Crise

Brigitte Helm is the bored wife of always-working Gustav Diessl. He's bored too, but he orders her not to go out with her friends. Driven to distraction, she visits poor artist Jack Trevor, and agrees to go to Vienna with him. But her husband has trailed her, and confronts Trevor. Then he's off to the club, so she goes out night-clubbing.

Fraulein Helm is 90% of this movie, but beautiful as she is, what I noted were director G. W. Pabst's compositions and editing, so that this 96-minute movie seems to contain no more than a score of titles. The story is told with such ability -- and a hand-held camera under the supervision of Theodor Sparkuhl -- that little is needed to bring forth the anomie that suffuses this stale marriage.

I think the ending is a bit of a cop-out; apparently when they weren't being gloomy and Teutonic, German audiences enjoyed a happy ending just as much as American audiences. However, is it really an ending, or just the beginning of another cycle?

Just before his two masterworks with Louise Brooks, Pabst directed this provocative study of an upper-class woman's sexual frustration. Neglected by her work-obsessed husband, Brigitte Helm falls in with a fast crowd of Berlin nightclub denizens (the "wrong turn" of the title), toying with an artist and a boxer as potential lovers. Pabst sketches this milieu in terms of consumption of cigarettes, liquor, and drugs, but it looks considerably more realistic than the garish cartoon decadence of CABARET and its imitators. A highlight of a lengthy nightclub sequence is some amusing play around the erotic impact of a backless evening gown. If Helm writhes with coiled intensity in almost every scene, she still creates a credible psychological portrait. While the plot devolves into a can-this-marriage-be-saved? formula, Pabst sustains interest through expert framing and shrewdly chosen gestures: thus, the act of dividing a pastry comes to represent the possibility of divorce. An intelligently adult resolution, offering no easy answers, adds to the film's stature.

The years 1925 to 1931 were creatively rich for G.W.Pabst. The film under review comes between 'Loves of Jeanne Ney' and 'Pandora's Box'. Siegfried Kracauer maintained that this film would be of no account at all but for the nightclub scenes but I think in this he has judged it too harshly. Pabst does not waste any time on preliminaries as we are intrigued by and attracted to the main characters from the outset whilst the final reconciliation is beautifully understated. Technically the film is faultless. This is one of three films that Pabst edited himself and he has the services of Theodor Sparkuhl whose camerawork in the nightclub sequence is breathtaking. The images in this sequence are both intoxicating and erotic. A truly fascinating cast both on screen and off. Herta von Walther would eventually make a speedy exit to Brazil via Portugal rather than be a Gestapo agent whilst the eventful life of aristocratic Jack Trevor, including wrongful imprisonment for alleged collaboration, would make a film in itself. Gustav Diessl alas was taken far too early at only forty eight and the wondrous Brigitte Helm, greatly admired by Hitler, quit films in the mid 1930's never to return. Although this would generally be regarded as 'minor' Pabst it is wonderfully stylish and a further example of this director's mastery of the visual and his talent for getting the best from his actors.

"Abwege", a film directed by Herr G. W. Pabst, demonstrates the most representative and important artistic merits of the oeuvre of this great German director during his silent period. Expressionism and Psychology are both intertwined without distinction in this film so we could say that the film is an Expressionistic film as well as a profound study of the psychology of the main characters, or a film about a marriage in crisis in which the troubled relationship of the couple is worked out in an oppressive setting.

In its visual aspects, "Abwege" is an astounding film with important and decisive cinematography by Herr Theodor Sparkuhl. The different settings that are showed in the film superbly illustrate the different moods suffered by its main characters. This is demonstrated in an astonishing early scene when Herr Thomas Beck ( Herr Gustav Diessl, perfect as the boring and upset husband ) is depressed, sitting on the sofa the in their bedroom in front of an open window waiting in vain for his wife, Dame Irene ( Dame Brigitte Helm, more feline and cold than ever ) The different way of lighting the apartments of the various characters or those wonderful and thrilling shadows in the stairs, are a good examples of the virtuosity of Herr Theodor.

Complicated, controversial and at the same time, successful, is the psychological study of the different personalities of that marriage, a couple in crisis characterized by continuous ups and downs, incomprehension, monotony, and lack of understanding. They are two very different people with different ways of living and they must take on the hard task of finding common ground, an effort that seems to doomed to fail. Herr Pabst falters at the end of the film when he resorts to an unconvincing happy ending as well as doing some unnecessary moralizing.

There is a part of "Abwege" that this German count especially loves and it is the one that happens in the Klub… can you imagine, this film gives the chance to watch a genuine, decadent German night-Klub of the Weimar era!!!... It's is a great present for decadent Teutonic aristocrats who in this way can remember the crazy nights of their youth, where many good times were spent in such gorgeous dens of iniquity. There the vicious and idle clients could find the vice of their choice: alcohol, drugs, tobacco and, the most terrible of all, Latin dancers!… And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must return urgently to the Klub.

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com/

Brigitte Helm glides draped in a variety of killer outfits through an escapist fantasy of love among the loaded, far from the gritty realism one usually expects from G.W.Pabst.

Introduced by her chic, worldly and bobbed-haired friend Hertha Von Walther into a world of swingers in which everyone is immaculately dressed and has limitless amounts of money to squander on sex, drugs and rock & roll, Helm herself throughout remains nobly aloof, like Giulietta Masina in 'Giulietta deli Spiriti'.