Ecstasy (1933)

Film: Ecstasy (1933)
Stars: Hedy Lamarr, Aribert Mog, Zvonimir Rogoz
Director: Gustav Machaty
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Hedy Lamarr-click here to learn more about Ms. Lamarr (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

A few housekeeping mentions before we get into our discussion of Ecstasy.  First off, this is a very special article not just because we're kicking off our month-long tribute to Ms. Lamarr, but also because it's an historic one for two specific reasons on the blog.  For starters, it's our first ever foreign-language film we've profiled in "Saturdays with the Stars."  Lamarr is in fact our very first actress for the series that wasn't born in the United States (we've had nine months of American girls), and while some of those women filmed movies in non-English-speaking Europe (specifically the likes of Ruth Roman, Rhonda Fleming, and Linda Darnell), none of them had a major career in another language like Lamarr did.  Though our goal for our 2019 season of "Saturdays with the Stars" is to focus on the career's of Hollywood actresses, it felt a damn shame to dismiss the rare opportunity to see a legitimate Golden Age star like Lamarr act in a different language, so I made an exception.  Next week we'll return to see what Lamarr did with her career in the United States, but this week we'll see her infamous turn in Ecstasy.

The other thing I want to note before we dive in, though, is that this our 2500th article here on The Many Rantings of John.  I had a big plan to roll out some facts or a list we've never done, but I'm currently on vacation & am not about to let a perfect record with getting "Saturdays with the Stars" articles out be ruined by me being too lazy (or to put on an optimistic spin, too much enjoying my vacation) to postpone a day or two for Ms. Lamarr.  I'm approaching another major milestone I'm hoping to hit sometime in late December, so when we get to that we'll do some naval-gazing and self congratulations, but if you are someone who has enjoyed any of those 2500 articles on the blog, thank you very much and I'm glad to have you here.  I'll get started on the next 2500 tomorrow, but for now...Ecstasy!

(Spoilers Ahead) Filmed in 1933 in Slovakia, the movie is just far enough into the Sound Era that it isn't a silent film, but frequently plays as such.  As a result, there aren't a lot of characters, and the plot is relatively easy to follow since there's not much dialogue to exhibit complexity of story.  The movie follows Eva (Lamarr), a beautiful young bride who seems at the beginning of the film to be headed to a life of domestic bliss.  Her husband Emil (Rogoz) is a bit sheltered, but appears to genuinely care for her...except when it comes to matters of the bedroom.  I'm not sure if we're supposed to assume things about Emil's sexuality, but let's face it-if a man in a 1933 movie isn't going to sleep with Hedy Lamarr, they probably want you to think he's gay.  Eva doesn't want a marriage without affection, so she leaves him, and goes back to her family's farm, where she meets a young engineer who isn't really of the same station as Emil, but nonetheless is able to make up for it in the bedroom (he's definitely the "manly man" in the eyes of the screenwriters), and they start a passionate affair.  This turns tragic when Emil finds out, and kills himself, sending Eva into a moment of self-loathing & depression, and she leaves Adam despite their clear romance, heading off into the unknown on a midnight train.  The film ends with a sweaty Adam hammering, wondering what might have happened to his brief love.

The film, as I mentioned above, is considered pretty infamous.  Nudity in film is not a new thing.  Even if you discount filmed pornography, which began almost instantaneously with the invention of cinema itself in the late 19th century, legitimate actresses like Annette Kellerman had appeared nude in major studio production's as early as 1916, with the release of Fox's A Daughter of the Gods.  However, by 1933 the Hays Code was in effect, and as a result nudity in film simply wasn't done, and the movie never received a major release in the United States, even after Lamarr became famous.  Lamarr's husband Friedrich Mandl once tried to buy every copy of the film ever produced and have it destroyed (clearly unsuccessfully, as I just streamed it on Amazon).  To gain some perspective on how shocking a film with nudity and where a woman experiences an orgasm would have been in this era, the first major star to appear nude onscreen in a motion picture post the Hays Code was Jayne Mansfield in 1963's Promises! Promises, thirty years after the initial release of Ecstasy.  It's staggering to me that this didn't end up ruining Lamarr's career, and she admittedly had very mixed feelings about the film, frequently decrying it later in her career.

But the movie isn't that bad, and of course to our modern audiences it isn't that shocking.  Yes, Lamarr exposes her breasts and does have an onscreen orgasm in closeup, which is kind of bizarre to watch (I frequent classic cinema almost daily, and I'd never seen something so explicit in a movie of the era), but it's not a major part of the movie.  What is, and what is more groundbreaking to me, is that it is clearly sympathetic to the sexual desires of Eva, wanting her to have a full romantic life, not one with sacrifices.  The film's ending is ambiguous (what are we to make of Eva leaving behind Adam, whom she loves, to honor the memory of Emil?), but it's interesting.  The film is short on plot, and the Emil character in particularly is wildly underwritten/acted, but it's a fascinating picture, one that has a natural energy from Lamarr that I didn't know she was capable of, and makes me excited to see if any of her American productions were able to capture that luminous quality she brings to Eva, a broken woman who isn't willing to blame herself for problems she didn't cause (a novel concept in cinema even today, but surely in 1933).