From director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Fear Eats the Soul, Fox and His Friends, I assumed this was a German war film about the sister or another female relative of Eva Braun, and even though it wasn't I watched with interest. Basically, set in Germany, 1943, and during a bombing raid by Allied forces, Maria (Hanna Schygulla) is married to soldier Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch), but after only a short time together he returns to the front, and she is later told he has been killed. She starts work in a bar, often visited by Americans, as a hostess, and after a relationship with African-American soldier Bill (George Byrd) she becomes pregnant with his baby, but she is shocked to be caught with him by Hermann who is in fact alive. In the fight between the two men, Maria unintentionally kills Bill hitting him over the head with a full bottle, but when she expresses love for her husband he takes the blame for the crime and is put in prison. After aborting her pregnancy she heads home on a train and gets the attention of Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny) the old wealthy industrialist, and he offers her a new job as his assistant, and of course she soon becomes his mistress. Maria tells Hermann in prison about the latest events, promising their life will get going again after he is released, and she earns loads of money to buy a new house, Oswald even visits her husband to offer him and his wife his wealth if he leaves his wife after he is released. This offer is kept a secret, but when Hermann is let out he heads for Canada, only sending his wife a gift every month so she knows he still loves, and when he finds out that that Oswald has died he returns to Germany. In Oswald's will that executor Senkenberg (Hark Bohm) reads out, the secret agreement between him and Hermann is revealed, and in distress she ends her life by lighting her cigarette and creating a gas explosion. Also starring Gisela Uhlen as Mother, GoldenEye's Gottfried John as Willi Klenze and Elisabeth Trissenaar as Betti Klenze. In the leading role Schygulla gives a good emotionally up and down performance, the story set in the war is admittedly a little confusing for me at times, but it had some good melodramatic moments, full of the sort of things you get in those kinds of genre films, so it is certainly a worthwhile romantic drama. It was nominated the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. Good!
Review of The Marriage of Maria Braun
