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I could just as accurately label Mädchen in Uniform "boarding school cinema" and lump it in with Diary of a Lost Girl and Dead Poets Society. But failing to note that a movie made in 1931 treated the subject of homosexuality with seriousness and sensitivity would be like an archeologist failing to note that he found a television set buried in King Tut's tomb.
Images of gays in the movies of the early sound era were few and far between; and positive ones? Forget it. One of Clara Bow's last films, 1932's Call Her Savage, included a scene in a gay bar, the first and last such scene in a Hollywood movie until Otto Preminger's 1962 movie, Advise and Consent, but otherwise gay men existed at best as foppish creatures of ambiguous sexuality and at worst as "sissies" subject to ridicule and broad comedy.
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That's why seeing a movie like Mädchen in Uniform feels so much like stepping into a time warp—there wouldn't be another movie like it for decades. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that it came from Germany; film critic Ruby Rich in talking about the film, noted that Berlin under the Weimar Republic was remarkably open to gays and lesbians such as Christa Winsloe who wrote both the script and the stage play it was based on, and Leontine Sagan who directed both versions of the story. The movie "comes to us directly from that era," Rich said, "and shows us the kind of scene that flourished there."
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"Through discipline and hunger we will become great again," she says as she dismisses student complaints of malnutrition and mistreatment, "or not at all!" The movie was filmed just two years before Hitler took power in Germany and the school and its principal were swipes at the rising Nazi tide and its threat to a free society. At this school, books outside the classroom are forbidden, letters are censored and the girls' striped uniforms bear an uncomfortable similarity to those later worn by concentration camp inmates.
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Manuela sees in her teacher a substitute for the mother she lost many years before and as she is overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions—loneliness, homesickness, her own budding sexuality—she develops a crush on Bernburg so palpable her feelings are soon obvious to everyone. Manuela's story, that of a lonely girl searching for something, is the film's strength—loneliness, ironically, being one of the chief traits all human beings share.
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"What you call sin, Frau Principal," Bernburg says, "I call love which has thousands of forms."
Later, when an act of kindness is misconstrued, the simmering tension between the authoritarian principal and the compassionate teacher comes to a boil.
The film's ending, in stark contrast to that of the play, is hopeful. Whether Winsloe and Sagan settled on the changes for artistic reasons or to appease German censors, I can't say, but at least, as Ruby Rich put it, they spared us the cliche of "lesbian suicide."
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Mädchen in Uniform premiered in Germany on November 27, 1931. It was initially banned in the United States until Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of New York governor Franklin Roosevelt, interceded on its behalf and in September 1932, it played briefly in New York City. While audiences of the time—and certainly censors—were shocked at the film's subject matter, I'm not sure a modern audience would react any differently today. While we may now be open to the characters' sexual orientation, I suspect most of us would look askance at the hints of pedophilia, an issue the filmmakers seemed blind to.
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Dorothea Wieck made a couple of Hollywood films, neither a success, then returned to Germany where she continued to work in supporting roles for another forty years. Hertha Thiele resisted offers by the Nazi party to perform in propaganda films and in 1937 emigrated to Switzerland where it took her five years to find work. After the war, she worked in East Germany as a nursing assistant before returning to acting in the mid-1960s.
As for the subject matter itself, with enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, portrayals of gays and lesbians were driven even further underground. Gays and lesbians would have to be satisfied with the occasional Mrs. Danvers or Joel Cairo, characters ambiguous enough to slip past the censors, if not audiences. Not for another thirty years would Hollywood again openly address the issue.
Postscript: Unfortunately, Mädchen in Uniform is not available on DVD. It pops up periodically on cable (I taped it off the Sundance Channel years ago), or if you don't mind watching it on YouTube, you can see it here.
2 comments:
Well, I tried but my ancient computer will not let me see it properly.
So, just by your terrific post, I can only say, I don't have a problem with the gay part. When I read the part where she is a mere child, that is where I have to say no.
Doesn't matter what year it is, or what allegory the director was going for, there is a sinister aspect to the film.
So, throw away the whole film because of that one huge flaw?
Yeah, says me.
So, throw away the whole film because of that one huge flaw? Yeah, says me.
I don't have a problem with that reaction. I spent parts of the movie thinking "what the --" and I'm sure that if it had been made yesterday, people would burn down the theater. (Which come to think of it, is probably why it isn't available on DVD.)
Still, it's a landmark film, and I throw it out there to give you a sense of what was going on at the time -- and maybe more to the point, what wasn't going on.
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