Nie wieder Liebe!, based on Julius Berstl’s play Dover-Calais (also the title of the French version, filmed at the same time), starts off in an UFA-built New York and then cruises to the south of France where shooting took place on location in Nice. The story concerns a billionaire playboy (Harry Liedtke) who, tired of being conned by women, forswears amorous attachment for five years before sailing away on his yacht in the company of his devout butler (played by the show-stealing Felix Bressart) and a crew sworn to eternal hostility to women. As usual, Litvak co-wrote the script, this time in collaboration with Irma von Cube who contributed to many of Litvak’s pre-Hollywood films. The climax occurs when the title song is sung on board the ship as a misogynistic anthem. Litvak, clearly ravished by Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023), edits this scene by following the song’s rhythmic cue, intercutting at various speeds between the pistons of the ship’s engine and the men, as if their virility has been subsumed into the steely machine. Then without wasting a moment, a fade to black juxtaposes that scene with a fabulous tracking shot that shows the sailors, bereft of female company, in desperate melancholy. The change of tone is swift and then it only takes a sprightly tap dance by Lilian Harvey, a drowning woman fished out of the water, to disrupt the male camaraderie.
The relationship between men and women, a jigsaw puzzle of assumed identities played out against restrictive barriers of social status or age, was a key to Anatole Litvak’s world. In spaces strictly regulated by higher social and political orders, love, or the absence of it, links all his films from this first surviving work in his filmography to the very last, The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (1970), ironically made some 40 years later in the same location. This is the most light-hearted of Litvak’s films, as if the director is dancing with his enviably unchained camera. Max Ophüls, who had previously directed the stage version of the film in 1927, served as Litvak’s assistant director and learned to venerate the crane shots that were so impeccably executed by Franz Planer (who later shot Letter from an Unknown Woman for Ophüls) and Robert Baberske.

Ehsan Khoshbakht