1POPULAR CINEMA

tions of war. The later Harvey films frequently exploited the faltering myth
for their own misogynist exercises. Here the star system introduced additional
scenarios of punishment acted out on the body of a once-famous actress
who ended up performing the mechanisms of male aggression in unintentionally
revealing ways, beginning with her unflattering presentation
by the camera and the lighting. Thus Antje Ascheid in her work on Harvey
concludes
that the female star performer as a popular icon—regardless of the
subject of her performance—speaks to the incongruity of the Nazis’
philosophical ideal of womanhood and the cultural practices that
informed, but also derived from, contemporary women’s own hermeneutic
self-conceptions. 12
Woman at the Wheel follows two newlyweds, Maria Kelemen and Paul
Banky, as they deal with their marital difficulties because of a fundamental
disagreement over the wife’s continuous employment as the secretary at a
bank. From the beginning, their exchanges on this subject are very confrontational.
It is her unwillingness to adapt to the role of dutiful wife—and
not his unwillingness to consider her personal needs and, later, their shared
economic needs—that is presented as the source of all problems. He cannot
reconcile his vision of married life with the fact that she often has to work
long hours. Despite his assertion that he earns enough money to support
both, she refuses to give up her beloved job. Already the evening of their engagement
ends on a bitter note when she declares, “I am much too modern
for you.”
Once the central conflict over the question of female employment is established,
the film only needs to demonstrate that the wife is a traditional
woman after all and, more generally, that all career women deserve to be
mistreated—because they mistreat themselves, as it were. In a bizarre twist
on contemporary policies concerning the employment of married women,
Paul is fired from his job because he is perceived to be single— one of several
improbabilities that add to the atmosphere of free-floating aggression
in the film. The resultant role reversal, with the man as the increasingly
frustrated house husband and the woman as the busy professional climbing
the corporate ladder, is standard comic repertoire; so are the scenes that
gently mock the rituals of masculinity, from her reading the newspaper at
the dinner table to her night clubbing with the boss under the pretense of
202 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich