That’s Marika Rökk. She was a big deal back in ’39 in Germany. That’s got to be one of the greatest death metal names, ever, but alas, all their death metal was riveted into stukas and welded into panzers and whatnot back then.

The video is colorized, which always looks garish and washed out at the same time. But I’m not sure you could get too garish for a big production number like that one. Everyone favored over the top numbers at the time. None other than Goebbels decided that Germany needed the same kind of Busby Berkeley numbers that America enjoyed. Marika fit the bill. The Depression was more or less worldwide, and Germany had been limping along longer than most, so people wanted a dash of swanky stuff as a diversion.

I like to listen to old pieces of music, and to video like this one, and try to put myself in the time and place it was presented. Adapt the mindset of the time to better understand how you’d react to it. Good movies are able to do that, but good movies are a very rare thing. Most movies just have modern people wielding modern mindsets tossed catch-as-catch-can into hoop dresses and drawing rooms. If you watch Amadeus, for instance, you can see a Mozart that acts more like Jimi Hendrix than a court composer of the time. It didn’t have to turn out that way. In the original play, they had real actors who captured the mindset of the times better:

Amadeus won the Best Picture Oscar, if I recall correctly. It was pretty good. I apologize unreservedly for describing anything with a heaping helping of Mozart’s music as “pretty good” in any respect. And I’m not trying to bag on F. Murray Abraham by beating him over the head with Paul Scofield. F. Murray did OK, but Scofield is one of the best actors I’ve ever seen in anything.

But I’ve seen two versions of Amadeus. There was the original version, and a later “Director’s Cut” or some such thing, and it’s a bit of a mess. They nominated the film editors of Amadeus for Oscars, but they didn’t win. After seeing what they took out, and how they made Animal House in Vienna into Amadeus with skillful cutting, I think they should give them some kind of medal or prize or something more substantial than a gold statue. What the first one accomplished, that the longer one didn’t, was an easier way to suspend your disbelief and sit in the audience and listen to Mozart fresh off the quill pen.

So I’d like to put myself in Germany in 1939 and get the same vibe they got from Marika in real time. On second thought, no I don’t.