Jon Mirsalis on Piano. Maria Jacobini was both diva and anti-diva-a star who made her mark playing honest, simple girls. "She is our purity," one critic wrote. "The others speak to the senses. But Maria Jacobini speaks, with her wordless art, straight to our hearts." The director-star team of Righelli and Jacobini were invited to Germany in 1922 by producer Jacob Karel, who immediately formed Maria Jacobini GmbH. In Der Bastard, based on a popular novel, Jacobini plays the innocent daughter of aristocrats who has a child out of wedlock. She follows her seducer-abandoner to Paris and onto a transatlantic sea voyage. Replete with a Titanic-like fire at sea, a rescue by Chinese with its implied meditation on orientalism, and footage of a stunning World Fair in Berlin, "Der Bastard is a perfect movie from the twenties, well directed, photographed, interpreted by a cosmopolitan cast all working together in harmony." (Vittorio Martinelli)