This was the first time I’d seen Die freudlose Gasse
on the big screen and, after my last viewing of the EditionFilmMuseum DVD, I’d
connected it very strongly with the austerity programmes of the former Tory-led
coalition under the joyless headline “plus ca change”. Well, French was never
my strong suit but over the last five years, things have just got so much
better haven’t they?
Anyway, back to 1925 and post-war depression in greater “Germany”,
specifically Austria and a film that having once been ten reels long is now in
an ongoing state of restoration. Even now it feels like a Diagon Alley
version of the Melchior Street it’s supposed to be with understandable
narrative disruption caused by using five different sources and retrospective
sequencing. That said, it’s never made more sense to me than tonight, sat in
the front row after a week in Bologna and yet with John Sweeney holding the story
with the thematic continuity of his 151 minutes of improvisation. There’s such
variety in Mr Sweeney’s playing and none of tonight sounded like what he played
for Sir Arne’s Treasure or Les Vampires just a few days ago in
Bologna.
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| Where the sun never shines... the locals queue in Melchior Street |
Pabst’s film is based on Hugo Bettauer's novel and takes
what is essentially a crime story and develops its socio-political aspects. Screenwriter
Willy Haas described the source book as "a miserable crime novel" and
said that what appealed to his director was "... the harsh social
portrayal of inflation, the bankruptcy of the old-established patrician
circles...the corruption, the moral decay..." The Joyless Street
therefore focused on the "social" and a realistic portrayal of
poverty and the consequences of mean-spirited capitalism and the greed that
drove western-European economies.
Pabst cast a combination of one of the creators of
cinematic acting and a relative newcomer who’d only made one feature film. Asta
Nielsen was cast as Maria Lechner the daughter of a disabled father who lives
in near poverty and then becomes entangled in the lives of the financiers
running and ruining the economy for profit. Then into her forties, even Asta
was a stretch for the part of an innocent younger woman but her skill carries
her through some memorable and powerful scenes even when the lighting and
unforgiving close-ups can't.
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| Asta Neilsen, Hertha von Walther and Greta Gustafsson soon to be Garbo |
Standing next to her in the forlorn queue for the
butchers is Grete Rumfort, played, of course, by one Greta Gustafsson, fresh
from Gosta Berling and not quite 20 years of age. This was the film that
clinched her ticket to Hollywood and it's not hard to see why Mr Goldwyn was so
impressed. She's superbly photographed by Pabst and you can see the beginnings
of the force of nature that would captivate millions, she’s sublimely
eye-catching if markedly less centred than she will become, jumpy even.
Legend has it that Pabst used slow motion to help
counteract the impression created by the young actress's nerves and this
combination served to create an impression of graceful edginess. Even if
Stiller was on hand to help manage his protege, can it be a coincidence that
Herr Pabst managed to enable defining performances of such power and beauty
from both Garbo and Louise Brooks?
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| Greta. |
The film features many strands and an ensemble of rich
characters. Werner Krauss is monstrously greasy as Geiringer the Butcher who
rules Melchior Street by restricting the supply of meat to only those he
favours: the wealthy or those women prepared to pay in kind. He meets his match
in the local brothel when offered Grete; he can’t cope with her at all and it’s
a telling moment when the bully is flawed by beauty.
Running that house of ill-repute is the other ruler of
the Street, Mrs. Greifer who is played by the extraordinary Valeska
Gert, a dancer and cabaret artist who brings a great knowing energy to the
screen – even breaking the fourth wall on occasion, yelping in silence at the
audience: more Poly Styrene or Ari Up than Gloria Swanson! Mrs. Greifer runs a
fashion boutique which acts as the front for a relatively high-class brothel. Women
of the street are drawn into Mrs. Greifer's, seemingly labyrinthine premises
driven by hunger and desperate poverty to subvert dignity in the service of selfish
and, as it turns out, hypocritical males.
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| Valeska Gert meant it! |
Amidst so much economic disruption, greedy speculators act
to make things worse by manipulating the stock market and the people of the
street suffer whilst the bankers waltz around in opulent hotels and drink
champagne in Greifer's salon.
Further up the social scale, the Rosenow family are
untouchable, with Max (Karl Etlinger) leading the stock market scams. His daughter
Regina (Agnes Esterhazy) loves his assistant Egon Stirner (Henry Stuart) and
this is where it gets complicated. Whilst Egon’s love appears to be true…
this doesn’t stop him from having designs on the Rosenow’s lawyer’s rather
striking daughter Lia Leid (Tamara Geva) AND… he’s also in a somewhat serious
relationship with Maria who writes him love letters and is convinced that they
have a future together.
All of this makes Egon The Eager, pivotal to the entire
story and makes him a disappointing man for a happy ending with Regina or anyone
else. Regina tells him that he’s too poor for her – presumably Maria is too
poor for him? – and that the only way he can have her is to "... become
as rich as I am, or I as poor as you."
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| Maria's boyfriend Egon with other lovers, Lia and Regina... what's a boy to do? |
This leads Egon into willing complicity with her father’s
idea to make half a million by spreading the rumour of a strike at the Petrowitzer
mine which will push the value of the stocks down and then, at their lowest, reassurances
will be made that send the value skyrocketing; guaranteeing a killing for those
in the know. This will include Don Alfonso Canez (Robert Garrison) who is in
town to make just such a profit but not, of course, Grete’s father, Councillor Rumfort
(Jaro Fürth). He decides to take voluntary redundancy and to bet it all on the
stock market.
When the fix comes in, Rumfort loses everything having
bet on Coal stocks remaining low and the family is forced into taking a lodger
as Grete struggles to keep the money worries away from her broken father. A
lodger is soon found in Lt. Davy (Einar Hanson) an American serviceman in
Vienna to help with reconstruction, he hands Grete $60 and she has to use it to
pay her father’s stock market loses…
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| Asta |
The plot has all the hallmarks of a novel as source but
the main thing for Pabst is to foreground the social injustice with the
complexities of personal and social betrayal rather less important than the
fact they happen. The direction of the women’s’ lives is driven by the need to
provide and both Maria and Grete move nearer and nearer to the club Frau Greifer
runs with the former becoming Don Carlos’ “girl” for rent which is how she ends
up in the cheap hotel next door the night Lia Leid has gone there for an
illicit rendezvous with Ergon…
There are some excellent sequences in the club as Grete
comes closer to following the same path; she can’t quite bring herself especially
after one of the club’s waiters, Kellner (Gregori Chmara) has a rush of blood and
tries to force himself on her. This is when you can see Pabst’s use of slow-motion;
whether it was used to make Garbo look “smoother” or to heighten the moment of
fear, it is certainly effective.
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| Gregori Chmara chases Greta slowly... |
Even this reconstructed version is missing some content but
it makes sense overall and the emotional force of the story is clear as day. As
the men go wild for Grete the people in the street outside decide that enough
is enough and the film ends with a call to action and for solidarity in the
crisis. Nearly a century later we are still grappling with the gap between rich
and poor and struggling to recover from a banking crash that has led directly
to Trump and to Brexit. Who knows what will happen next?
Stylistically Joyless Street is post-expressionist and part
of the “New Objectivity” movement with its resigned cynicism balanced by a
desire to seize the moment. Pabst was, according to biographer Lee Aywell, the
first to take up this stance with his expressive style focused on the everyday
and not fantasy. Melchior Street is accentuated reality of a very stylized
kind; entirely studio-based and yet gritty as any exterior; the gutters may
have been papier-mâché, but the grief was all too real.
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