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Die Yacht Der Sieben Sunden (released in the U.S. as "Yacht of the Seven Sins"), the 1928 Jacob Fleck & Luise Fleck German silent ocean cruise crime melodrama starring Brigitte Helm (best remembered for her starring role in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"), John Stuart, Rina Marsa, Kurt Vespermann, and Hugo Werner-Kahle. Note that the movie was made by husband and wife Jacob and Luise Fleck. Although completely forgotten today, except by major film buffs, the Flecks were major figures in the super early history of the cinema. Luise Fleck was born in Vienna in 1873, the daughter of Louis Veltee, who ran a panopticon (a semi-circular theater), and in 1910, she married Anton Kolm, and together with her brother and their cameraman, Jacob Fleck, they set up the first film production company in Austria. They made short documentaries, some directed by Louise, who is considered the second female film director (after French Alice Guy-Blache). During World War I, they made newsreels, but in the economic collapse in Austria after World War I, the company went bankrupt. They started a new company, but in 1922, Anton, Luise's husband, died, and she soon married Jacob Fleck. They worked for German production companies including UFA over the next decade, but when Hitler took power, they returned to Austria because Jacob Fleck was Jewish. However, in 1938, when the Nazis took control of Austria, Jacob Fleck was sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp. He was released in 1940, and the couple were exiled to Shanghai, where they helped make movies there. After the war, they returned to Austria, hoping to start a new film studio, and that did not happen, but they made a few movies. Luise died in 1950, and Jacob died in 1953.
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Important Added Info: Note that this is an interesting movie poster! In the 1920s, before the advent of sound in movies, movies from one country could easily be distributed in every other country, because all that was needed was to change the language of the "inter-titles" (since there was no sound!). So often, countries would print posters with a blank area where the title would go, so that other countries could use those posters when the movie was shown, overprinting their country's information in that bottom blank area. That is the case with this poster. We know it to be from the German UFA movie "Yacht of the Seven Sins", because that is printed in the bottom right corner in German, with "1 SHEET" after it. Obviously, UFA made these one-sheets to be sent to the U.S. where the posters could be overprinted, and this poster was not used, because it does not have the overprinting (of further interest is the fact that there is some Japanese writing on the back, indicating that it was sent to Japan, but likely never used there either, or there would be Japanese overprinting on the front). We have seen German posters from other movies of this period with a similar blank area, but we have never seen this striking poster before! Also note that this is a very rare "country of origin" poster from Germany from before World War II. There are very few German movie posters from before World War II in existence (because of the massive paper shortages in Germany during World War II), and most of those few are in museums.

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