History Film / DieUnbekannte

The film opens at a police station, where the desk sergeant tells his boss that a body was fished out of the river. The two men step into the morgue and pull back the sheet, finding the corpse of a woman with an odd, Mona Lisa-esque smile on her face. They wonder what could have driven her to drown herself.

The movie then cuts back to show the answer to that question. The dead lady is Madeline (Sybille Schmitz) a nightclub singer and apparently a breaker of hearts (and it's vaguely implied that she might have been a GoldDigger or even a HighClassCallGirl). She finishes an engagement at a club and heads to the train station to catch a train to her next gig. There she meets one Thomas Bentick, a scientist and explorer who is headed off to Africa on a five-year expedition to explore the sources of the Nile and Congo rivers. Thomas has a fiancée, but she left ahead of him, and a little thing like another woman isn't going to stop him from looking up the alluring Madeline. They fall in love, and Madeline has to weigh her love for Thomas against her guilt at possibly stealing him away from both his fiancée and his work.

* ArtImitatesArt: The most likely reason that the "L'Inconnue de la Seine" mask became famous is the curiously knowing smile on the woman's face. The film ends with a closeup of Madeline's face in just such a quiet smile as she drowns herself.
* BreakHisHeartToSaveHim: Thomas proclaims his love for Madeline. To stop him from breaking things off with his fiancée and abandoning his research, she lies and says that she never loved him. It works, as he leaves for Africa the next day.
* CatapultNightmare: It's not really a nightmare per se, just a dream in which Madeline dreams of Evelyn on a boat to Africa looking at a picture of Thomas, followed by her face taking the place of Evelyn's face. It certainly disturbs her, as she bolts up from her bed in classic CatapultNightmare style.
* TheChanteuse: Madeline's job. She seems to attract a lot of men by doing it.
* DisposableFiance: Thomas is all too willing to ditch his pretty fiancée Evelyn to be with Madeline, despite only knowing Madeline for a couple of days.
* DownerBeginning: Begins with a pair of puzzled policeman contemplating the drowned corpse of poor Madeline, before the film jumps back to tell her story.
* {{Fainting}}: Madeline is prone to this. She faints for no obvious reason in a scene where Thomas is playing the organ in a church. She faints again when Thomas leaves on his expedition.
* ForegoneConclusion: The film opens by showing that Madeline drowned herself before the story shows why.
* GrayRainOfDepression: Rain spatters the window as Madeline watches Thomas leave forever.
* HighClassGlass: A rich guy with a monocle dances with Madeline at her nightclub. She addresses him as "Baron".
* HowWeGotHere: The opening scene shows two cops at police headquarters contemplating Madeline's corpse, before the story tells what happens to her.

* MeetCute: Madeline catches a man who lifted Evelyn's purse at the train station, giving it back to Evelyn. The purse had important documents related to the expedition in it, which is Thomas's excuse for looking Madeline up again.

* OminousPipeOrgan: Thomas, evidently a talented musician as well as a scientist, plays Schubert's 8th Symphony on a church organ. It isn't really all that mysterious, but the organ music and a statue of the Virgin Mary seem to disturb Madeline, and she faints.
* RedemptionEqualsDeath: Par course for a Nazi-era German “women’s picture;” Madeline must throw herself into a river as punishment for her adulterous and lascivious past.
* SuicideBySea: Madeline drowns herself in a river, apparently unwilling to face life without Thomas.

** Then at the end, as she's pretending that she doesn't love Thomas, Madeline proclaims herself "the unknown woman, from a world unknown to you."

* ActorAllusion: Sybille Schmitz made her feature film debut as another young woman DrivenToSuicide by [[SuicideBySea drowning]] seven years prior in G.W. Pabst’s ''Film/DiaryOfALostGirl''. Both films feature a strikingly close-up of Schmitz’s lifeless face after her body is recovered.

''Die Unbekannte'' is a 1936 film from UsefulNotes/NaziGermany, directed by Frank Wisbar.