First, a warning: this post contains no image captures. I watched the film courtesy of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, whose staff kindly allowed me access to a copy of an as-yet-unreleased restoration from their collection. As I obtained my viewing copy via these means, I will refrain from posting images—so you must rely on my description to whet your appetites. With that said, we can proceed…
Brigitte Helm starred in three films made during 1928. First was the remarkable L’Argent (1928), followed swiftly by the unremarkable Die Yacht der sieben Sünden (1928). Her final film shot that year was Der Skandal in Baden-Baden. This film had neither the prestigious cast and director of L’Argent, nor the pulpy glamour of Die Yacht der sieben Sünden. It premiered in January 1929, the first of her last three final silent films released that year. I’ve written about her last two: Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna and Manolescu elsewhere on this blog. The director of Der Skandal in Baden-Baden, Erich Waschneck, began his career as a cameraman in 1920-21. By the middle of the decade, he was directing a number of minor Ufa productions. Indeed, if it weren’t for the presence of Helm, Der Skandal in Baden-Baden would also be deemed a minor film. (It’s fair to say it is a minor film even with her in it.) The story is based on Georg Fröschel’s novel Die Geliebte Roswolskys (1921). This had already been adapted for cinema in Felix Basch’s eponymous film of 1921, starring Asta Nielsen and Paul Wegener. I have not seen that version, but descriptions of it suggest a rather more complex plot and characters than the simplified storyline of Der Skandal in Baden-Baden.
The plot of the 1929 version is straightforward: Vera Kersten (Brigitte Helm) is an out-of-work dancer who chances to meet the British millionaire John Leeds (Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur). He pulls some strings and she ends up with a manager, Edgar Merck (Leo Peukert), and a gig at the festival in Baden-Baden. But Merck exploits Vera’s passing acquaintance with Leeds for his own financial gain, hoping to frame her in a fraud scheme. This also has the effect of sabotaging Vera’s romance with Baron Egon von Halden (Henry Stuart), who believes she is having an affair with Leeds. At Baden-Baden, Vera achieves a small triumph in her dance performance, but Merck’s machinations cause the high society crowd to believe she is a gold-digger, exploiting first Leeds and now Egon von Halden. However, Leeds himself turns up at the end of the film and clears everything up: Merck is arrested for fraud, the gossiping crowd learn the truth, and Vera and Egon walk away to rekindle their romance.
Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is barely 75 minutes long and there is no dawdling. It is concise, compact, neat. It’s a minor film, but well-made and well-performed. The real interest (for me, at least) lies in the role Helm gets to play. After being cast as varying kinds of vamp in Metropolis (1927), Alraune (1928), Die Yacht der sieben Sünden, and L’Argent; or as rather angelic innocents in Metropolis (her dual role as the “good” Maria), Am Rande der Welt (1927), and Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927), her role in Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is notably every-day. She is working class, poor, jobless. Indeed, Vera in this film is something of a Cinderella role: the poor aspiring dancer being transformed into a society belle, only for the threat of her new life to disintegrate overnight.
In the opening scene, Vera is gazing over the dull rooftops from her garret in a cheap rented apartment. She is framed within the frame of the window. We’re invited to look at her and contemplate her own contemplation. Helm brings with her a certain star quality: not just her good looks, but a way of holding herself, and of holding our attention. When we cut back inside to see her small room, she turns away from the window. When she comes into view properly, we see she is holding a cat in her arms. Here is one solitary creature showing sympathy for another. There is something a little feline about Vera, too. (Reviewers were often comparing Helm with cats in her other roles.)
When she walks the streets in search of work, the way she is framed by the camera that tracks alongside her shows off her profile. Vera might walk quickly, but she is downcast. Helm’s famous profile is not thrust forward to meet the world, but reacts to it timidly. Her failure in several job agencies sends her out onto the streets again. It is by chance, on a road, that Vera enters the life of the millionaire John Leeds. Ostensibly, he runs her down in his car. The device for getting the pair to meet would be more complex if Leeds was actually the driver of the car, but he isn’t—it’s being driven by a chauffeur. What is interesting is the ambiguity of how Vera ends up walking across the road. Head downcoast again, she is wandering more slowly this time, without direction or destination. She walks across the road without looking up. It isn’t a busy street, but a sideroad somewhere on the edge of town. Is she (as it seems) purely distracted or is she (consciously or not) suicidal? I’m not sure the film knows, or lets us know. So much of the film is concerned with showing how events are always out of Vera’s control. A suicidal mentality would be definite, an act of someone finally wanting to take a decisive step. But Vera seems to wander haphazardly into her fate. The choreography of the scene makes little of the near-fatal accident: the editing is economic, not feeling the need to portray the accident as a dramatic set-piece. It just happens.
Vera’s lack of agency continues in the next scenes. For Leeds now makes decisions for Vera, who is at first nervous—clearly, she is wary of his intentions. (And, clearly, she knows what men usually want in return from women for whom they do favours.) She is given new clothes, and the presence of John Leeds gains her immediate work, and the attention of an agent. But this lucky chance is never without strings: her association with Leeds (made public by a press photographer who follows them) immediately results in gossip, and Merck, the agent she gains, wishes to exploit her for fraudulent ends. Her agency is curtailed throughout the film, always by men.
Vera’s romance with Egon, which also triggers a minor subplot involving the jealousy of Egon’s current female companion Fernande (Lilly Alexandra), begins when the two meet by chance on the train to Baden-Baden. They encounter one another again at the local golf club. Vera is dressed sportily, but unshowily: beret, jacket, and a skirt that might pass for “practical”. (That she isn’t decked out in finery doesn’t stop all the local gossips from referring to her as Leeds’s “protégée”.) Egon asks to give her her first golf lesson. We watch her being shown how to tee off. It’s pretty perfunctory stuff, but I think that’s the point. Helm is no longer swathed in luxurious fabric, seducing men to their doom in raucous surroundings. She’s an ordinary woman, undertaking ordinary actions. It’s not a great meeting of souls on screen, but a tentative encounter that the couple slowly nurture. Their hands meet when they both reach for a golf ball. They have a private moment of conversation. Fernande and her friends glimpse this and take it for more than it is. And this is rather the point: everyone in the film seems to think Vera is a vamp, when in fact she is an honest, working-class woman. Brigitte Helm’s role and performance goes against the grain of her star image. Indeed, the film is about the price paid by people who assume that a woman’s “star” status implies a kind of prostitution. Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is about the injustice of being confused for one’s (manufactured) reputation, and the way a woman’s identity is shaped (and judged) by others.
The one sequence where Vera performs a form of glamorous seduction is when she dances at the festival venue in Baden-Baden. The dance itself is a little underwhelming, and it hardly makes the most either of Helm herself or the possibilities of the performance as a set-piece. In 1929, at least one critic compared her unfavourably to Leni Riefenstahl, whose own dancing pedigree (and all-round athleticism) was much stronger than Helm’s. In Der heilige Berg (1926), Riefenstahl’s character is introduced through an astonishing dance shot in silhouette against the crashing waves and rocks of the coast. It’s a much longer sequence, a full set-piece in itself, and makes her character a kind of mythical archetype. There is nothing like that in Der Skandal in Baden-Baden. Helm’s solo number occupies only a little over a minute of screen time and the dancing is banal. It’s a kind of freestyle prancing, much of its impact being through the diaphanous skirt and wrist puffs Vera wears. The latter floats and exaggerates the movement, making more of the dance than the dancer’s body itself.
(A sidenote here: I’d be very curious to know what kind of music accompanied this sequence in 1929. The film was first presented in Berlin with a score by Artur Guttmann. Guttmann had worked as composer, arranger, and conductor for many Ufa films by this point. He had conducted the premier performances of Murnau’s Faust (1926) and Lang’s Spione (1928) (both with scores by Werner Richard Heymann). He had also produced scores for Hanns Schwarz’s Die Csardasfürstin (1927, based on Emmerich Kálmán’s operetta of the same name), Gerhard Lamprecht’s two-part Der alte Fritz (1927-28), and Artur Robison’s Looping the Loop (1928). I have no idea how much, if any, of his music from the silent era survives. What kind of music did his score for Der Skandal in Baden-Baden contain? In particular, for the dance scene, did Guttmann use anything from the familiar ballet repertoire, or something more exotic or abstract? Or was the music his own composition—and in what style?)
But the point of the dance sequence is that Egon is looking on, enraptured. Waschneck cuts between Vera, Egon, and the pianist—excluding the rest of the audience. One shot of Vera begins in close-up before she pulls away across the stage. It’s not a subjective shot (Egon is the other side of the stage pit, in a private box—there’s no way Vera could be as close to him as she is to the camera). But it is a kind of imagined, willed subjectivity: it’s the view that Egon would surely like to have. And it also gives the impression that Vera herself wants to get close to Egon. So yes, an effective moment of framing and staging—but on a modest scale. I suppose “unpretentious” is the word I’m looking for to describe it. This sequence is also one of the few where Vera has a kind of agency: she has centre stage, she performs the number that proves her artistic worth. But of course it’s also for an audience that judges her, and an audience that will soon turn against her.
If Der Skandal in Baden-Baden isn’t glamorous or glamorizing, this does not mean that it isn’t a good-looking film. It is. The cameraman was Friedl Behn-Grund, who (despite having shot several films by 1928) was still very young: he was only 22 when he shot Der Skandal in Baden-Baden. There are lots of interesting shots on location around Baden-Baden, with some nice summery exteriors. (Part of the film’s charm is not being set in Berlin. It’s curious to see a kind of provincial German clubland in the late 20s.) There is also some nice low-key lighting in the nighttime exterior scenes when Vera and Egon kiss. But there are almost no tricks pulled with lenses, focus, or elaborate movement. I’d hesitate to call so light a film “realist”, but the glamour we glimpse in the festival setting does not extend to the way it is filmed. It’s a temperate film as well as an unpretentious one.
But Der Skandal in Baden-Baden does have occasional scenes where the presence and role of the camera becomes more complex. There is a clever moment when we see a letter being written. It is addressed to Vera and its contents imply that the writer is romantically involved with her. We watch a hand sign the letter: the name is signed “John”. But then the camera tilts back and tracks away from the letter. We see the writer: it is Merck. It’s a nice way of making the writing of text more visually interesting, more significant.
Merck fakes this letter from Leeds to Vera to imply that she is his mistress. He shows it to Fernande, who shows it to Egon. Merck even vouches for its truth. The consequences are again related through a letter and another interesting visual treatment of text. Egon writes to Vera to tell her that they shouldn’t see each other her again. When Vera reads the letter, we see her shock and sadness in a close-up. She reads the letter again, and now there is an extreme close-up of the text: the lens scans the first lines almost word-by-word: “Merck has confirmed to me that you are, after all, in a relationship with John Leeds.” It’s the only extreme close-up in the film and the effect is startling: by reserving this level of proximity to this one shot, it has maximum impact.
I should also mention other members of the cast. Henry Stuart is charming, if a little bland, as Egon. He has little psychological depth, but he’s convincing enough. As Merck, Leo Peukert is smarmy and creepy without exaggeration. As Leeds, Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur is rather anonymous. In fact, the most memorable member of the cast beyond Helm herself is Adolf Edgar Licho. He plays one of the agents at the start of the film. Licho played Jeanne Ney’s uncle in Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, where Pabst provides him with a role of utmost sliminess and greed. His appearance in Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is not quite on the same level, but it’s a clear echo of it. His agent is a cigar-chewing creep, who eyes Vera up and down. He gets her to raise her skirt to show him her knees, her thighs… It would help her get along if she were a little “nicer” to him, he says. Licho’s bald pate, stubbly round face, and bulgy little eyes make him a superbly unpleasant presence on screen. When Vera tries to smile, we see a whole history of the exploitation of aspiring female performers under creepy male managers. That Vera seems to know what’s expected of her makes the scene more unsettling, more upsetting, than it might otherwise be. Helm gives us a history of Vera, but also a history of women, that goes beyond this scene to countless other moments prior to this. When the scene fades to black, we wonder if Vera is forced to perform any other kind of favour for the agent. It’s one of the few moments of real depth or bite. It presages the way Vera will be judged as the kind of woman who performs exactly this kind of favour to get her new dresses and position in society.
So, despite its lightness, Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is an interesting film. Helm’s character is noteworthy for being a more down-to-earth character, one who feels the pressures of the patriarchal world: the male agents who judge her, and the male patron who “rescues” her but whose intervention opens her up to accusations of selling her body, and the society gossips who stand ready to judge and condemn her for her relations with men. Though we can (simply because she is Brigitte Helm) imagine she is a star being waiting to be found, the film never lets her character have control over her life. Her position as a woman at the mercy of male judgement (for good or ill) is a common theme in many of Helm’s films. Der Skandal in Baden-Baden provides Helm an unpretentious modern setting to show a more restrained performance. Of course, the film does get to clothe her in more expensive attire once Leeds has paid for it. But she doesn’t use her costumes for writhing seductively (cf. Alraune) or mooching in glamorous boredom (cf. L’Argent). Indeed, her showiest costume is used for her stage performance and never worn again; you might even see it as a practical outfit in the sense of it being (technically) workwear. She’s never less than interesting to watch, and I did so gladly.
In sum, I cannot say I was greatly moved by Der Skandal in Baden-Baden, but it was charming and engaging and I’m very happy to have seen it. It is striking that this film has been the most difficult (not to say utterly impossible) to see among all of Helm’s silent work. As far as I can tell, it has never been reissued in any format since its first run in 1929. It made only slight impact at the time, and since then it’s been something of a footnote in the few accounts of Helm’s work. As I’ve argued here, Der Skandal in Baden-Baden is an interesting film and deserves some attention. The FWMS restoration is due for completion in spring 2024, so I hope it gets a proper release for live and/or home audiences after that.
Paul Cuff
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Luciano Palumbo, Carmen Prokopiak, and Marcel Steinlein of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung for their help in answering my questions and providing me access to the film.
The Realm of Silence 