MÄEDCHEN IN UNIFORM Movie Review

Girls in Uniform

When a young girl (Herta Thiele) arrives at an upper-crust girls’ boarding school, she nearly collapses under the weight of the school's Prussian, regulation-crazed authoritarianism. Her only ray of hope comes in the form of one sympathetic, patient, and understanding female teacher (Dorothea Wieck), with whom the girl falls completely in love—with disastrous consequences. The 1931 German film Mädchen in Uniform was directed by Leontine Sagan and based on the play Gestern und Heute by Christa Winsloe. It's an unusual and remarkable film in a number of respects, not the least of which is the fact that it was directed by a woman from a play by a woman. Far from simply an “issue” picture, this is a sleek, elegantly told, poignant fable about individuality and special needs being crushed mercilessly by authoritarianism, which comes in many forms. The film's sexual subtext seems merely an eloquent means of expressing this larger idea about the dehumanizing qualities of power, and in fact the overt lesbian theme is perhaps less startling in retrospect than its more subversive (for Germany) anti-militarist thrust. With Hitler's rise to power shortly after the release of Mädchen in Uniform, Sagan and most of the cast were—not surprisingly—forced to leave the country. Banned briefly in the U.S., the film was finally restored to its original, uncut version in the 1960s. (An undistinguished German remake was filmed starring Romy Schneider and Lili Palmer in 1958.)

NEXT STOP … The Blue Angel, M, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

1931 90m/B GE Dorothea Wieck, Ellen Schwannecke, Hertha Thiele; D: Leontine Sagan. VHS MRV, NLC