Die Hose (1927)

Director:

Hans Behrendt

Writers:

Franz Schulz (writer)
Carl Sternheim (play)

Release Date:

21 September 1929 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy

Plot Keywords:

Based On Play

Cast

  (Credited cast)

Christian Bummerstaedt	...	Fürst
Rudolf Forster	...	Scarron
Veit Harlan	...	Mandelstam
Jenny Jugo	...	Luise Maske
Werner Krauss	...	Theobald Maske
Olga Limburg	...	Elfri de Deuter

Also Known As:

A Royal Scandal
Skandal in einer kleinen Residenz
The Trousers

Country:

Germany

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Company:

Phoebus-Film AG

Metonymy: The Container for the Thing Contained

When pretty young Jenny Jugo has her undergarments fall down as she and her much older husband are on their way to Church one fine Sunday morning, she is so embarrassed that she rushes back home. Her husband, on returning, starts to rant, but a little domesticity in the form of bacon restores harmony. However, the rest of the world assumes that she is as loose as her knickers and complications ensue.

This film is very professionally written and performed, but it lacks any sort of comic underpinnings. Instead, everything becomes a snickering symbol, from misshapen cigars to bowling bowls that land in the gutter, to men destroying their beds to collapsing candles. We see symbolic representations of rape, voyeurism, masochism and homosexuality, but the one attempt of non-normative sex -- the local Prince invites young Jenny for dinner and she writes a note to her husband that she is tending to a sick relative. Miss Jugo is quite affecting as the ill-at-ease subject of his venery, but, as you might expect, little comes of it.

The problem with this comedy is that it goes on for far too long and is aimed at far too intellectual an audience. There is little that is overtly funny; instead, all the real jokes are symbolic, suitable for Freudian analysis.

Charley Chase would have made a good two-reeler of this -- indeed, he did a good two-reeler with socks serving as symbols of sex. But in this movie, everything happens symbolically and beneath the symbols there is no reality.

The director of this movie, Hans Behrendt, was a specialist in comedy. He escaped to Austria when the Nazis came to power and made movies there until 1936. After the Anschluss, he fled to Belgium, but they caught up to him in Belgium in 1940. He died in Auschwitz two years later.