“Lya de Putti (Amalia von Putti, 1896-1931). Josie Ullstein, the widow of cameraman Lamberti, who worked extensively in Germany in the twenties, told the writer that in 1921 she was a chorus line dancer together with Camilla Horn, Marlene Dietrich and Margo Lion, all around their twenties, in Rudolf Nelson Theatre on Kurfürstendamm (today’s Astor Kino, Berlin’s temple of retrospectives).
One day a fat, cigar-chewing gentleman showed up asking Nelson to let him have his chorus girls just for a couple of days. He was director Joe May who was then shooting Das indische Grabmal.
This is how Lya de Putti’s adventure in motion picture started. After this role and several other minor ones, she went on to occupy the position left by Pola Negri, who had moved to Hollywood, although in a minor key and with a cheekier sensuality.
Briefly, de Putti managed to create a murky little figure of enticing seductress, with her heart-shaped mouth, her eyes languidly lowered, and her sidelong but ambiguously innocent glances as in Berta-Maria’s role in Varieté (1925), directed by E.A. Dupont, her best feature film, and considered one of the best examples of German silent cinema. After that she played in Manon Lescaut (1926), to which Artur Robinson added a lewd and libertine touch, just partly hidden by the laces, curtains, sheets and priet’s gowns bellowing in every scenes.
In Hollywood, where she was also swallowed up, beside a satanic role in The Sorrows of Satan (1926) by Griffith, she was turned into a jealous and vengeful Sicilian lady in The Prince of Tempters (1927), and later she played several other routine’s roles. Lya found Robinson again in Great Britain for The Informer (1929), her last film. She died at 35 because of a throat infection after having inadvertently swallowed a chicken bone”. (Vittorio Martinelli)

“Karl Grune is a director who would deserve a thorough research: fortunately a lot of his work has in fact survived, even if much of it remains to be transferred from nitrate. Moreover, leafing through the historiography of our fathers (Sadoul, Bardeche and Brasillach, Jeanne and Ford, Carl Vincent), it almost seems that these, conceding to his best film Der Strasse (1924) certain qualities, they still criticized him in unison: ‘Le milieu représenté par la fille et son souteneur son d’un romatisme facile’, ‘la façon dont Eugen Klöpfer campe son personnage est trop théâtrale’; and apropos of Eifersucht, withstanding judgement, the historians affirm that Grune, ‘s’il avait des qualités, ne possèdait pas celle de tirer de ses acteurs le rendment maxium’, accusing the cast of Eifersucht of incompetence.
The public can now judge whether or not this tragic-comedy in which Grune undertakes an analysis of jealousy with the help of suggestion, without using direct notations and thus rendering the torments of the protagonist more understandable, even if it is poorly acted.
Werner Krauss, an actor of a thousand masks, in the part of the ‘cocu manifique’ is simply incomparable, opposite him is a seductive kitten called Lya de Putti, while at the third side of the triangle we find Georg Alexander, an actor that recalls the coeval King of England.
This elegant ‘kammerspiel’ doesn’t show its age of nearly three-quarters of a century”. (Vittorio Martinelli)