The Yellow Ticket
About The Yellow Ticket
After her Jewish adoptive father dies, Lea goes to St. Petersburg to study medicine. Jewish women can get a residence permit only with a yellow ticket, and those tickets are issued to prostitutes. She takes one, then studies under another name by day. When the double life is exposed, her classmate Dimitri, whom she loves, turns away. She attempts suicide and is taken to a clinic. There she is identified as the daughter of the professor under whom she has been studying. She recovers, and she and Dimitri come together.
Cast & crew
More about The Yellow Ticket
Victor Janson and Eugen Illés directed the PAGU production. Paul Davidson produced it. Hanns Kräly and Hans Brennert wrote the script. Illés was also the cameraman, and Kurt Richter designed the sets. The Murnau-Stiftung lists the German premiere as 22 November 1918 and the length as 1,571 metres. The Zeughauskino notes that part of it was shot in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw.
Themes
Background
Made in Germany during the war with Russia, the melodrama uses the yellow-ticket rule to show legal discrimination against Jewish women in St. Petersburg.
Look
Eugen Illés photographed the film, including scenes in Warsaw's Jewish quarter.
Preservation
Long treated as lost. In the 1990s sections were identified in the Netherlands and in Russia, and Kevin Brownlow assembled a reconstruction. The Zeughauskino has shown that version.
Notes
- The German title is Der gelbe Schein. English-language releases also used The Devil's Pawn.
- Pola Negri plays Lea. English Wikipedia also credits her with the mother, Lydia. Harry Liedtke plays Dimitri, Victor Janson plays the tutor Ossip Storki, Adolf Edgar Licho plays Professor Schukowski, and Guido Herzfeld plays Scholem Raab.
- The yellow ticket was a tsarist residence paper. German Wikipedia notes that only prostitutes received it, and that the rule ended after the October Revolution.
- Kevin Brownlow reconstructed the film after material was identified in the 1990s in a Dutch private collection and in the Russian state film archive.
Scenes
- Lea waits at the police station with a group of prostitutes for the yellow ticket.
- In the clinic she is identified as the professor's daughter.
