Willy Fritsch and Maria von Tasnady ~ This is a cigarette card from the Bunte Filmbilder cigarette card series. It was published in 1937. It is card #288. Size: just over 2¼" x 2¾" (much larger than a typical US or British cigarette card). Very light wear. Overall the condition is very fine.

Willy Fritsch studied drama under Max Reinhardt and entered the German film industry in the early-1920s. He became a highly popular star of light operettas and romances often opposite Lilian Harvey or Käthe von Nagy. Fritch kept working right through the Nazi domination of the German cinema averaging about one film a year including Vienna Blood (1942) and The Bat (1945). As easily as he had worked under the Nazis, Fritch continued acting in occupied Germany and then West Germany until retiring in 1964.

Sultry Nazi sex-kitten, Maria von Tasnady, a steady if not accomplished leading lady of the German cinema during the Nazi era. Maria often found herself in second female leads. Her beauty and sexuality were obvious but perhaps it was this sexuality that kept her from rising to the top ranks of UFA's stars. In a state in which Heinrich Himmler's influence attempted to erase overt sexuality and certainly eroticism, it did not profit to be a sex kitten. Despite this, von Tasnady made at least one film that seemed to thumb its nose at middle-class Nazi values, Final Accord or Schlußakkord (1936) which has been regarded to achieve cinema's sensual potential. On the other hand, she also starred in the overtly Nazi drama People Without a Fatherland (Menschen ohne Vaterland) in 1937.