The Company's in Love

The first long-playing movie of Max Ophüls has not enough singing to be really an operetta, but both songs "Ich wär so gern richtig verliebt" and "Ist dein Herz noch ledig, schick es nach Vendig" are reprised several times. So sometime it looks like an operetta.

For sound track hunters (like me) there wasn´t any real loot, because all singing parts were very short and noisy.

An interesting scene was in a ´wave bath´, because I did not know that this kind of bath was already existing in 1932. (excuse my school-english)

Leading lady Anny Ahlers walks off the set of the musical comedy she's starring in. The company notices Lien Deyers at the local hotel and decide she should star. First she has t get approval from the head of the studio.... who's traveling, so his son, Gustav Fröhlich, gets to make the call. She's ready for the casting couch, but he's all business. He tells her that he'd rather deal with the professionals, even if they are crazy, and she would be better off being married and raising children. She, however, wants to be famous.

Max Ophüls's first feature is a good studio film, a musical comedy run at high speed, with a pre-code vibe, some good gags thrown in, and good camerawork by Karl Puh. Miss Deyers' career had its days numbered. She took UFA to court over her contract and won, which did not endear her to the studio bosses, particularly Fritz Lang, with whom she had already clashed in her first film. More than that, although cast as a simple German girl, she was half Jewish, and her husband, Alfred Ziesler, was Jewish. So they fled to England and America, where her career stopped dead in its tracks. She vanished from sight. At the time of her death in 1982 at 72, she had been married five times.

The Company's In Love is the first feature film directed by the legendary Max Ophuls, and that is pretty much the only reason to watch it. It is doubtful that Ophuls had any control over the script because not only is it totally unlike his later movies, but it is also poorly written. The movie is a behind the scenes look at the making of a musical movie. The movie is disrupted when Gretel, a local woman, literally skies onto the set. The lead actress storms off in a huff and the crew gets the idea to replace her with the interloper.

You can't expect the story of a farce to make any sense but in order for the nonsense to work, there must be laughs. Unfortunately, while there are a couple amusing bits, the movie is steadily unfunny. (Although there was a certain irony in watching this a month after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, as nearly every male character tries to Gretel alone for "private counseling". I guess sexual harassment has been in movies from the very beginning.)However, the cast is very talented and they do what they can, and even at this early stage, Ophul's direction is very steady. After this, he would quickly show what he was capable of.