Saturday Night Cinema
The Joyless Street

The film that brought international fame to both Pabst and Greta Garbo, The Joyless Street is a stinging indictment of the soulessness of Weimar-era Vienna. In the wake of World War I, the newly impoverished middle class becomes the prey of both black marketeers and the decadent upper classes. This whirlpool of economic ruin and moral decay is dramatized through the story of a middle-class family in decline. Garbo stars as a young woman who sells herself after her father makes a disastrous business decision. The story was considered too explosive by the Weimar government, which censored it heavily. This print is a sound era re-release 60 minutes in length,and it should be noted that the original film released was 150 minutes.

The Joyless Street/Die Freudlose Gasse (1925 Germany 145 mins)

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Source: Munich Film Archive Prod Co: Sofar-Film Dir: G.W. Pabst
Scr: Willy Haas, based on the novel by Hugo Bettauer Phot: Robert Lach, Curt Oertel, Guido Seeber Ed: Marc Sorkin (uncredited) Art Dir: Otto Erdmann, Hans Sohnle Ass Dir: Marc Sorkin, Anatole Litvak

Cast: Asta Nielsen, Greta Garbo, Werner Krauss, Einar Hanson, Valeska Gert, Gräfin Agnes Esterhazy, Henry Stuart

Michael Koller wrote here:

Drawing on Pabst’s own experiences in post-war Vienna, The Joyless Street
tells the story of two women whose lives take different routes during
the period of hyper-inflation in immediate post-war Vienna. One is the
poverty stricken Marie (played by Asta Nielsen), who stumbles into
prostitution while attempting to raise money for the man she loves. The
other is Greta, the daughter of a struggling middle class bureaucrat,
who resists the temptation of the easy money that prostitution offers.
The ultimate moral of the story, that virtue is its own reward, is
surprisingly old-fashioned for a film that is explicit in its rendering
of sex and base human (or more aptly male) behaviour. Perhaps this
moral is the remaining vestige of its right-wing origins?

The downtrodden Marie never has a chance. Her father
beats her at the beginning of the film, and her relationship with Egon,
her supposed lover, is non-existent. He is more interested in two other
women; an older one who supplies him with the means to raise money and
the younger Regina, the woman he truly loves, who wants it. Asta
Nielsen portrays Marie as a slightly “retarded”, faded beauty, face
caked with too much make-up and in love with the much younger Egon. Not
fully comprehending what is happening to her, she drifts into
prostitution to raise money for the man who shows no interest in her.
In an era when exaggeration was the rule, the immobile Nielsen uses
only her eyes and hands to express the emotional vacuum of someone who
has lost everything. As M. S. Fonseca so astutely stated: “’Asta
Nielsen’ means the power to speak of pathos, to see pain, and to find
the middle path between Baudelaire’s flower of evil and the sick rose
of which Blake sang.” (1)

In 1925, the 35-year-old Nielsen was one of Scandinavia and Germany’s
premier actresses and the film was put into production based on her
involvement in the project. The Joyless Street
was nevertheless one of her last films. To modern audiences her
charisma is enigmatic, her squat figure and frumpish dress sense don’t
exude star appeal, but this doesn’t apply to her co-star. The
20-year-old Garbo had just made Stiller’s The Atonement of Gösta Berling (1924) and was on the brink of stardom. The studio-head Louis B. Mayer had seen Gösta Berling,
but had not yet been able to contact Stiller and Garbo to offer them
contracts with MGM. Pabst had also seen the film and enthusiastically
wanted Garbo for the second lead. Serendipitously, he located the
director and star in Berlin just as they were about to leave the city.
They were broke and needed work. Pabst drew a very different
performance from Garbo to the one he garnered from Nielsen. Greta, the
character, although placed in much the same situation as Marie – unable
to obtain meat during a food shortage, in dire need of money, tempted
by prostitution – is a younger, more privileged woman. Garbo’s
performance, in contrast to Nielsen’s, imbues her character with great
vitality, something that is lacking from her more detached Hollywood
persona. Early in the film, when Greta is exhausted, there is a
lethargy that seeps into her soul. Later, when more dynamism is
required, a youthful vibrancy surfaces. When the American officer
agrees to rent a room so that the family will be capable of paying its
living expenses, the pores of her body seem to pulsate with a
contagious exhilaration. As Louise Brooks, another actress who was
touched by Pabst’s genius, said of Garbo, “she gave him the purest
performance of her career” (2).

Yet it is for Pabst’s political acerbity that the film is truly
memorable. Many contemporary critics viewed the film as a stirring
moral protest, and by modern expectations of a silent film, the
explicit portrayal of sexual promiscuity is surprising. Pabst
powerfully documents the moral and economic collapse of a recently
great society. The dark centre of the film is the brothel, whose madam
also controls the adjoining night-club and clothes shop. Like Dr
Mabuse, her power exerts control over all aspects of other people’s
lives. The wealthy celebrate while the poor struggle to find food.
Stock market manipulation by the wealthy wreaks disaster on the poor
and weak. The economic collapse feeds moral corruption, as the wealthy
are unabashedly depicted as sexually exploiting those less fortunate
than themselves. Regina tells her suitor, Egon, that only money can
make her happy. And she is happy for him to prostitute himself to get
money for her. A policeman enters the brothel, investigating a murder
and informs the madam that he is on official business, the implication
being that he needs to tell her that his visit is not for pleasure.
This is a remarkable indictment of authority in a nation where the
respect for it was all pervasive. The righteous military officials of
the American Relief Fund, as well as a sleazy foreign investor visit
the night-club to experience what Viennese women are ‘really’ like.
Pabst’s raw illustration of the unbridled male libido, as well as his
searing indictment of a bankrupt political system, led to the film
being banned or recut in most countries outside of Germany:

When completed it was ten thousand feet in length…. France accepted
the film, deleting two thousand feet and every shot of the ‘street’
itself. Vienna extracted all sequences in which Werner Krauss appeared
as the butcher. Russia turned the American Lieutenant into a doctor and
made the butcher the murderer instead of the girl
(3).

This precedence set the pattern for what was to happen to most of
Pabst’s subsequent pre-WWII German films. These were variously censored
and/or re-edited. They were too confronting for the general public, yet
Pabst’s reputation grew despite of, or maybe because of, these
interferences with his artistic vision. Unfortunately, the shorter
versions of The Joyless Street
were shadows of the former major work. This marked the film as only
worthy of mention for Garbo’s performance. This has changed in the last
few decades with restoration work positing the film in its rightful
place amongst the canon of important works by a great, but poorly
appreciated filmmaker.

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