REVIEW: MARTINA - EIN MÄDCHEN OHNE HALT / MARTINA - AN ANCHORLESS GIRL (1949) The impressive start to Vice-Crime after WWII

 

An essential part of the German Krimi films had always been the parallel existing "Sittenfilm." A truly German-Scandinavian movie genre, depicting of - well - loose girls who were certainly doomed and would destroy everyone that would be close to them. Certainly, prostitution is their profession, and so the boundaries between drama, educational moral tales, and Krimi are very blurry. 

Without these films, movies like DIE TOTEN AUGEN VON LONDON, DER MÖNCH MIT DER PEITSCHE, or DAS PHANTOM VON SOHO would not exist. The endless cycle of bars, brothels, and correction homes, even prison, that these girls would go through would later develop into the lurid fantasies of Jess Franco - and there is a definite connection between the Sittenfilm and movies like the sensationalist 99 WOMEN. 

In comes this totally forgotten oddity from 1949. One of the few movies, produced under the Berlin Blockade, when the Soviet Union skipped all supply chains to Berlin and American airplanes were the only secure source of supply. Who would make a movie then and there under these conditions? And who would care? Certainly not the American censors who had to turn a blind eye on such a sleazy epic, because - well - at least somebody did produce something, right?

One should actually write a history of these "Blockade Movies," a very small and closed field for collectors, I would say.

Produced with money by Heinz Rühmann, whom we know as Dr. Watson in the enjoyable DER MANN DER SHERLOCK HOLMES WAR (1937), and Alf Teichs, whom he had met at TERRA film production on the set of that movie. After the war Teichs worked for Preben Philipsen and London Films and even later for the semi-TOBIS successor Deutsche Hansa Films (more on that in a later post). Anyway, Teich brings in Artur-Maria Rabenalt as director, and he would later start RIALTO's venture into German crime with FÜR ZWEI GROSCHEN ZÄRTLICHKEIT in 1957.

Albert Hehn and Jeanette Schultze in
MARTINA

If we throw in that the female lead was played by 18-year-old Jeanette Schultze, who would go on to marry Albert Hehn (who plays her pimp here), the father of SCHULMÄDCHENREPORT star Sascha Hehn, this movie becomes the nucleus for post-war German genre cinema.

The story: Police raid a brothel in Berlin, where young, underage "Fräuleins" do all kinds of services to  GIs. Tinny, whom we encounter naked (like naked-naked) in a bathtub (without foam) during that raid, is sentenced to 6 months in an all underage-girl "correction institute."

 Of course Tinny is completely jailbait and escapes the institute during a Christmas celebration. She flees to her sister, who is a doctor of psychiatry and who has over-the-top guilt complexes towards her. See: during the last days of the war, their parents were killed in an air raid, and while she survived studying psychiatry, her little sister Martina was presumed dead - and obviously both were fine with it.

Now, of course, Martina's sister (Irene, played by the elegant Cornell Borchers) has her own Christmas party going on, with her two love interests (a Swedish newspaper photographer and a professor of surgery) attending. Loose Martina preys on the Swedish photographer and sooner than later lands in his bed. Irene is not happy, and Martina decides to leave it all, returning to the correction institute. After being released, she returns to her pimp but witnesses him murdering a "customer," flees, and gets run over by a car.

Now she is in the operation theater on the table to be treated by Irene's surgeon, and while she's being anesthetized, she remembers the traumatic events at the end of the war (when she was 14) that led to her downfall.

Director Arthur Maria Rabenalt was one of the better workers in the trade. Certainly tarnished by his collaboration and direction in several NSDAP-approved movies (like REITET FÜR DEUTSCHLAND and ACHTUNG! FEIND HÖRT MIT!), he had been prohibited by the Allies to direct for two years. With a few comedies under his belt, he started this daring piece about the post-war PTSD that many German women suffered due to the widespread rape by Allied forces. As funny and noir as this movie is, the highlight of the movie is the long sequence starting with the murder scene up to Martina becoming unconscious on the OP table. This is German expressionism in pure form and expertly executed.

The movie did not do well, although it was received well by the critics. Rabenalt would be able to get back to the top with the Hildegard Knef vehicle ALRAUNE in 1952. 

Cornell Borchers

Jeanette Schultze

Here's the trailer;