Renate Muller comes to town, takes up residence in a women-only boarding house, and goes in search of a job. They're hard to come by, but she makes friends with bank clerk Felix Bressart, who gets her an interview with personnel director Ludwig Stossel. He assigns her to the typing pool and tells her to show up for a date when her work is done. She does the former, but not the latter. In revenge, Stossel rips up her finished work and tells her to do it over again, even though she will have to stay late. While she's working away at it, bank director Hermann Thimig leaves through the typing pool. Without revealing who he is, they chat, laugh, and make a date.
This movie was one of those movies of the 1930s in which separate versions were produced in several languages. I have seen the English version, SUNSHINE SUSIE, which also starred Muller. As directed by Victor Saville, it's a visually inventive film for an early talkie. This one is what I would call a semi-musical, with Bressart and fraulein Muller getting a few brief musical turns. While it's fun, it's definitely a little more lugubrious than the English version; Stossel is thoroughly unlikeable, and Thimig, while pleasant enough, torments fraulein Muller in the manner of romantic comedies of the era, trying to make sure she is not simply a gold digger looking for a cushy spot as a kept woman.
While Stossel and Bressart are familiar faces for American audiences of 1940s movies, Stossel would specialize in older immigrants, usually with children, like his turn as Gary Cooper's father in PRIDE OF THE YANKEES. Bressart would play the same sort of role he does here, as a friendly but ineffectual comic clerk. Likewise, director Wilhelm Thiele would come to Hollywood in the middle of the 1930s, where he would direct programmers and later television. Fraulein Muller's life would not be as happy. She remained in Germany, and seems to have become a drunk. She died by falling out of a third-story window in 1937 at the age of 31. Her IMDb biography indicates she was pushed.
The copy of this movie I looked at, on blu-ray derived from holdings at the Murnau Stiftung, is in very good shape. Given the sound techniques of the day, it sounds a trifle muffled, but not more so than equivalent American movies of the same year.
