Hypocrisie

Adapted by Franz Schulz from the play by Carl Sternheim and directed by Hans Berendt this 'blend of grand burlesque and satire', in the words of Potamkin, was considered too highbrow by the critics but proved to be a great success with the paying public. It is immensely enjoyable with some splendid comic touches. The plot is perfectly simple. Owing to what would now be termed a 'wardrobe malfunction' at a public event the pretty wife of a pompous, petty official becomes an object of desire for a fifth-rate poet, a hapless young barber and a Prince Charming. Needless to say she chooses the latter but has a pang of conscience and returns to hubby who is decorated and promoted by the Prince as a reward for his complacency. The playing is faultless all round. The lovely Jenny Jugo plays the wife,Rudolph Forster the poet, Veit Harlan the barber and there is a marvellous comic turn by Olga Limburg as the 'woman across the street'. The official,Theobald Maske, is another of the unforgettable gallery of characters created by the superlative Werner Krauss. He is self-satisfaction incarnate and is far more concerned with matters of the stomach than the heart. Krauss was a master of make up and the real star of this film is his outrageous moustache! Interesting to see Harlan as a young actor. He made his directorial debut(uncredited) eight years later and went on to become one of the most distinguished and notorious of directors. Director Berendt however went on to perish in Auschwitz. I found this film on You Tube to be far more enjoyable once I had turned down the intrusive and aggravating score that has been tacked on. Should your musical ear be as sensitive as mine, I advise you to do the same. Whatever happened to solo piano accompaniment?!

Pretty young Jenny Jugo has her undergarments fall down as she and her much older husband are on their way to Church one fine Sunday morning. She is so embarrassed that she rushes back home. Her husband, on returning, starts to rant, but a little domesticity in the form of bacon restores harmony. However, the rest of the world assumes that her morals are as loose as her knickers and complications ensue.

This film is very professionally written and performed, but it lacks any sort of comic underpinnings. Instead, everything becomes a snickering symbol, from misshapen cigars to bowling bowls that land in the gutter, to men destroying their beds to collapsing candles. We see symbolic representations of rape, voyeurism, masochism and homosexuality, but the one attempt at non-normative sex -- the local Prince invites young Jenny for dinner and she writes a note to her husband that she is tending to a sick relative -- doesn't happen. Miss Jugo is quite affecting as the ill-at-ease subject of his venery, but, as you might expect, little comes of it.

The problem with this comedy is that it goes on for far too long and is aimed at far too intellectual an audience. There is little that is overtly funny; instead, all the real jokes are symbolic, suitable for Freudian analysis.

Charley Chase would have made a good two-reeler of this -- indeed, he did a good two-reeler with socks serving as symbols of sex. But in this movie, everything happens symbolically and beneath the symbols there is no reality.

The director of this movie, Hans Behrendt, was a specialist in comedy. He escaped to Austria when the Nazis came to power and made movies there until 1936. After the Anschluss, he fled to Belgium, but they caught up to him in Belgium in 1940. He died in Auschwitz two years later.