La Habanera portrays a Scandinavian woman's foreign affair, a romance with an exotic landscape, a seductive song, and a Latin lover. Astrée goes astray and surrenders to a reckless moment. The paradise quickly loses its lustre and she lives as a veritable hostage, bound to a tyrant who torments her. Her only solace is a young son, with whom she imagines a life back in the snow of Sweden. La Habanera is a consummate example of Nazi cinema's own foreign affair, its conscious attempt to appropriate Hollywood melodrama for domestic audiences. It starred the Swedish actress Zarah Leander, Nazi Germany's most well-paid screen presence. It was made by a director loath to the government who would go on to a notable career in American studios. Is this an early example of the auteur's ironic approach to popular formulas? Or is it perhaps a further example of how the Nazis recognized the reality of alternative longings, of needs not satisfied in the everyday, and how they fostered films that addressed those needs, meeting them halfway-all the better to regulate and contain errant emotions?-E.R.