Das Haus in Montevideo (1951)

The impeccable Professor Traugott Hermann Nägler lives with his wife, Marianne, and their twelve children in the stuffy, respectable seaside idyll of Cuxhaven. The children are named after characters from Richard Wagner’s works or according to Latin ordinal numbers, as illustrated at the beginning of the film by someone leafing through the family album—where Aunt Josephine’s picture is missing. The eldest child, Atlanta, was named after the American ship on which the couple were married by the captain 19 years ago. When Nägler’s late sister Josephine leaves him a house in distant Montevideo, subject to certain conditions, the morally upright professor is initially far from pleased—his sister had been the black sheep of the family. She had become pregnant without being married, and he had cast her out of the family; the child died at the age of two. Outraged, Nägler tears up the ship tickets. But the prospect of a fortune, in light of the financial difficulties facing a high-school teacher with twelve children, along with the desire for another child and the chance to be recognized as the city’s future benefactor, ultimately proves more compelling. With the help of the mayor and Pastor Riesling, a family friend, Marianne manages to persuade her husband to travel to Montevideo with their 17-year-old daughter Atlanta so they can claim the inheritance. The daughter’s prospective fiancé, an engineer who has also named his motorboat Atlanta, secretly joins them as well. In Montevideo, Nägler’s moral convictions are thrown into complete disarray. Confronted by the Spanish language barrier and numerous cheerful young women dressed for summer in the lavishly furnished villa, he wonders what kind of establishment he has stumbled into, and what line of work his sister pursued. In fact, the institution, which houses 45 girls under the age of 21—and where his daughter is to become number 46—is not a brothel, but a foundation dedicated to protecting and educating musically gifted young girls who have no home. The deceased Maria Machado, a gifted and commercially successful opera singer, had enough money to build the house and fund the teaching program. The inheritance also includes a sum of $750,000, however, which reconciles the professor to his sister’s way of life. But the inheritance comes with a condition: the same moral transgression for which he once condemned his sister must occur in the Nägler household. Only a female member of the family who becomes the mother of a child born out of wedlock can inherit, and this must happen by a set deadline: before July 22 of the following year, Atlanta’s 19th birthday. Professor Nägler now desperately tries, through all sorts of hints, to make his daughter’s lover understand what he should and should not do. Naturally, the suggestion is met with complete incomprehension. The young couple want to follow the Näglers’ example and marry properly, once again aboard the ship that gave the daughter her name, the recently renovated Atlanta. The pastor tries to arrange this, but the shipping company turns him down. Now he must desperately impress upon the professor the consequences of the refusal: someone in his family has made sure that a child born out of wedlock will come into the world …