Wow, this 1919 German silent film, variously translated as "Women Who Shouldn't Get Married" and "His Learned Wife" (the later translated from its Austrian title, "Seine Gelehrte Frau") shown as part of the Bonn silent film festival, is all sorts of awful. It's incredibly sexist in its gender-role moralizing, and it's also incompetently made--choppy and wordy in egregious violation of the cinematic dictum to show instead of tell.

Neither did streaming the film without English subtitles do me any favors, as there are a lot of German intertitles to run through Google Translate in this short 41-minutes feature--upwards of one for every two shots, it seemed. At one point, an entire scene is comprised of just three intertitles and no shots of characters and scenery. Over and over again, too, there are elliptical title cards expressing that "some time has passed," or something to the effect of, "now, it's the evening," which is utterly redundant when the film already includes fade outs. It's enough to make me miss the tableau style of a few years prior when each scene was preceded by a descriptive title card.

Perhaps, some footage has been lost over the years, as some scenes seem abruptly cut, but just about everything else here is done so poorly, that might not be so much the case. The print is even poorly plotted, split into three acts as it is, but with all the action happening in the third act. To say something nice, though, there is tinting, and the acting relatively isn't bad. The camera positions are prosaic, but there's some scene dissection.

As for the lesson of this social-problem melodrama, it's about a wife who focuses on being a doctor, to the neglect of her needy, nightclub-frequenting husband and the abandonment of her supposed imperative to bear children, turning her husband a philanderer who impregnates another woman. Even though she delivers babies, she still receives a lecture from one of these mothers about how much giving birth makes her a woman. After "some time has passed," the other woman has complications birthing her child, and a specialist is called in. Guess who? I don't know if it's because I've seen too many of these stupid melodramas, or it's just that predictable, but I knew exactly what was going to happen after that, as well, and that's exactly what did happen.

To demonstrate how atrocious the lecture is, as surely made worse by automated translations, here are a couple quotations, or paraphrases, from the film:

The husband canoodling with the other woman states, "Your stupid little femininity captivates me! Oh, how I hate this science which turns women into unfeminine beings."

And, the wife shares her learned lesson as, "Yes, it's my fault, not him. I am the lost one who has denied her natural predestination... a learned woman can be proud, but never the wife of her husband!"

Additionally, talk about life imitating art, lead actress Esther Carena, reportedly, was true to the message of this movie, retiring from the screen after her marriage. Don't cut this old nitrate any slack, either, as this was from the same country and the same year that produced one of the earliest films lecturing for the acceptance of homosexuals with "Different from the Others," starring Conrad Veidt, as well as such artistic triumphs as Ernst Lubitsch's "The Doll" and "Madame DuBarry," which brought him to the attention of and eventual migration to Hollywood. Production was also underway on "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920). Point is, there's a timelessness to this particular picture's poor quality.

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