After she was filmed twice as dancer at the Folies-Bergères, Josephine Baker played her only film role in La sirène des tropiques. She played the role of the mulatto Papitoe, who takes an interest in the French engineer André who has been sent to the West Indies by a rival who wants him to disappear without trace. Papitoe saves André and is taken back to Paris by him where she becomes a great revue star. This love story is not all that spectacular, but is made a sensation by the presence of Josephine Baker. Her energetic movement seems to fill the whole screen and she is the absolute star, especially in the second part. When the film was released in 1927 the press was united: ‘The greatest advertisement is of course that Josephine Baker plays in this film. It is a must that everyone has to have seen her.’ Mario Nalpas, one of the directors of the film, was the assistant director to the young Luis Buñuel.The Filmmuseum commissioned Wim van Tuyl and Yvo Verschoor to make a new score for the film, in which they made use of the music archive of the Filmmuseum, which houses a large number of so-called incidentals: music fragments that reflect a certain mood. The score for the film is made up of incidentals like this, of which Wim van Tuyl made a piano arrangement augmented with recordings of original music by Josephine Baker.
