THE SINNER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 901, 9 November 1956, Page 26

THE SINNER

(Cellini Films) R: 16 years and over. THE SINNER is an extraordinarily interesting and oddly haunting film. One of the very few post-war German productions we’ve seen, it was made by a pre-war German director, Willi Forst, from an idea of his own; Gerhard Menzel wrote the script. Like many pre-war German films it is preoccupied with sin, disease and death, as a background to a love story. Its stars, Hildegarde Neff (seen here in British and American films) and Gustav Froelich, the players of great talent, though in this piece Fraulein Neff overacts ‘at times. Herr Froelich is Alexander, an artist who is going blind, and Fraulein Neff is Marina, his wife. She picked him up, literally from the gutter, outside a night club, took him home and for the first time found herself in love. The daughter of a good-time mother and a father of the old school, she had been seduced at 14 by a cousin. Since then she had had many wealthy lovers, and she is still willing to do so occasionally if she needs money badly to help the man she loves, All this is told in a matter-of-fact way and one or two scenes are fairly sensa-tional-but not, I think, gratuitously so. Beginning and ending at almost the same point of time, The Sinner is in effect largely an elaborate flashback which moves backwards and forwards freely within the girl’s past as her voice on the soundtrack recalls it. Since we often do remember in that erratic way, this device is really very effective; and though there’s not very much dialogue, a fairly strong visual narrative style (the photography at its best is very good) underlined by the voice of Marina-and it’s all in English-make the story quite as easy to follow as any told in more conventional terms.