The Heath with a Movie Organ: The Film The Heath is Green

For a few moments in this film, you might think it does justice to the beauty and melancholy of the heathlands. There are occasional images that, even in color, give you a sense of its darksome allure, its expanse, its solitude. But then the postcard kitsch starts, the movie organ begins to wail, and that is that for the pleasant vision. In the opening credits, the names cleverly appear as if whittled in birchwood; and after all, what would the heath be without Hermann Löns! He is deployed zealously to the strumming of a guitar—it’s impossible to get The Heath is Green and Rosemarie, for whom my heart cried for seven years, out of one’s head. There are folk fairs with traditional costumes, and even displaced persons play a role—allowed to sing a song from the Sudetes Mountains. The script handles everything with speed and enthusiasm— the displaced landowner’s yearning for his property, the passion for hunting that turns him into a poacher, and, along the way, the entire knotty problem of refugees, dealt with summarily. That the whole thing is dished up with “heartache” and singsong (most delightful are the three vagabonds who also feature) is what makes it so annoying—but as experience tells us, probably only to a few. The masses will, as usual, be moved to see their favorites again—Willy Fritsch and Rudolf Prack, Sonja Ziemann, Maria Holst, Otto Gebühr, Hans Richter, Ernst Waldow and whatever the rest of them are called. (Director: Hans Deppe.) What else could you want? It’s all so lovely!