The Merry Widow

In the impoverished Balkan principality of Pontevedrino, a love drama unfolds. The class divide prevents Count Danilo from marrying the peasant girl Hanna. With an aching heart, he moves to Paris, while she becomes engaged to a rich banker who dies soon afterwards, leaving her his large fortune. Baron Zeta of Pontevedrino now seeks to have Hanna marry a compatriot, hoping that her millions will save the principality from bankruptcy. Although the plan seems to succeed at first, fate has something else in store for Hanna.

The film is an adaptation of Austrian composer Franz Lehár’s popular operetta from 1905 of the same name. Only a fragment from the middle of the film survives; the scenes include a Montenegrin national dance. The fragment contains only a single intertitle in Swedish.