To New Shores

In London the singer Gloria takes the blame for a forgery committed by the officer she loves and is deported to the penal colony in Australia. He does not follow her; he goes on with his career. Gloria is put into a labour camp in the colony, and there learns whether another life is possible. The film is not interested in love. It is interested in sacrifice going unrewarded: the woman takes the blame and receives nothing for it, and the film builds that as an error rather than a virtue. Inside the melodrama mould it is an unexpectedly hard conclusion. The form is early Sirk: symmetry of sets, the play of light and shadow, a single light falling on a woman's face. The language of his later Hollywood melodramas begins to be assembled here. Douglas Sirk directed, still working in Germany under the name Detlef Sierck. The film was Zarah Leander's first major work in German cinema and made her one of the country's biggest stars. Sirk would leave Germany a few years later. Willy Birgel plays the officer. Who it is for: viewers curious about Sirk's origins and thirties German melodrama. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot set aside the political context of the production. The film was made in Nazi Germany, inside a cinema under state control.