Die Unbekannte ("The Unknown") is a 1936 film from Nazi Germany, directed by Frank Wisbar.
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, The 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 Madeleine (Sybille Schmitz) a nightclub singer and apparently a breaker of hearts (and it's vaguely implied that she might have been a Gold Digger or even a High-Class Call Girl). 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 Madeleine. They fall in love, and Madeleine has to weigh her love for Thomas against her guilt at possibly stealing him away from both his fiancée and his work.
Tropes:
- Actor Allusion: Sybille Schmitz made her feature film debut as another young woman Driven to Suicide by drowning seven years prior in G.W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl. Both films feature a strikingly similar close-up of Schmitz’s lifeless face after her body is recovered.
- Art Imitates Art: 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 Madeleine's face in just such a quiet smile as she drowns herself.
- Break His Heart to Save Him: Thomas proclaims his love for Madeleine. 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.
- Catapult Nightmare: It's not really a nightmare per se, just a dream in which Madeleine 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 Catapult Nightmare style.
- The Chanteuse: Madeleine's job. She seems to attract a lot of men by doing it.
- Disposable Fiancé: Thomas is all too willing to ditch his pretty fiancée Evelyn to be with Madeleine, despite only knowing Madeleine for a couple of days.
- Downer Beginning: Begins with a pair of puzzled policeman contemplating the drowned corpse of poor Madeleine, before the film jumps back to tell her story.
- Driven to Suicide: Unable to live without Thomas, Madeleine drowns herself in the river.
- Drop Dead Gorgeous: The two policemen in the prologue are absolutely enthralled by the beauty of Madeleine's lifeless body.
- Fainting: Madeleine 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.
- Foregone Conclusion: The film opens by showing that Madeleine drowned herself before the story shows why.
- Gray Rain of Depression: Rain spatters the window as Madeleine watches Thomas leave forever.
- High-Class Glass: A rich guy with a monocle dances with Madeleine at her nightclub. She addresses him as "Baron".
- How We Got Here: The opening scene shows two cops at police headquarters contemplating Madeleine's corpse, before the story tells what happens to her.
- Inspired by…: "L'Inconnue de la Seine
", a famous mask said to be the death mask of a young woman who drowned herself in the Seine River. (In fact that's only a story and the true origin of the mask is not known.) - Meet Cute: Madeleine 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 Madeleine up again.
- Melodrama: A highly dramatic, tragic romance in which a woman burdened with the sins of her past tricks her lover into leaving her, then kills herself. Most of Nazi cinema was escapism, either melodramas or light comedies.
- Ominous Pipe Organ: 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 Madeleine, and she faints.
- Redemption Equals Death: Par course for a Nazi-era German “women’s picture;” Madeleine must throw herself into a river as punishment for her adulterous and lascivious past.
- Suicide by Sea: Madeleine drowns herself in a river, apparently unwilling to face life without Thomas.
- Title Drop
- A policeman in the opening scene says that the suicide victim was pulled from the river and is "unknown".
- Then at the end, as she's pretending that she doesn't love Thomas, Madeleine proclaims herself "the unknown woman, from a world unknown to you."
