© 2014 William Ahearn

It’s all shopping and holidays in St Moritz for Else Thalhof, the daughter of a businessman and investor until the market goes south and daddy may end up being sent to debtors’ prison. There is someone who can help, an older man who has always had an eye for the girl and he will help her father if only she would do something for him. There’s no Hollywood ending for this film based on a novel by Arthur Schnitzler that has been described as “the last representative and ‘death-sentence’ of the bourgeois tragedy.”

There’s an interesting use of St Moritz as it prepared for the Olympic winter games and the notion of the alps and skiing as symbols of freedom that were an integral part of the so-called Mountain films.

The novel was also turned into a play before the silent film version and two other films were made from the story, “The Naked Angel” (1946), in Argentina, and “Fräulein Else” (2014), from Germany.

Directed by Paul Czinner from a screenplay by Czinner and Carl Mayer. Cinematography by Karl Freund. Starring Elisabeth Bergner, Albert Bassermann, Albert Steinrück, and Adele Sandrock, among others.