Let’s Talk About Vergewaltigung Baby

And now children . . . Let us have a conversation about pre-code Hollywood. I am referring of coarse to the Hays Code, that bastion of perversity policing that protected our innocents for some twenty years. It also begat the chastity belt still strangling the fun out of films, the MPAA.

Today we’ll examine in brief the German film DIARY OF A LOST GIRL, directed by G.W. Pabst. Yes, this is a foreign film and so is not technically a Hollywood picture. However it’s foreignness is significant two ways in particular. It provides dramatic contrast not only to the films that were produced in Hollywood during the period of regulation, but to those being produced today as well. Not to mention an influx of foreign films contributed to the eventual regression of the code. The highest court in the land couldn’t keep the burgeoning suburbanites of this nation from sharing their SUMMER WITH MONIKA, in all her glorious nubility.

So what of DIARY OF A LOST GIRL? Here it is in brief. A young girl Thymiane, the très Brooksian Louise Brooks, devastated by the sudden, mysterious drowning of her family’s dear maid, is drugged, raped by a family friend, impregnated with rapist’s child, sent to a reformatory, then to a brothel, banished from home, orphaned (and more!) by film’s end.

The most shocking aspect however would be the frankness with which said situations are dealt. The sex is not fetishized, it just exists. Thymiane, while initially punished for the pregnancy, is ultimately redeemed by her own insistence on survival and goodwill. The sole sense of shame lies within the parental figures, including Thymiane’s father and the elder Count Osdorff, for having cast their charges out to meet dire fates. This film wholeheartedly embraced the outcast, the angsty teenage rebel as hero long before Brando alighted a generation with his jaunty leather cap.

One can attribute the film’s honesty in part Brooks herself. She was an enigmatic, mature actress who possessed preternatural sexual confidence that pervaded throughout this adolescent portrayal. Today’s stars are most often girlish imps on screen, even when they are forty-something women (see SEX AND THE CITY-THE MOVIE quick crit!). Thanks then to Kates Winslet and Blanchett for giving us something to admire on screen in the past ten years. Thanks as well to Herr Director Pabst. Your images are vivid. Your love for Louise’s naturalness is obvious. And your close-ups of Valeska Gert as the reformatory director’s wife will haunt me forever.