Cradle Song (1933)

Mitchell Leisen: Cradle Song (US 1933). Kent Taylor (Don Antonio Perez), Dorothea Wieck (Joanna) and Evelyn Venable (Teresa).

Il canto della culla / Rakkaus herää / Nunnornas barn / Wiegenlied / Le Chant du berceau.

    US 1933. PC: Paramount Productions Inc. P: E. Lloyd Sheldon.

    D: Mitchell Leisen. SC: Marc Connelly. Dalla pièce Canción de cuna (1911) di María e Gregorio Martínez Sierra. DP: Charles Lang – b&w – Academy. ED: Anne Bauchens. PD: Wiard Ihnen. M: W. Franke Harling. D: Dorothea Wieck (Joanna), Evelyn Venable (Teresa), Guy Standing (il dottore), Louise Dresser (priora), Kent Taylor (Antonio), Gertrude Michael (suor Marcella), Nydia Westman (suor Sagrario), Gail Patrick (suor Maria Lucia). 

    77 min

    Language: English.

    Helsinki premiere: 8 April 1934 Bio-Bio, distributed by Paramount Pictures.

    35 mm print from: Library of Congress

    E-subtitles in Italian by SubTi Londra.

    Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna 2026: Easy Living with Mitchell Leisen.

    Viewed at Cinema Jolly, 21 June 2026

Ehsan Khoshbakht (Bologna 2026): "Though not exactly Mitchell Leisen’s directorial debut (he had a major hand in directing two films that were eventually attributed to Stuart Walker), the highly unusual Cradle Song – closer to Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du péché than to either Ernst Lubitsch or Vincente Minnelli – was the first time his name appeared as director. This belongs to an exploratory period lasting until 1935, in which Leisen was looking for material that suited his design-favoured cinema. His taste for aesthetic innovation was matched by Paramount’s tendency towards ostentatiousness. He was searching for a deeper truth that his cinema could surrender to. Based on the Spanish play by María and Gregorio Martínez Sierra, Cradle Song is a story of family reconfiguration and belonging, both key to Leisen’s cinema. The story is about young Joanna (German actress Dorothea Wieck), who leaves her adopted family to join a convent. During years of living in seclusion, Joanna fights temptations, and they are not lustful – it is the sound of children playing outside that distracts her from total devotion. “I think of our Lord as a child,” she says, suggesting that innocence, motherhood and divinity are seen as a continuum. Therefore, the arrival of the abandoned baby in the convent is more like a small miracle. She raises the child, who, in adulthood (played by Evelyn Venable), goes out and falls in love with a dashing engineer. She becomes a go-between for the flesh and the soul, and a surrogate for her mother’s earthly desires. Leisen maps worldly pleasures onto the mother when, in one shot, the lace of the daughter’s wedding dress momentarily covers the entire frame, including Joanna’s face, making it look as if it is the mother who is going to the bridal chamber. The compositions emphasise desire and separation, and there is an incredible moment when the groom is allowed to look at the faces of the nuns who once only in their cage of chastity unveil for him." Ehsan Khoshbakht

AA: Mitchell Leisen's Cradle Song was the first film adaptation of María and Gregorio Martínez Sierra's classic Catholic play which has been much filmed.

In Spain, an orphan woman Joanna (Dorothea Wieck) leaves her loving adopted home and becomes a nun at St. Mary's convent. Why? A mystery remains. 

A kindly doctor (Guy Standing) becomes an interlocutor between the secular and the religious. He recognizes Joanna's powerful maternal instinct, and when the doctor agrees to adopt a baby left at the convent's torno wheel, an arrangement is negotiated so that Joanna can raise her. The baby, baptized as Teresa, grows into a radiant young woman (Evelyn Venable). At the construction site of a train station, Teresa meets the engineer Antonio Perez (Kent Taylor), and the movie ends with them taking their farewell to Joanna on their way to the wedding ceremony in Madrid. 

Dorothea Wieck had risen to world fame as the beloved governess of a Prussian girls' school in Leontine Sagan's all-female masterpiece Mädchen in Uniform (DE 1931) co-starring Hertha Thiele as a teenage student who falls in love with her teacher. Wieck and Thiele teamed again in Frank Wisbar's Anna and Elizabeth (DE 1933). Both movies are Sapphic milestones about hidden desire and secret love. Wieck's warm and noble presence was distinguished by subtlety and sophistication. 

In America, having contributed beautifully to Paramount elegance in two movies, Wieck was falsely denounced as a Nazi agent by jealous rivals. Back in Germany, she was cast as an opera singer in the female leading role of the third adaptation of German film art's foundational story, The Student of Prague (DE 1935, D: Arthur Robison). 

In Cradle Song, Dorothea Wieck sang the titular lullaby herself. In The Student of Prague she lip-syncs an immortal song of film history: "Warum?" (composed by Theo Mackeben to the poem by J. W. von Goethe, sung by Miliza Korjus). The title means "Why?". Like in Cradle Song, the question is the answer. Both convey the supernatural. In Cradle Song, the divine. In The Student of Prague, the demonic.

Ehsan Khoshbakht in his program note evokes Les Anges du péché: Robert Bresson and Mitchell Leisen set their debut films in a convent. Dominique Sanda, discovered for the cinema by Bresson, told us last year in the morning discussion at the Midnight Sun Film Festival that films she might consider taking to the desert island would be Peter Ibbetson and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Both were shot by Charles Lang, also the DP of Cradle Song, Death Takes a Holiday and Midnight by Mitchell Leisen. In 1929-1952, Lang belonged to Paramount's top cinematographers, beloved by stars from Marlene Dietrich to Audrey Hepburn, a master of the art of light and shadow in a wide range of genres from war (A Farewell to Arms), to horror comedy (The Cat and the Canary with Bob Hope & Paulette Goddard) to film noir (Ace in the Hole, The Big Heat). Charles Lang had a special talent in conveying transcendence, the supernatural and the film noir sense of "streets dark with something more than night".

The editor is Anne Bauchens, a Hollywood legend and a Cecil B. DeMille regular who excelled particularly in his four religious films. Bauchens and Leisen had worked together on DeMille productions since Male and Female (1919).

In charge of the art direction is Wiard Ihnen. He had started at Famous Players-Lasky in 1919 and become an art director in 1932 in films such as Blonde Venus. The production team boasted also Edith Head, about to become the most acclaimed costume designer in film history. She started at Famous Players-Lasky in 1923, to be absorbed to Paramount for which she worked a total of 44 years. In 1940, she married Wiard Ihnen. 

Contemplating these talents helps make sense of Paramount magic. It was based on hard work and experience honed over many years in artistic collaboration. Already a studio veteran, Mitchell Leisen had home ground advantage, and he could engage the cast and the crew like a conductor of a familiar symphony orchestra.

"Get thee to nunnery". In making his debut movie about a religious subject, Leisen did not obey the Cecil B. DeMille recipe of "sin and salvation". The religious essence of Cradle Song is sincere, and Leisen's approach is more deferential than Bresson's who questioned the church as an institution. (DeMille's movies broke box office records. Cradle Song was a commercial disappointment).

The movie gives no answer to the mystery of why Joanna leaves a beloved adopted family to live under the discipline of a convent. We are left to our own devices in thinking about answers. A restriction can be a liberation. "At 18, you need to decide between matrimony and a cold wash". A convent was for centuries a unique opportunity for female self-determination, a liberation from patriarchal order and patriarchal family life. In a case of a love that dare not speak its name, a convent was a means of sublimation and transference. A liberation from earthly desire channeled into a sacred pursuit. And a liberation from all worldly towards the heavenly.

This spectrum Dorothea Wieck conveys beautifully. After Les Anges du péché and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Robert Bresson ceased to cast professional actors, because he found that acting skills distanced performers from their own spirit. We are all born from the spirit, which we often lose and forget. Therefore Bresson cast non-professionals like Dominique Sanda who had not yet learned to hide their spirit. But I think Bresson might have approved Dorothea Wieck.

Mitchell Leisen's cinematic approach is already expressive and coherent: the sense of space, the moving camera, the mise-en-scène. At times Cradle Song borders on the maudlin, the dialogue turns artificial, the imagery glossy. Yet the emotional arch is genuine and compelling. The tears that are flowing in the two farewell scenes bookending the movie feel real. I write down from the electronic subtitles in Italian: "Che Dio sia con voi".

The print seems clean and intact, but in the beginning, full black is missing, and there are blurry passages, as if the print might have been partly sourced from 16 mm. "A nitrate print of this film survives in the UCLA Film and Television Archives" according to IMDb which also informs that Cradle Song is "One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since. Because of legal complications, this particular title was not included in the original television package and may not have ever been televised."