Madchen in Uniform. 1931. Directed by Leontine Sagan.

(6/20/00)

The uniforms look like prison uniforms. (they have stripes.) It is a German boarding school for girls run by a Prussian headmistress who believes that hunger is good for the girls--builds character. The girls are not allowed to send letters to people on the outside unless they have been approved. Letter-writing in general is frowned upon.

Into this environment comes Manuela, a 14-year-old girl whose mother is dead. (I'm not sure of the exact details of her family situation.) She is high-strung and starved for affection and develops a crush on an attractive female teacher who has treated her with compassion. Now, this is perfectly normal as far as I can see. But I suppose it must have been quite shocking to see such an attachment played out on a movie screen in the early 1930s--even in Europe. But I don't think that this girl is a lesbian and I don't think it would have happened if there had been boys around.

Fraulein von Bernburg, the teacher, is another matter. Before we see her we hear about her and we hear that other girls have developed crushes on her. And in one scene we see her kiss a girl on the mouth, which I suspect is a little bit beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Fraulein von Berburg could indeed be a lesbian. I might even suspect that she is a sexual predator except that she always seems a compassionate and responsible person.

Herthe Thiele shines as Manuela. She is incandescent as the emotionally-startved 14-year-old. She looks particularly lovely dressed as a boy in a school performance of Schiller's Don Carlos. And she carries off the climactic scenes beautifully.

When the girls put on a play for the other students and invited guests someone spikes the punch. Under the influence--and also in the excitement that naturally follows a school performance--she makes a speech in which she acknowledges her feelings for Fraulein von Benburg and also the gift of a chemise. And--of course!--the powers that be overreact. And Manuela becomes so upset that she nearly commits suicide by jumping from the top of a long stairwell, but she is rescued by her peers.

Discipline is a very important thing to learn when one is young. So it is not necessarily a bad thing that the school is strict and I am not so quick to think of Frau Oberin, the principal or headmistress, as a villain. She wants to build strong, disciplined women and that's not necessarily a bad intent. However, the spartan rations and what amounts to a gag order suggest a repressive atmosphere. Above all, Frau Oberin doesn't seem to have the perspective to handle a crisis--or to keep a trivial incident from becoming one. She just doesn't have the understanding to cope with the needs of adolescent girls. The one who does has to resign.

It wasn't Manuela's fault that someone spiked the punch and got her drunk.

Frau Oberin cuts an impressive figure, stalking the halls with her cane. Her assistant, Fraulein von Kester, is an obsequeous toady. I liked it that the climactic scene on the stairwell was anticipated by several shots of it earlier in the film.