Enemy of Women

I rented this film from Netflix because I was hoping to see yet another over the top propaganda film from WWII--the type that are almost funny because the acting and characters are so over the top. However, I was very surprised to see that "Enemy of Women" was actually rather restrained. Heck, I could even see some viewers actually feeling a bit of sympathy for the focus of the film--Dr. Josef Goebbels! The film begins as Berlin is in ruins--and a radio broadcast by Dr. Goebbels is telling the people that everything is peachy. Then, the film goes back in time to 1925 and eventually works its way back to where the film began. You see Goebbels as a rather insecure man--a guy who has a difficult time with women. He is secretly in love with his landlord's daughter, Maria. When he makes a very awkward advance on her, her father throws him out of the home. And, inexplicably, Goebbels spends the entire rest of the film trying to win her love. However, along the way, Goebbels shows that he's a lover not to be trifled with and uses the power he achieves from the Nazi party to get his revenge.

This entire film is weird--very weird. That's because it seems like a real biography of the man--though most of it is fiction. Yes, there was a Goebbels and he was a sick and twisted jerk--but oddly, the Goebbels in this film is a bit vulnerable. Sure, he's evil...but somehow not altogether hateful. Because of this somewhat human aspect, the film is a standout for the genre, as propaganda films usually try very hard to de-humanize the enemy. Mind you, this did not make Goebbels look exactly good---but he was indeed human and vulnerable. Overall, it's well made and actually ages pretty well. Just remember that this is NOT a real biography, as the real Goebbels was much more complex and sick.

Of all the gang around Adolf Hitler probably the sickest and most degenerate was Joseph Paul Goebbels. Minister for propaganda and public enlightenment, he was one of the few who was not trying to cut a deal for himself when the Third Reich was in its last days. He stayed loyal to the master to the bitter end.

If Dr. Freud could have gotten Dr. Goebbels on the couch I'm sure his notes would have been fascinating. Like Somerset Maugham's protagonist Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage, Goebbels was born with a club foot and that together with a raging libido was the story of his life. When he was a nobody he couldn't get a date, when he became minister his job included supervision of the German film industry. He had a casting couch that put L.B. Mayer's and Darryl Zanuck's to shame.

This film concerns his obsession with one he couldn't get. Claudia Drake who laughingly rejects him while he was trying to earn a living as a tutor pays for it the rest of the movie. She and father H.B. Warner and husband Donald Woods. Goebbels never forgot a slight in real life.

Wolfgang Zilzer plays Goebbels and it's a change from Martin Kosleck who usually played Goebbels when he was a character in film. If you want to see a good portrayal of Goebbels in a good film I highly recommend The Bunker where Cliff Gorman and Piper Laurie played Joe and Magda Goebbels. She's a cipher here and that's wrong in and of itself. She was as sick as he was, maybe worse. But she completely put up with his womanizing because she didn't believe in letting the grass grow under her feet. There's a fine account of that in Albert Speer's memoirs.

Making Magda a peripheral character in the story is a big mistake. And the general shoddiness of production doesn't help either. In fact at the end of the film the narrator says this story isn't finished and how could it be in 1944.

Still this World War II propaganda has some good moments in it and should be seen as a curiosity.

The story of this Monogram movie is loosely based on the life and times of Nazi criminal and German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Viewers who have the habit of first checking if every button and leather strap of the actor's different Nazi Uniforms are the right size and in the right place will have reason to be displeased. The movie does not aim at historical or geographical accuracy.

Despite of its shortcomings – or maybe just because of them – the basic message is plain and clear: Tyranny means the abolition of law and order and the arbitrary, unabashed invasion of any kind of private sphere and individual freedom. And unhealthy characters will enjoy unlimited power. Goebbels is depicted as a randy „suck-upper". First he quite literally sucks up to the daughter of his landlord, an aspiring actress with whom he reads Roemo and Juliet helping her to prepare for the part of Juliet. The girl pushes the heated up guy away, Goebbels stumbles backwards and falls over a chair. The girl laughs at him lying there as her father, a general, enters and without further ado kicks him out.

This slight brings on Goebbel's lifelong persecution of the girl. He leaves the general's house, crosses the street, gets into a beer hall and – what do you know? – there is a guy there (only seen from a distance) giving a clumsy speech about the Fatherland, Germany's humiliation etc. Freshly humiliated Goebbels instantly sucks up to him, inventing the Hitler salute on the way. His rise to power has begun and soon he can do with the girl whatever he pleases. And he doesn't miss the opportunity. She is for him just a trophy to own, the tragic final scene that shows her in a kind of a golden cage, just helplessly standing there as bombs fall on Berlin make that plainly clear.

Enemy of Women succeeds in making the viewers understand the mechanics of tyranny – it is closer to Charles Chaplin's The Great Dictator than to movies made later, when the USA had larger war experience. Even the heroine's flight to Free Austria is reminiscent of Chaplin's movie. John Alton's camera-work of course is a major asset, he was a true master of shadow and light. One scene of bliss for the girl and her future husband is remarkable as sticks as being extremely bright, almost blinding. I don't know how much the editing is responsible for the effect, in any case, I will not forget it. I also wondered if the director or the cameraman (or both) fell in love with Claudia Drake. Especially in the second part of the movie she is stunningly beautiful and gets a lot of screen time in the most favorable light.

The small Cinémathèque suisse recently released a DVD with its oldest treasures ("Il était une fois... la Suisse" Images cinématographiques des années 1896-1934). The last item is a newsreel report of Dr. Goebbels after a visit to the League of Nations in Geneva in 1934. Before boarding a waiting Junkers 52 he delivers a short speech saying that the German people want nothing but peace and that the German government will do anything in its power to secure it forever. He really was an unscrupulous, intelligent and eloquent liar. The final speech in Enemy of Women struck me as having exactly the same tone and phrasing. The makers of this movies must have studied the „original" carefully.

We are informed at the outset that "The following story unfolds the private life of the greatest scoundrel of our time". One would have thought that would have more aptly described Hitler himself (or at least Goering) rather than Goebbels; but the Doctor would have been as flattered to be considered important enough to get an entire film to himself depicting him (as 'Inglorious Basterds' later put it) as "The number two man in Hitler's Third Reich", as he would have been disdainful of the result.

At a time when far less was then known about him than has been documented since his death, as the most visible and vocal member of the Nazi hierarchy after Hitler it was widely assumed during their lifetime that Goebbels was the real brains behind the Führer. This was certainly how he was portrayed (superbly played by Henry Daniell) in Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator' (1940). Only after the war did it emerge that Goebbels had far less influence over Hitler than had generally been supposed. But that is the least of this film's many inaccuracies; and it shares with Stuart Heisler's 'Hitler' (1962) a similarly tedious fixation with it's subject's love life rather than his political activities.

Originally titled 'The Private Life of Paul Joseph Goebbels', but at some point saddled with the absurd 'Enemy of Women', the film's writer-director Alfred Zeisler was one of Hollywood's many exiles from Nazi Germany and was thus in some instances drawing upon his own memories of the period when Goebbels was consolidating Nazi control over the German film industry; while at other times embellishing with the benefit of hindsight. The result is a bizarre but lamentably dull mishmash of surprisingly recherché historical information and total fabrication. On the one hand the film surprisingly includes the Austrian clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen (later portrayed by Klaus Maria Brandauer in István Szabó's 'Hanussen' in 1988) accurately predicting the Reichstag fire and the rise of Rommel; and Goebbels' secretary was indeed named Hanke, as he is called here. But the character of Maria Brandt, an Austrian actress with whom the Doctor becomes chronically obsessed - not to mention the time frame involved - bears no relation at all to the affair Goebbels actually had with the Czech actress Lída Baarová during the thirties. Stranger still, in 1931 Goebbels married Magda Quandt, by whom he had six children; but in this version of events Joseph seemingly remains a bachelor, and Magda, as played by Sigrid Gurie, appears simply as the mother of a boy young Joseph is teaching history, and has just one word of dialogue: "Harald!"

The Führer himself is seen only fleetingly in longshot, Himmler is shown briefly from behind sounding like a Hollywood gangster; and that's all you see of the other Nazi leaders. Goebbels himself disappears from the film for long stretches, including much of the final third (Claudia Drake, who plays Maria Brandt, is ominously billed above supposed lead Paul Andor); and we are instead forced to watch Maria's extremely uninteresting romance with handsome and equally fictitious Dr. Hans Traeger. None of this is made any more involving by Zeisler's sluggish direction; and the end result is, alas, much duller than it sounds.

Have read various books which dealt with Joseph Goebbels one of Hitler's right hand men who carried out the murder of Millions of Jewish people and many more people from various countries. Goebbels had some very dark secrets as a young man growing up who carried out all his sick mental problems on other people. Joseph Goebbels is played by Wolfgang Zilzer who did a great job of acting and also looked very much like the real person. Goebbels in real life loved all kinds of women and he really loved Maria Brandt, (Claudia Drake) who was a very pretty German actress who gave Joseph a hard time. However, Hollywood twisted the story which made Goebbels into a person who was not as evil as he really was. In real life, Goebbels really went to bed with this famous German actress and was really married to a very beautiful woman who had to turn her back on all his affairs. Nice 1944 film.