Based on Guy de Maupassant’s novella and set in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, Romance revolves around Madeleine, the wife of a respectable but conservative bank clerk, who has an affair with a young composer. The opening sequence is a cinematic tour-de-force: the camera moves from the roofs of Paris into Madeleine’s bedroom, where she lies like a corpse, suddenly brought back to life in narrative flashbacks that show her desperate and vain attempts to find fulfillment outside her home. Nearly banned by Goebbels as too defeatist, it is surely the most nuanced and sympathetic of the Third Reich–era films by virtue of its reflections on a woman who dreams of a more vibrant life.