the pavilion to free Lincoln, fervently hoping he hasn't read her letter. But Lincoln has already broken the seal and devoured the text. Now he only feels contempt for his former queen of hearts. Probably, he believes, the locked lair door is also part of their plan of revenge. Luise rushes there, frees him and throws herself at his feet. But the deeply injured Lincoln disdains them. Alice joins them and tries to comfort Luise as best she can.
Days later: Multimillionaire Lincoln is in the dining car of an express train reading the newspaper. In the social section it is written: "Luise von Bahrensfeld, the well-known benefactress of the poor, is going to the theater of war with a delegation of the Red Cross soon".
Production notes
The Lady in Black passed the film censorship on December 14, 1912 and was probably premiered a little later. The two-act with 14 subtitles was 850 meters long.
Kurt Dürnhöfer designed the film structures.
This film was the third part of the so-called Lincoln film series (1912/13) with Oskar Fuchs in the title role and accordingly had the subtitle "From the life of a multimillionaire III". Manny Ziener , who played the young Alice von Wartenegg here, had also worked alongside Oskar Fuchs in the second film in the Lincoln series "The Mauritius Brand" immediately before, also in 1912, and played her first major role there.