Every now and then a film just absolutely throws me for such a loop that I have to take some time to reflect on what I've seen and Madchen am Kreuz (aka Crucified Girl) (1929) is one of those films. Directed by the husband and wife team of Jacob and Luise Fleck it's as if Straw Dogs was crossed with a D. W. Griffith morality show that shakes what you think a silent film can be to its rawest core.
The IMDB synopsis seriously undersells what you're about to get into, story is essentially the very bad week a father and his daughter, Mary, suffer, he at the cuckolding affairs of his second wife and Mary at the hands of the creepy gardener whose stalking takes a turn for the much, much worse when he brutally assaults Mary in a scene that is one of the most extraordinary sequences I've seen in a silent. Just devastating.
Despite being an Austrian film I could easily see this as a pre-Code Warner Bros., particularly something like Wild Boys of the Road or The Story of Temple Drake, but the freedoms allowed in European productions ensure a grittiness that American films of this time would seem unlikely to ever achieve. Restored by Film Archive Austria it is not complete and is missing about 250 meters of running time which happily did not seem to disrupt what is left although I do hope it shows up as I think having every frame of this would be a good thing.
