Vintage Italian postcard (despite the French text) for the German language version of Alessandro Blasetti's Terra madre/ Mother Earth: the German early sound film Kennst Du das Land (Constantin J. David, 1931), shot simultaneously with the Italian version in Italy. Cines-Pittaluga, No. 4.
The leads in this German version were for Hans Adalbert Schlettow as the landowner Marco, Eduard von Winterstein as Nunzio, the foreman of the estate, Maria Solveg/ Maria Matray as his daughter Emilia, Fritz Genschow as the farmer Silvano, Olaf Fjord as Bianchi and Mary Kid as Lia. They played the parts performed by Sandro Salvini (Marco), Leda Gloria (Emilia), Vasco Creti (Nunzio), Franco Coop (Silvano) and Isa Pola (Daisy/ Lia) in the Italian version. The plot deals with a young aristocrat, planning to spend time in town, returns to sell his farmland to a modernizing new owner, thus threatening the welfare of the peasants who work for him. He then has a change of heart.
Plot: Duke Marco has been living in the city for a long time, far from the lands he owns. He comes back only when he decides to sell them to maintain a costly standard of living which also includes his mistress Daisy. His return is welcomed by peasants hoping he'll stay with them. During a solitary tour of his lands, in which he remembers his youth in the countryside with growing nostalgia, Marco meets Emilia, the farmer's daughter, and is struck by her spontaneous energy and freshness. When the peasants learn about the news of the sale their enthusiasm turns into disappointment, but Marco, pressured by financial needs, returns to the city with Daisy to sign the documents. Here he is joined by a phone call from Emilia informing him of a serious fire that broke out on the farm. At that point, Marco leaves everything, runs into the countryside, directs the victorious fight against the fire and decides to revoke the sale. He will stay to take care of his lands and he will marry Emilia.
Terra Madre was drawn from a subject entitled Passa la morte, written in 1930 by Camillo Apolloni, a former actor of silent cinema, which was purchased in 1930 by "Cines" relaunched by Stefano Pittaluga as the first Italian company in the production of sound cinema. On the basis of that text Blasetti, in collaboration with the director of the silent era and writer Gianni Bistolfi, wrote the script with the intention of providing «an indication of the social and lyrical value of rural life. Two parties contested the originality of the story, but years after, Blasetti said that from the original story "only the boots of the farmer" had remained.
After a few years of vehement criticism of Pittaluga conducted with the group gathered around the magazine Cinematografo, in the middle of 1930 Blasetti and some of his collaborators entered the Cines and became its staunch defenders. The Roman director thus had the opportunity, after the searing failure of Blasetti's Sole (and apart from the parenthesis of Nerone/ Petrolini) to resume the themes of "rebirth" in the new situation, first with Resurrectio and then with Terra Madre, in which he revived the spirit " ruralista "already present in his debut film Sole. It was the contrast between the urban world, considered indolent and parasitic (the "Stracittà "), and the peasant one (the "Strapaese"), seen instead as strong and healthy by a current of fascism, the one born in the countryside, favorable to the preservation of the rural character of the Italian people.
The film - one of the 10 feature films published by the Cines-Pittaluga in the 1930 - 1931 season - was shot at the Theater 3 of the Cines in Via Vejo in Rome, between September 1930 and January 1931, while for the exteriors some locations in the Roman countryside were used. Like the first sound film released in Italy, Gennaro Righelli's La canzone dell'amore, also Terra Madre was a co-production of which a German version was made, again at the Cines, on behalf of the company Atlas of Berlin (title: Kennst Du das Land), interpreted in the two main roles by Hans Adalbert Schlettow and Maria Solveg, and directed by Constantin David, former director of the German version of the Righelli film.
Next to Blasetti, on the set of Terra Madre worked the future directors Ferdinando Maria Poggioli and Goffredo Alessandrini, who on that occasion had entered the Cines as scriptwriter and assistant, both from the group around the magazine Cinemagrafo that at the beginning of 1931 had ceased publication after the transfer of most of its exponents employed by Pittaluga. Particularly important for highlighting the contrast between city and countryside was the musical comment given on one side to Foxtrot motifs and the other to the rhythm of a popular "saltarello" and to 5 choirs performed by the Camerata Lughese of the "Canterini Romagnoli". A great deal of attention was also paid to photography, so much so that to the two hired operators (Montuori and De Luca) a third assistant joined them, the almost newcomer Clemente Santoni, producing a result of great expressive value in chiaroscuro and depth.
Terra madre was released in March 1931 and was a big success, both critically and commercially. This also was the case for the German version, and equally for a French dubbed version called Le rappel de la terre. Also in Latin America, it was very successful. Critics were not unanimous in their praise. Some rather praised Pittaluga's effort to raise the new national sound cinema and were less convinced by Blasetti's direction, claiming that in comparison with Sole, in Terra madre the landscape had lost its primitive, raw and pure beauty. Others, such as Leo Longanesi, considered Sole and Terra madre on a par, on equal height. Longanesi called it "a masterpiece of rural rhetoric, an oleography of our times."
Source: Italian Wikipedia, IMDb.
Eduard von Winterstein (born 1 August 1871 in Vienna; died 22 July 1961 in Berlin, real name: Eduard Clemens Franz Freiherr von Wangenheim) was a German film and theatre actor. His German film career spanned from the 1910s to the late 1950s, from the Wilhelminian cinema to the cinema of the GDR.