Die Freudlose Gasse (1925)
Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst

Film Review

With his third film, G.W. Pabst not only established himself as one of Germany's leading filmmakers, he also provided Greta Garbo with her springboard to Hollywood in the role that was, arguably, the first to exploit her acting talents to the full.  The previous year, Garbo had made her debut in Mauritz Stiller's The Atonement of Gösta Berling (1924) and was well on the way to becoming an international star.  Die Freudlose Gasse (a.k.a. Joyless Street) proved that Garbo wasn't a one-hit wonder and she was soon heading for America, at the invitation of Louis B. Mayer.  When Pabst hired Garbo for his film the actress was in straitened circumstances and desperate for work (as was her Svengali, Stiller), so she was perfectly suited to a portray a woman coping with the indignity of financial hardship at the time of hyperinflation in post-WWI Germany and Austria. 

Although stardom was beckoning, the twenty-year old Garbo had to content herself with second billing in the film.  The lead role went to an actress who was fifteen years her senior, Asta Nielsen, one of Germany's leading film stars at the time.  They may play characters who are in a virtually identical situation, but Garbo and Nielsen could hardly be more different.  Near the end of her illustrious career, Nielsen was very much a diva of the silent era, and her mannerisms and appearance were already looking dated by this time.  Garbo, by contrast, represented modernity, not only more naturalistic in her performance, but also more vital and engaging.  There is a cruel irony in the fact that Nielsen played the doomed of the two heroines, the one who is fated to be crushed by circumstances.  Garbo triumphs over adversity and is whisked away to a happier future by a handsome American - as would soon happen in real life.

From Hugo Bettauer's moralistic novel, Pabst crafted a powerful indictment of post-war Austria and Germany, depicting extremes of decadence and penury existing side-by-side, with some getting rich by speculation whilst the majority struggled to fend off starvation.  The film's lurid subject matter made it a box office hit but its more graphic scenes ended up being removed at the insistence of the censor.  In some countries, the film was more extensively trimmed or else banned outright.   Die Freudlose Gasse was one of the earliest examples of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in German cinema, a movement that rejected expressionism in favour of a far more realistic portrayal of everyday subjects.  Pabst was particularly concerned with the fate of ordinary women in German society, the hardships they had to bear and how they were exploited by the male sex.  The fate of the two heroines in Die Freudlose Gasse would be replayed in many of Pabst's subsequent great films, most notably Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927), Abwege (1928) and Pandora's Box (1929).

Film Synopsis

Vienna, 1921.  In the chaotic aftermath of WWI, food is scarce and it is only the unscrupulous who prosper.  In Melchiorgasse, a street in a poorer part of town, the butcher Josef Geiringer is doing a roaring trade, and so is his wife, the owner of an upmarket nightclub with a brothel attached.   Two less fortunate residents on the same street are Maria Lechner and Greta Rumfort, ordinary young women who live on the breadline.  Maria finds relief from her misery when she falls in love with a younger man, Egon, but he shows little interest in her and exploits Maria's devotion to drive her into prostitution.  The same fate seems to await Greta as one disaster after another drive her and her father, a retired civil servant, towards destitution.  Shortly after her father loses his pension by investing in shares that prove to be worthless, Greta is dismissed by her employer when she resists his lecherous advances.  In the end, Greta has nothing else left to sell but her body...