1POPULAR CINEMA

posits, which explains their desperate efforts during the remainder of the
story to cover that loss through whatever means possible.
In the Carl Froelich comedy from 1936, any racial and erotic ambiguities
are eliminated in favor of clean harmless fun, and the main crime is not
even embezzlement, a crime based on economic inequity, but the mere suggestion
of an extramarital affair. No longer a naïve young man but the respected
member of a small-town establishment, Rühmann in If We All Were
Angels returns to the scene of the crime as the quintessential German
philistine, complete with three-piece suit, wire-rim glasses, and the obligatory
stand-up collar. These attributes recall the Pallenberg figure from The
Humble Sinner, yet their positive identification with social propriety, moral
righteousness, and barely concealed lechery has little in common with the
mild mockery of provincial awkwardness in the earlier film. Arriving at the
Galathee-Varieté in Cologne, a much older and very married Rühmann first
asks the waiter about the “indecent stage number” but then proceeds to lecture
the young woman next to him about her dubious lifestyle. In such an
atmosphere, his subsequent stumbling down the stairs in a drunken stupor
marks a paradigmatic moment in that it excuses any moral downfalls in advance
by linking transgression to lack of consciousness. Moreover, by making
no distinction between real or imagined acts, this highly symbolic scene
reduces sexual desire to the realm of prurient fantasies and dirty jokes.
After 1933, the presentation of gender trouble rarely reached the level
of social commentary prevalent in the early sound comedies. Instead the
stories and images confirmed the underlying assumptions about identity as
an essential and performative category, but never a social construction. This
apparent contradiction—that identity could be fully evident to itself and
completely dependent on images—is most pronounced in situations that allow
for the articulation of hidden sexual and social anxieties. In many ways,
these situations reveal the underside of the almost compulsory preoccupation
with ordinariness. The degree to which the figure of the “little man”
became codified in terms of sexual inadequacy is especially astonishing if
one compares the German preference for a comical solution—that is to say,
a basic acceptance of the status quo—with the very different approaches to
modern masculinity in other European cinemas during the 1930s. Here a
brief comparison to, say, Jean Gabin would corroborate the suggestion made
earlier that the Rühmann persona of the “little man” required the containment
of male sexuality through the false alternatives of adolescent unruliness
and marital contentment. By contrast, the more traditional masculin-
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