Most controversial are Forst’s over-the-top melodramas Mazurka and Die Sünderin (The Sinner, shot in 1950 and released to violent protests and big box-office in early 1951), a striking noirish silent film with Hildegard Knef's voice-over commenting the plot, told in non-chronological flashbacks. (It was Forst's old love Marlene who encouraged Knef to do the film.) Mazurka is so over-the-top that Forst asked his composer Peter Kreuder to use loud music in some scenes so that audience laughter might be drowned out. As it turned out, this wasn't necessary. Audiences were deeply moved. (As it happened, Kreuder was a former lover of Marlene's as well.)

Because of some of her spectacular off-screen antics, many people think of Pola Negri as a wildly melodramatic, unsubtle actress. The opposite is the case. In this respect her next-to-last German talkie, Nunzio Malasomma's Die Fromme Lüge (The Noble Lie, shot from December 15, 1937 and released on March 25, 1938), is particularly revealing. It is a quiet melodrama to begin with, too quiet to be exciting but likeable and modern as a result. Like James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, Pola's character is too generous to her child, a son in this case, and doesn't know when to stop. She commits a kind of cheque forgery to cover his debts (to be more exact, she signs a contract and gets advance money without telling her impresario that she has lost her singing voice after her son was nearly killed in a racing accident), but all ends well. In the film's first minutes it is not established that the young man is her son, and we are led to believe he's her young lover. That's a fine idea carried out well.

The only other of Pola's German talkies I have seen is Tango Notturno, which reputedly was intended for Marlene Dietrich in case she might return to Germany. (At Paramount, Dietrich had starred in Song of Songs and the aborted Hotel Imperial, both remakes of Pola's silent films.) The plot and structure are strongly reminiscent of Mazurka. Pola was teamed up again with Albrecht Scohoenhals, her leading man in Mazurka, and this time Pola is dead and Schoenhals is accused of murder (instead of the other way around, as was the case in Mazurka). Again a married woman visits a former lover, and her husband finds out and rejects her; again she loses her voice and, worse than appearing in a cabaret as in Mazurka, has to prostitute herself. Pola's first minutes are arresting. In dark, wet streets reminiscent of Weimar cinema at its best (the art director Erich Czerwonski had repeatedly worked with the great German director F.W. Murnau in the 1920s), Schoenhals follows a mysterious woman who gets nervous and flees. Needless to say, it's Pola. The next minute, she's dead, and he's in jail. It is difficult to defend Schoenhals because he refuses to reveal the identity of the dead woman, who quite obviously was a drug-addict and a prostitute. In the flashbacks, it is revealed that the dead woman was his beloved wife, a celebrated singer who gave him his big break in show business. After their child's death she felt obliged to go underground. When Schoenhals found her, it was too late. Schoenhals is rather unconvincing in the flashbacks (too old, too world-weary) as a struggling young composer, but that's only a minor weakness. No other of Pola's German talkies has such a strong supporting cast. Most impressive are Erich Pontos a drunk man in a bar, Elisabeth Flickenschildt as Pola's maid, and best of all: Lina Carstens as the vulgar landlady in whose rooms the final tragedy takes place. This woman is both funny and creepy. In an almost supernatural sequence, she encourages Schoenhals to take poor Pola back, but at the same time she claims that a drug addict will forever be a drug addict and cause harm to all people close to her. Carstens' voice can be heard all over the house, driving Pola to suicide.

Two further films in which Pola was supposed to star did not materialize are worth mentioning.  Some filmographies contain Gräfin Volescu (Countess Volescu). This spy melodrama was announced for her by the Film-Kurier (July 15, 1936), to be co-starring Gustav Diessl and Paul Hartmann, but it was never made.  Pola also was to co-star with Hans Albers in Gustav Ucicky's Savoy-Hotel 217 (Savoy Hotel, Room 217), a Czarist Russian-set murder mystery. She had to leave the project (which would have been her comeback at UFA) because she fell ill in January of 1936, but there may have been other reasons. Hans Albers was a domineering star, and Pola would have had to play second fiddle to him. In all her German talkies she had competent but rather bland leading men. Her character in Savoy-Hotel 217, finally played by Brigitte Horney, is a married hotel guest in love with the hotel's head waiter Albers. This woman is quickly established as the film's female lead, but less than a half-hour into the film, she is shot—by her jealous husband, as it turns out in the end. Thus Alfred Hitchcock wasn't the first director to kill of his leading lady at the beginning of the film. For the rest of the film, chief suspect Albers goes underground to find the murderer. Being cleared, he gets his girl, played by Gusti Huber who went on to play Anne Frank's mother in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).

A final note: one of main attractions of Karl Anton's anti-Soviet melodrama Weisse Sklaven - Panzerkreuzer Sebastopol (White Slaves: Battleship Sebastopol), whose shooting began in June 1936, was Peter Kreuder's song "Wenn die Sonne hinter den Dächern versinkt" ("When the Sun Goes Down Behind the Roofs"), sung by leading lady Camilla Horn. Before the film was released on January 5, 1937, Germans already knew the song because it had been previously recorded by Pola Negri. On CD’s it is still her version that one can hear.