Dorothea Angermann (1959) - film review

Late one evening, a young woman walks out of a bar and confesses to the murder of her husband.  At her trial, Dorothea Angermann looks back on the events that have brought her to this tragic outcome.  It all began when her father, a prim country priest, sent her away from home to start her own life.  At the restaurant where she worked, she attracted the attentions of a womanising chef named Mario.  It wasn’t long before Mario managed to force his attentions on her.  The result: an unwelcome pregnancy.  When Dorothea’s father heard of this, he forced Mario to marry her, but that merely added to her misery.  Mario was not a man any self-respecting woman would choose as a husband....

Well into the second phase of his German filmmaking career, Robert Siodmak applied his considerable talents to this compelling adaptation of a hard-hitting play by the Nobel Prize winning author Gerhard Hauptmann.  As in his earlier Hauptmann adaptation, Die Ratten (1955), Siodmak downplays the earthier aspects of the original play and employs some of the stylistic devices he used on his memorable Hollywood film noir offerings to create a stifling mood of fatalism.  In a similar vein to the early German expressionist filmmakers, Siodmak is more concerned with the psychological condition of his characters than in delivering a naturalistic portrayal of their external world.  To that end, high contrast lighting and camera positioning are used, very effectively to convey the sense of the entrapment which the heroine experiences as her world closes in on her through the malign workings of Fate (or male chauvenism, to give it its modern name).

Although slow paced and entirely predictable, Dorothea Angermann is a film that holds our attention, mainly on the strength of its central performance from Ruth Leuwerik.  The latter had recently found national and international fame through Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Trapp Family diptych, Die Trapp-Familie (1956) and Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958), playing the role that Julie Andrews would later claim as her own in the film version of The Sound of Music (1965).   Cast opposite Leuwerik as a thoroughly nasty piece of work (one who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Richard Attenborough) is Kurt Meisel, a distinguished Austrian actor who was also a prolific and talented film director.  A suitably measured performance from Alfred Schieske (playing the heroine’s seemingly stone-hearted father) and touchingly humane contributions from Bert Sotlar and Alfred Balthoff add lustre to the film and prevent it from being the kind  of dry and dowdy melodrama that was quite prevalent in German cinema at this time.

© James Travers 2011

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