REVIEW: DAS HAUS AN DER KÜSTE / KUCA NA OBALI/HOUSE ON THE COAST 1954 The last Sybille Schmitz (Vampyr) movie: A balkan crime-drama par excellence!

 A strange little movie we got here. After the atrocities on both sides during WWII, a Bosnian-German-Austrian production was set on the beautiful Dalmatian coast. Showcasing Dubrovnik and Sybille Schmitz.

Let me introduce the characters. We got Anna, a former beauty and well-educated widow of a shipowner who now has to rent out rooms and work in a tavern in Dubrovnik (yes, the Game Of Thrones town) for Beppo. Beppo is the quintessential brute who once had a thing with Anna and together they planned an accident at sea to get the insurance money. Anna planned this, and Beppo executed the shipwrecking. Sadly, 25 sailors lost their lives back then. And Beppo has proof of this. 

Anna and Beppo

So he blackmails Anna into all sorts of services, most of all marrying her beautiful daughter Marina to him when she will turn 18. Of course Beppo cannot keep his hands off stunning and beautiful Marina before marriage, and she flees to relatives. While she is away, Branco, a new doctor for the hospital, comes into town and rents a room from Anna. Well, he's an attractive young man, and Anna is... Anna. 

Marina

They have a thing. When Marina returns on order of her mother, she falls in love with Branco and so does he. Anna does not like it, and Beppo neither. Beppo comes up with a plan to get the doctor relocated to some Bosnian village while Anna lets all her frustration and anger out on Marina. This is Balkan-style. So amidst a lot of drinking and Chora dancing, this soon becomes vicious and deadly.

Marina and Branco

One stormy night, Anna presses Marina to take a small boat with her to the open sea, and things get worse. In the end, a smuggler buddy of Beppo rescues Marina from the ravaged ship, but Anna has vanished. 

Everyone assumes that Anna is dead and that Marina killed her in jealousy. She gets three years in prison for manslaughter. When she gets out, Anna turns up again, and things pick up where they were left three years ago. 

This cannot end well and it does in a dramatic fashion.

A nice noir crime drama we get here. Director Bosko Kosanovic knows his trade and I am very surprised to find out that this was his first full-length movie. He followed this one up with the similarly themed and produced KLISURA/DIE FRAU DES HOCHWALDJÄGERS/THE WIFE OF THE HIGH MOUNTAIN HUNTER (1956) which is even more rural Bosnian and dramatic, and MALE STVARI/LITTLE THINGS (1957). That overly dramatic piece of love-triangulation would be his last full-length feature. From then on, only documentaries and short films are documented. Bosnia-Herzegovina should really get into this and appreciate his work. As this is a fine film. 

It helps that it stars (on the German side) none other than the marvelous Sybille Schmitz, a stunning beauty and veteran of the Weimar era (you MUST have seen her starring in Karl Dreyer's VAMPYR). She was able to be employed during the III Reich, but Goebbels did not like her. He even ranted about her in one of his diaries. Lots of personal life drama, lots of hidden skeletons in her closet, and lots of financial trouble made her ideal for this role of a troubled, but still very attractive woman in her fourties.

Her performance is marvelous, telling whole stories of ruthlessness, guilt, jealousy, and redemption in the beautifully lit close-ups of her face. But she does not overplay; this is believable, and her falling for the young doctor and the pain and turmoil she goes through when facing the impossible task to lure him away from her far more attractive, sweet, and innocent daughter is very well played.

At that point, Sybille was already broke and addicted to morphine. That addiction was caused by a female doctor she was living with. A year later, she would commit suicide on OD stating in her final letter that there is no place for her in this new world, although she tried.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder later made a movie, inspired by her life DIE SEHNSUCHT DER VERONIKA VOSS/VERONIKA VOSS (1982).

Speaking of Marina. My dear! Who is that? Stunning, stunning, and very attractive Nadja Regin in her first big role. And she fits it. Utterly attractive and innocently seductive, she is the perfect canvas for every male desire. As this movie here was co-produced by the Rank Organisation, she was able to get a foot in the door and would act in two James Bond movies. No wonder she married rich later. Her astonishing life (her father - a professor - was executed by the Germans when she was twelve, and she went into the Serbian resistance immediately after). And thankfully the movie (being Yugo... you know) is not as chaste as you might think it would be.

The male lead is René Deltgen, who - at that point - had been around German cinema for a long time and would stay true to crime, even appearing in DER HEXER, one of the finest Edgar Wallace Rialto movies. For my taste, he tries too hard to be the bad guy, and as such, the conclusion of the movie does not really fit him/the role. 

Sad to say, apart from Serbian Nadja Regin, the Yugo-cast remains very bland, and Bert Sotlar, a well-respected Yugo-actor, does not lend any depth to his doctor, who is torn between Anna and Marina and obviously some kind of pita in the hospital he works for. A miss.

The movie premiered August 6th at the Oberhausen Film Festival and had a good run in Germany afterwards. 

A strange little movie. Very much noir drama but very well made with lots of local shots and the difference of being - well- balkan. Worth a rediscovery.