Melody of the Heart

Melody of the Heart

Directed by	Hanns Schwarz
Written by	Hans Székely
Produced by	Erich Pommer
Starring	Dita Parlo Willy Fritsch Gerő Mály Marcsa Simon
Cinematography	Günther Rittau Hans Schneeberger
Music by	Werner R. Heymann
Production company	Universum Film AG
Distributed by	Universum Film AG
Release date	16 December 1929 (1929-12-16)
Running time	88 minutes
Country	Germany
Language	German

Melody of the Heart (German: Melodie des Herzens) is a 1929 German musical film directed by Hanns Schwarz and starring Dita Parlo, Willy Fritsch and Gerő Mály.

The film was the first successful sound film produced by the German major studio Universum Film AG (Ufa) and was credited with establishing the popularity of the operetta film. It was shot in Hungary. Initially the film was intended to be silent, but halfway through production its producer Erich Pommer was ordered by his superiors to convert it into a sound film.^[1]

Ufa had recently made a deal with the Klangfilm syndicate (consisting of Siemens & Halske, AEG, and Polyphon-Werke AG (who sold Polydor records) to license the Tri-Ergon sound film system, under the name 'Ufa-Klang'.^[2]^[3] A previous attempt in 1925 by Ufa to use an earlier version of the same system, at the time owned by Klangfilm's former competitor, Tobis, had ended in failure.^[4]^[5]

The film premiered at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on 16 December 1929.^[6] It was released in four different languages: German, English, French and Hungarian.^[7] Such multiple-language versions, which had been pioneered by British International Pictures, were popular in Europe until dubbing became more widespread.

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Transcription

Cast

Dita Parlo as Julia Balog
Willy Fritsch as János Garas
Gerő Mály as Vater Garas
Marcsa Simon as Mutter Garas
János Körmendy as Vater Kovács
Juliska Ligeti as Mutter Kovács
Anni Mewes as Anna Kovács
Tomy Endrey as Der kleine Kovács
Ilka Grüning as Fräulein Czibulka
László Dezsõffy as Zugführer Benézel

References

^ Hardt p. 129
^ Gomery, p. 54
^ Ford, p. 261
^ Ford, p. 217
^ Kreimeier, pp. 102, 178
^ Hardt p. 238
^ Rogowski 237

Bibliography

Bergfelder, Tim & Bock, Hans-Michael. The Concise Cinegraph: Encyclopedia of German Cinema. Berghahn Books, 2009.
Ford, Fiona (2011). The film music of Edmund Meisel (1894–1930) (PDF) (PhD thesis). University of Nottingham. Retrieved 2 September 2017.
Gomery, Douglas (1976). "Tri-Ergon, Tobis-Klangfilm, and the Coming of Sound". Cinema Journal. 16 (1). University of Texas Press, on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies: 51–61. doi:10.2307/1225449. JSTOR 1225449.
Hardt, Ursula. From Caligari to California: Erich Pommer's Life in the International Film Wars. Berghahn Books, 1996.
Kreimeier, Klaus. The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945. University of California Press, 1999.
Rogowski, Christian. The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany's Filmic Legacy. Camden House, 2010.