The music

“In Ich küsse ihre Hand, Madame!, Marlene Dietrich plays her first starring role in a part which is already drawn around the stereotype of the cold woman and the enigmatic incarnation of what for man is marvellous and magical – a stereotype which just a few years later she was to incarnate as Lola in the Blue Angel. Certainly the overall atmosphere in the film is not at all morbid or tragic, but this is more a well-mannered and entertaining comedy, where the character played by Dietrich is already very distant from the palpitating and fatal divas of silent cinema. The title of the film is borrowed from a song by Ralph Erwin and Fritz Rotter and performed by Richard Tauber, which was later recorded onto the picture. It seemed natural to us to realise the musical accompaniment to the film using only music belonging to the different styles – from operetta to cabaret, from variety to the song written specially for the cinema – which in those years contributed to the creation of a cultural and aesthetic experience which was peculiar to the Germany between the wars. The musical traditions which run together in this particular repertory are different, from the French chanson to the marcette, from tango to jazz, from forms of modern dance (such as the fox-trot and the waltz) to ancient folk songs. German cinema in the first decade of sound gave preference to cinematographic versions of operettas and variety shows which had already obtained success in the theatres, thus favouring the affirmation of musicians made famous by theatrical scenes”.

Marco Dalpane

The Restoration

“Robert Land’s film Ich küsse ihre Hand, Madame!, appeared on the screen for the first time in January ’29. The title of the film took advantage of the success of a song which had been a hit throughout the previous year in different recordings made by Richard Tauber. Though in that time films in Germany were shot as silent movies, and were accompanied in the cinemas by orchestras, pianists or small ensembles according to their size and possibilities, Ich küsse ihre Hand, Madame! was on the threshold of the era of talkies: on the 10 January 1929, just before the ‘premiere’, the ‘Lichtbildbuhne’ announced: ‘For some days now, Harry Liedtke has been filmed with sound in the Tempelhof studios. He sings the success Ich kusse ihre Hand, Madame […]. The voice of Harry Liedtke will be exhibited in all the theatres which have already installed the compact Tobis apparatus’. […] Unfortunately no trace remains of this sound version and the location of the original negatives remains unknown. Up to the present date I have been able to trace a copy at the Danske Filmmuseum in Copenhagen, and one which has survived in two American archives in Washington and Rochester, shortened for the US market and with music. After having compared these two copies we were able to infer that, probably, the Danish version is the closest to the original. But the Danish nitrate print at the moment of copying in 1965 was already in a deteriorated state. Cloudy pictures and flares of light indicate deformations and decomposition which it was not possible to repair with the technology of the day. The damaged original was destroyed after copying, and the damage on the safety film could no longer be eliminated. A duplicate positive of the Danish copy, kept at the Bundesarchiv was the best material from which to begin restoration work, in which German captions were inserted in place of the intertitles in Danish, being reproduced via the censorship documents. In the fourth and sixth acts, certain sequences which had slipped by mistake from the beginning to the end of the respective reels during the copying phase have been returned to their original position. Today the film is again divided into seven acts, in each of which the action closes coherently with the narrative flow of the film. The restored version measures, including the additions of the prologue, 1893 m, and with respect to the 2020 of ‘29 is still missing 127m. Nevertheless, the estimates regarding the original length of silent films are always very vague, because the indications of length do not tell us the exact length of the pictures and captions. It is possible that the captions filmed in ‘95, are not as long as the originals because today audiences read faster than those of the Twenties.

Martin Körber, Cinegrafie, VI, no.9, 1996

“Film history, dictionaries and programmes all ignore the name of Robert Land, a film-maker from Vienna, who in a period of fifteen years (the whole span of his career before he was forced into exile by the Nazis to vanish no one knows where) directed more than thirty movies in Austria and Germany. He made his directing debut in Vienna in the aftermath of the First World War with a crime film set in Holland, Adrian Vanderstraaten, but Land had already had some experience as a screenwriter for a costume movie, Die Jüdin von Toledo, based on a play by Franz Grillparzer. After several other pictures, he brought to the screen a dark and sombre story set in the Viennese underworld, Durch die Quartiere des Elends und Verbrechens, and in 1922 he tried his hand at directing an 18th-century costume movie, Der Rosenkreuzer, for which he got permission to shoot inside the Hofburg, the Belvedere and other famous royal settings to tell the story of Franz Anton Mesmer, the scientist who founded Mesmerism. Another movie which won the praise of critics and audiences was Der Fluch (1925), set in the ghetto of Warsaw. The film also marked the screen debut of an actress who went on to have a bright future, Lilian Harvey. The director and the actress then signed a contract to work in Germany, where however they followed separate careers. Soon Land plunged into a whirlwind of directing, moving with careless ease from sparkling comedies, such as Venus im Frack and Prinzessin Olala, both interpreted by the roguish Carmen Boni, to sentimental sugary pictures with the dewy-eyed Liane Haid, such as Zwei rote Rosen and Spiel um der Mann; from “Bergfilme” such as Alpentragödie, to the sensitive Primanerliebe with the delicate Grete Mosheim. The recently found Der lustige Witwer and Ich küsse ihre Hand, Madame! stand out amongst his productions. Ich küsse ihre Hand, Madame!, also tailored-made for Liedtke, is, however, overshadowed by the magnetic personality of Marlene Dietrich, at the height of her expressive ability: capricious, passionate and cynical. We can already see traces of the later cruel Lola-Lola who humiliates her elderly admirer. ‘I would do anything for you’, whispers a panting suitor at the sight of Marlene mischievously powdering her nose and coyly straightening her skirt which clings invitingly to her thighs. She throws a meaningful glance at him looking up from the roses the man has offered her, then, as her only answer, ‘Alright, you can walk my little dog’. Ich küsse ihre Hand, Madame! helps us to make our acquaintance with a pre-Sternberg Marlene, a Marlene exuding a natural and shameless sensuality often ignored by her biographers, who preferred to harp on about her later Hollywood persona, so polished and sphinx-like that it became almost unreal. As soon as Nazism seized the reins of power, Land was forced to leave Germany. The first stop in his exile was Italy, where he directed, together with Giorgio Simonelli, the remake of a Franco-German movie from two years before, Melodrama, from a comedy by Henri Bernstein, with Elsa Merlini in the part played by Elisabeth Bergner. Then Czechoslovakia, where, in Barrandow, Land shot Jana, in a double Czech-Austrian version, introducing Leny Marenbach in the part of a peasant girl from the Bohemian woodlands who moves to the big city to work as a maid and eventually meets a tragic fate. Nothing is known of the subsequent whereabouts of the director; all traces of him were lost in 1935”.

Vittorio Martinelli, in Cinegrafie, VI, n.9, 1996