1POPULAR CINEMA

their late twenties and early thirties who have found responsible administrative
or managerial positions in large corporations. Unlike the coming-ofage
stories outlined above, these conversion stories feature women who
have given up on love and marriage and become hard and bitter in the process:
prototypes of the castrating female. However, under the guidance of a
loving man, they rediscover their so-called feminine side and find fulfillment
in a traditional love relationship. Thus in Die unmögliche Frau (The
Impossible Woman, 1936), Dorothea Wieck plays the head of an oil company
whose demeanor has earned her the attribution “impossible” among
employees. In the end, a competent engineer saves the company from industrial
sabotage and its female owner from a life without love. In Eine Frau
wie Du (A Woman like You, 1939), Brigitte Horney lives only for her work
as the head of personnel in a large corporation but then falls in love during
an unplanned vacation trip. Sybille Schmitz in Clarissa (1941) is so demanding
and controlling as a bank manager that the other employees refer
to her mockingly as “Her Excellency,” including the one colleague who
eventually wins her heart. Alles für Gloria (Everything for Gloria, 1941) introduces
Italian newcomer Laura Solari as the ambitious chief executive
of a record company who slowly succumbs to the charm of the head of
production.
Addressing similar problems in a more nuanced fashion, the third group
of films concentrates on married women who refuse to give up their careers
but after many problems, including a trial separation, recognize the necessity
for such a gesture of compromise. Here the power struggles frequently
manifest themselves around the question of domesticity, with the woman
preoccupied with her career and the man reduced to doing housework.
Sometimes these conflicts are resolved in favor of earlier commitments to
an important mission or task. In Die Frau am Scheidewege (The Woman at
the Crossroads, 1938) Magda Schneider plays a woman doctor who, after a
failed marriage to a bohemian graphic designer, finds her proper place in
the operating room at the side of an admired older professor. Such positive
portrayals of the woman as an “ideal work mate” remain limited to the medical
profession, where duty and sacrifice regularly triumph over more selfish
needs. Taking advantage of the combative atmosphere in the legal profession,
Zwei glückliche Menschen (Two Happy People, 1943) presents Magda
Schneider and real-life husband Wolf Albach-Retty as two divorce lawyers
whose professional partnership almost destroys their marriage. In Die
schwarze Robe (The Black Robe, 1944), Lotte Koch is cast as an ambitious
A Question of Representation 199