November 12, 2014, 6:45 p.m. — Her Sister’s Secret (1946)
Her Sister’s Secret
1946. USA. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Screenplay by Anne Green, based on a novel by Gina Kaus. With Nancy Coleman, Margaret Lindsay, Phillip Reed, Regis Toomey. Ulmer has come to exemplify the sort of resourceful, ambitious filmmaker who could survive and even prosper on Poverty Row. This 1946 melodrama becomes, with this newly restored 35mm print from UCLA, certainly the best preserved of Ulmer’s many films for the marginal Producers Releasing Corporation, thanks to the lucky survival of the original 35mm camera negative. A tale of two sisters (Coleman and Lindsay)—one an unwed mother, the other married, barren, and pining for a child—it was brought to the screen by a team of Austro-Hungarian Jews: novelist Gina Kaus, producer Arnold Pressburger, and cinematographer Franz Planer, backed by émigrés Hans Sommer (music), Felix Bressart, Fritz Feld, and Rudolph Anders (supporting cast). Restored by the UCLA Film Television Archive, with funding from The Film Foundation and the Franco-American Cultural Fund, a unique partnership between the Directors Guild of America (DGA); the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM); and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW); courtesy Films Around the World, Inc. 86 min.
