German film in the 1920s liked to move in glamorous spheres in order to give viewers a pleasurable insight into the life of the 'upper classes'. However, it also liked to make genre paintings of the lives of the 'common people'. Sadly, both social classes are rarely depicted realistically. In most cases, the depictions remain clichéd, often combined with more or less banal moral messages.
The important role played by clichés in 'Schlagende Wetter' is already evident in the first scene: young Marie (Liane Haid) sits at a table in a barren room, her head in her hands, visibly distressed. Presumably her father (Herrmann Vallentin) stands opposite her and asks: 'Who is the culprit?'. Director Karl Grune is apparently convinced that this stenographic exposition is enough for the contemporary audience to grasp the central conflict of the film: Marie is pregnant but unmarried.
The melodrama now plays out according to a tried and tested blueprint. Marie's father rages, the child's father George (Walter Brugmann) disappears, Marie is taken in by the unüpresuming and awkward Thomas (Eugen Klöpfer) and his parents (Adele Reuter-Eichberg, Leonhard Haskel), Thomas and Marie marry and he adopts the child. Now George reappears and makes a pass at his former lover.
Fortunately, what lifts the film far above the cliché is that Karl Grune sets this 'bourgeois tragedy' in the miners' milieu of the Ruhr area. The exterior shots show the mining district of the interwar period: crooked colliery houses on unpaved roads with smoking chimneys in the background. The film spends a lot of time at the pithead and underground and obviously strives for realism in its depiction of the miners' working and living conditions. The tunnels were painstakingly recreated in the studio and viewers can understand the structure of a mine, which may be unfamiliar to them, with the help of model sets that are skilfully edited into the action.
As the film title suggests, the mine also serves to dramatically escalate and ultimately resolve the conflict. Thomas and George are buried in a mine gas explosion - known in miner's jargon as 'Schlagende Wetter" (percussive weather). The melodrama is now enriched with elements of the gothic novel, as the characters face a variety of dangers in the dark and narrow corridors.
'Schlagende Wetter', only incompletely preserved, is a handsome film with elaborate shots of both the real world of the Ruhr area and the studio. Unfortunately, the plot is a little thin and hackneyed compared to the film's technical ambition.
