Ruth Weyher

Based on a short story written by Novel Prize for Literature in 1894, Grazia Deladda, “La Grazia” is a classic Italian-drama that follows the story of the a man (Giorgio Bianchi) who fell in love with beautiful shepherdess (Carmen Boni). Separated by fate, the man had an accident on his way back to his wife. For years, absence of her husband has made the woman suffer. She takes care of her child while waiting for her husband’s return.

A house in Paris happens to have two families living there with the same last name. In one apartment lives opera singer Gambetta Duval with his two daughters, Jeanne and Nita. In the second apartment lives old lady Duval with her grandchild Philippa and an her lodger, the physician Leon Monnier. Jeanne is secretly in love with Dr. Monnier who is secretly in love with Nita, who is secretly having an affair with the great playwright Armand de Marny.

Scientist Martin Fellmann is tormented by an irrational fear of knives and the irresistible compulsion to murder his wife. Driven to the brink of madness by fantastic nightmares, he encounters a psychoanalyst who offers to treat the perplexing malady.

A banker who had fallen out with his family stipulated in his will that his fortune should only pass to the person in possession of the five keys he distributed to his relatives during his lifetime 80 years after his death. Only with all five keys can the cassette in the vault of a bank be opened, granting access to the deceased's assets. 75 years after the banker's death, the fugitive crook Murphy comes into possession of one of the keys, together with a list of the names of the owners of the four remaining keys. Over the next five years, he manages to obtain two more keys by criminal means. Now he just has to get the fourth key from Carlo and the fifth key from the young, rich widow Maria. Any means will do. But the unscrupulous villain has not reckoned with Carlo's shrewdness, who initially falls under suspicion himself, but then takes up the pursuit of the criminal.

Naughty Susanne leads an exciting double life between her hometown and Paris: in the provincial nest she is considered the ever virtuous and down to earth girl, while in the cosmopolitan city she always escapes to, she is the queen of the night, sophisticated and seductive. In Paris, she meets René and begins to recruit him, but she has a noble competitor: Jacqueline. A spirited love triangle begins, complicated by the interventions of uncomprehending moral preachers. Their befitting final finds the story in the Moulin Rouge.

During a dinner given by a wealthy baron and his wife, attended by four of her suitors in a 19th century German manor, a shadow-player rescues the marriage by giving all the guests a vision what might happen tonight if the baron stays jealous and the suitors do not reduce their advances towards his beautiful wife. Or was it a vision?

Critics of the time called "Milak, der Grönlandjäger" the German answer to Robert Flaherty’s "Nanook of the North" (1922). Filmed largely on location in Greenland and Norway’s Spitsbergen archipelago, the film combines impressive landscape footage with ethnographic observation.