1POPULAR CINEMA

prosecutor who neglects her husband but, after a difficult court case involving
his old girlfriend, finds her way back to him. And to return to the
artistic milieu, Anneliese Uhlig in Solistin Anna Alt (Solo Artist Anna Alt,
1945) gives up her career as a pianist so that her jealous husband can regain
his confidence as a composer.
At first glance, the primary function of these narratives seems to be the
systematic containment of a woman’s ambition at various moments of her
life, with at least some understanding reserved for the young single woman
but more aggressive impulses directed against the married career woman.
Time and again the necessity of some adjustment is demonstrated through
minor female characters who manifest the excesses of sexual emancipation
in their neurotic or hysterical behavior. Whereas the male lead’s unwillingness
to change usually suggests true character, any principled position
by these women only adds to their debased status as figures of scorn
and ridicule.
However, do the experiences of these working women only corroborate
the pervasiveness of sexist attitudes? Do the films offer nothing but cautionary
tales about a female emancipation gone awry, in other words, a warning
about the limits of the acceptable? Or can the narrative structures, performative
styles, and conflicting modes of address also give rise to a more
complicated system of images and identifications that explicitly addresses a
gendered spectator and opens up a space for different female subject positions?
As the two model analyses in the third part will suggest, the overdetermined
function of femininity in wartime cinema often allowed for
more active forms of engagement through the tension between the woman
as subject and object of the gaze in classical narrative cinema and women’s
precarious position as participants in the public debate on female work and
employment. While these possibilities should not be confused with the kind
of subversive effects all too quickly attributed to popular culture, they nonetheless
shed light on the overdetermined role of working women in the
complicated negotiation of ideology, social reality, and the conventions of
genre cinema.
III.
The two romantic comedies to be discussed on the remaining pages contain
a veritable catalogue of typical sexist attitudes and beliefs about working
women. Yet through their different solutions to the problem, they also bear
witness to the considerable pressures on popular cinema to offer stories and
200 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich