In the past decades film historians have demonstrated that in the German cinema of the early 1930s comedies were the predominant filmic genre. Ulrich von Thüna notes that comedies formed 40 percent of the overall production of German films in 1930, increasing to 63 percent in 1931, and more than 64 percent in 1932 (von Thüna; see also Korte, 133–61). Von Thüna relates these high percentages to the repercussions of the Great Depression following the Wall Street stock-market crash of 24 October 1929: the German film industry sought to offer German audiences a convenient and much-needed escape from the harsh economic realities of mass unemployment, status anxieties, and increasing poverty. While von Thüna is certainly right in pointing to the escapist function of cinema in times of extreme economic distress, I wish to add a further consideration about the blossoming of film comedies during the last years of the Weimar Republic by highlighting the gender dynamics in a number of successful romantic comedies of mistaken identity from the period.

In this essay I will investigate Hanns Schwarz's film Bomben auf Monte Carlo (Bombs over Monte Carlo, released in the United States as Monte Carlo Madness, 1931), E. W. Emo's Marion, das gehört sich nicht (Marion, This Is Not Proper, 1932), and Karl Hartl's Die Gräfin von Monte Christo (The Countess of Monte Cristo, 1932). Focusing on the centrality of the figure of the vamp, a motif these films share with a host of others from the period, I will argue that these romantic comedies of mistaken identity should be read as efforts to reject and rewrite the genre of melodrama in the context of shifting gender relations. Drawing on Patrice Petro, I define melodramas as genre films that appeal to the emotions of their respective, predominantly female, audiences, by addressing the difficult life of, usually, female characters. Many times, the female protagonists resort to prostitution to make a living, and their ensuing sexual mobility tends to be depicted as a threat to society, a threat that is often controlled through their death. As historian Barbara Hales argues, the vamp is a female figure similar to the femme fatale in the sense that both present stereotypical images of women who seduce men and destroy their lives (Hales, 227; see also Müller, 259; Wager, 15; Doane, 2).