The plot of the charming comedy Saxophon-Susi revolves around two quite different young Berlin women: Anni von Aspen, the daughter of an aristocrat, and Susi Hiller, a disillusioned theater dancer. While Anni aspires to become a celebrated artistic performer, Susi dutifully follows her mother’s dream of a stage career but spends her free time immersed in studies. Anni’s father, Baron von Aspen, who has an eye for the ladies but opposes his daughter’s artistic ambitions, plans to send her to a girls’ boarding school in London. Meanwhile Susi is given the opportunity to refine her dancing skills at the Tiller School in England. Dissatisfied with their lives, Anni and Susi devise a brilliant plan to change identities by swapping clothes and roles.
Produced in 1928, Saxophon-Susi exemplifies the nature of German popular cinema in the late 1920s, with its diverse production team, international thematic elements, and use of music. The film was made under the patronage of the Berlin production company Hom-Film, which collaborated with several Czech companies and filmmakers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including a diverse portfolio of co-productions with the company Bratři Deglové, such as the melodrama Sündenfall (dir. Karel Lamač, 1928) and adventure movies like Das verschwundene Testament (1929), starring the Italian actor and acrobat Carlo Aldini. Hom-Film’s commitment to Czech cinema continued into the sound era, when it participated in German-language versions of Czech films.
Both of the key figures behind the film – Lamač and his leading actress Anny Ondra – overcame the limits of the small Czech film industry, and by the early 1920s teamed extensively with German and Austrian producers (e.g., Sascha-film, Vienna). The turning point in their careers was the completion of the Czech-German-Swiss co-production Evas Töchter (1928), when they decided to move permanently to Germany, where they founded their own production company, Ondra-Lamač-Film, and quickly established a collaboration with Hom-Film (e.g., Die Kaviarprinzessin,1929, and Das Mädel aus USA, 1930).
These multicultural collaborations are well illustrated in Saxophon-Susi, with its international film crew and shooting in several European cities, Berlin, Paris, and London. The team consisted mostly of German artists, including the Berlin-based Haller-Revue troupe, who are referred to in the story as the famous dancers the Tiller Girls from London. The film was a commercial success, and its reach to foreign markets was extended with the production of a sound remake, released in German and French versions under the title Baby. At the film’s premiere run in Berlin it was accompanied by a reportedly witty and amusing original live score (presumed lost) composed by Paul Dessau, supplemented by Rudolf Nelson’s song “Die Susie bläst das Saxophon” [Susie Plays the Saxophone], a jazzy fox-trot with lyrics by the play’s author Hans H. Zerlett. (There are contemporary recordings of the song by Rudolf Nelson and Irene Ambrus.  An original Czech song was also composed for the film by popular songwriter Karel Hašler.)
Ondra is radiant in the film. The lively, talented dancer she portrays can be seen as the culmination of the star’s on-screen development (her eccentric dance number is amazing). Ondra started playing naïve flapper types in the early 1920s, and by the end of the decade progressed to a string of appealingly eccentric, at times misguided characters. Such roles won warm reviews from the press, who praised her likeable screen persona and youthful exuberance. At the peak of her silent film career between 1928 and 1930 Ondra starred in 14 films, and her career continued after the advent of sound (think of Hitchcock’s Blackmail). Her popularity did not begin to wane until the late 1930s, due to ageing and political changes in Germany. This, combined with Lamač’s departure from Germany, led to the dissolution of Ondra-Lamač-Film in 1937.
The present restoration reflects the international nature of the film and its distribution, with elements found in France, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Russia. After a thorough comparison of the relevant elements, we decided in favor of the nitrate b&w intermediate positive with German-French intertitles from the Cinémathèque française in Paris and the b&w safety print with Italian intertitles from the Národní filmový archiv in Prague. Due to a missing first act in the intermediate positive and a heavily abbreviated beginning in the other material, we were able to fill in the first few minutes with a b&w reduction copy from a private collection based on the bilingual export version. The sepia tinting has been digitally reconstructed based on a nitrate print owned by the Cinémathèque de Bretagne in Brest.
Today, even after reconstruction, the film is significantly shorter than the length stated on the censorship record. That mentions a length of 2746 m., while the final length is close to 2010 m., which means a difference of 30 minutes at 22 fps. The German version of the film has unfortunately not survived, but historical documents nevertheless allowed lost scenes to be reconstructed and deviations in the export versions to be identified. Some of the first and last names as well as places have been changed. Most of the missing scenes we could identify concern Susi, the second female lead, and her life in the boarding school, as well as her acquaintance with her future husband, a storyline which completely disappeared. The engagement party at the Hillers’ with Anni’s love interest, but without her, which promised to be a great piece of entertainment, is sadly missing.

Michal Večeřa, Lou Burkart