Crise

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.

"Abwege," literally translated as "Astray," but usually given the English title of "The Devious Path," and otherwise known as "Crisis," seems as if director G.W. Pabst took the sort of comedy-of-remarriage scenario that his emigrated compatriot Ernst Lubitsch was inventing in Hollywood ("The Marriage Circle" (1924), "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925), "So This Is Paris" (1926)), but filmed it as though it were a somber and claustrophobic psychological melodrama, or "Kammerspielfilm" (chamber drama). The result, consequently, is jarring, but entirely gorgeous. Pabst would achieve his greatest artistic success the subsequent year by teaming up with flapper icon Louise Brooks in "Pandora's Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl," and while his earlier achievements, such as "The Joyless Street" (1925) with Greta Garbo and Asta Nielsen, also tend to overshadow this film, "Abwege" is further evidence, even with its smaller budget, that Pabst was already a technically proficient filmmaker.

The dolly shots are probably the most flashy technique, which are extraordinarily intimate when tracking Irene (Brigitte Helm) through a crowded nightclub dance floor or after her and her husband (Gustav Diessl) fail to reunite one night and are as effective when employed for quick, zoom-like effects to bridge from establishing shots to highlighting character interactions. But, the entire picture is exquisitely photographed and edited. The booze and drug fueled romp of the nightclub sequence might usually get the most attention, but the scenes in the couple's swanky home are also extremely well put together, including the moody lighting effects, cutting to follow figures between rooms, and the middle-class set designs. Even the train station sequence looks stunning with the low-key lighting. Almost everything must've been done in a studio.

Helm provides a sultry look throughout much of the proceedings and strips to her negligee in one scene to make a spectacle of her body, although the comedy-of-remarriage plotting undermines her character's image early on as a proto-feminist turned flapper amidst the glorious decadence of the Weimar Republic, to escape the housewife's gilded cage. Meanwhile, her husband intermittently surveils her, and, otherwise, the film's system of looks is maintained by some dolls sold at the nightclub. Diessl looks absolutely deranged much of the time. While Irene demonstrates concern at one point that her husband will kill himself; with that look on his face and the chiaroscuro effects wherever he went--even the wind gushing through the door when he enters the home of his wife's suspected lover, I thought it more likely he was going to murder someone else. I also like that the other man in the love triangle is an artist, for art-within-art, although the stuff with the boxer is less effective. It's suggestive that the artist spends all his time drawing Irene when he can't have her, but as soon as it seems he might be able to, he's sketching the portrait of some strange old man. Also interesting to note is that sound effects are hardly needed (and there were none in the score by Mauro Colombis for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival screening): views of a phone intercut with characters suddenly looking at it are enough to inform that it's ringing, and the aforementioned gust of wind requires no noise, either.

Although "Abwege" seems to have been circulating for a while now, the restoration presented for Pordenone is my first viewing of it. The recreated tinting/toning adds a lot, too, to an already practically pristine restored print. The entire narrative isn't much ado about anything, really, but it's usually worth it to just look and, if need be, forget the story of these late silent films made by the masters of the art form, and Pabst, indeed, was one of the great filmmakers.

(Note: Incomplete 35mm camera negative from the German Film Archive combined with a reel from a foreign print from the Swiss Film Archive, restored with added tinting/toning and title cards, and now housed in the Austrian Film Archive.)

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?

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.

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'.