Harakiri

O-Take-San is a young woman whose beauty proves to be her undoing. Coveted by a lecherous local bigwig, she is protected only by her father—whom the unwanted suitor drives to suicide through a scheme. In her despair, she meets a Dutch naval officer—and falls in love with him... This lavishly designed production was filmed between the two parts of *Die Spinnen* at Hamburg’s Hagenbeck Zoo, where set designer Heinrich Umlauff spared neither cost nor effort to create authentic Japanese backdrops. Despite the post-war German audience’s fondness for the exotic, the film was not a success; it only received due recognition upon its rediscovery in the late 1980s.
(Florian Widegger)