Synopsis
THE AMAZING REVELATION OF A BEAUTIFUL GIRL'S EXPERIENCES
An American vacations in Europe with her husband and watches him turn into a Nazi.
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The Man I Married
Cast
Joan Bennett Francis Lederer Lloyd Nolan Anna Sten Otto Kruger Maria Ouspenskaya Ludwig Stössel Johnny Russell Frank Reicher Ernst Deutsch Frederick Vogeding Egon Brecher Willy Kaufman Lionel Royce Rudolph Anders Walter Bonn Eugene Borden Glen Cavender Harry Depp Diane Fisher Arno Frey Carl Freybe Rudy Frolich Albert Geigel John Hiestand Leyland Hodgson Charles Irwin Greta Meyer Thomas Mizer Show All…
Director
Producer
Writer
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Editor
Cinematography
Art Direction
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Releases by Date
Theatrical
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USANR
Releases by Country
USA
09 Aug 1940
- TheatricalNR
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a programmer with a political twist, yes this is "the one about the woman who finds out her husband is a Nazi", and Joan Bennett does a great job at acting surprised.
made a year before the US entered WW2, to this day it has to be one of the better films about Americans' relationship with fascism. from the opening scene where talks about the elevator man's reaction to her saying she was going on vacation to Germany, the theme of the comfortable American turning their eyes away from atrocity is instilled.
there's a sense of systematic and pragmatic dread throughout the film, especially in the scenes where Bennett has to bare witness to the Nazi party. she's not overacting and the film isn't pounding you with melodramatic music or camera angles, it's all quite matter-of-fact, which is a much better match for the material than the bombast of other films Hollywood would produce once the US entered the war.
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Anti-fascism, Joan Bennett style: The more she's being pissed off by Nazi Germany, the stylisher her wardrobe gets. "Heil Heel!"
There is no real sense of dread and terror in this, but I liked the economical, matter of fact mise en scene, which doesn't fall prey at all to the allure of nazi aesthetics (especially obvious when contrasting it with the pompous, fetishistic newsreel footage the film uses in one scene). Pichel seems to have been mainly concerend with showing that nazis, whatever else they might be, are also a bunch of no-fun assholes. Which remains a valuable lesson, I guess.
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According to TCM, Pichel was blacklisted partly on the basis of this film's anti-fascist stance. Makes the movie even more relevant now.
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wait noooo. i'm disappointed. i wanted this to be a character drama about fascism but it's characters existing to be placeholders for preachy dialogue (annoying bc i agree fascism is bad, but who wants it delivered this way??) and the characterization is off from the get-go. carol is a successful art critic who "doesn't keep up with politics," like couldn't you have picked any other job for her because what kind of critic is this uninformed?? lastly, and sadly, the movie isn't a thorough critique of fascism because it doesn't, even slightly, suggest america is susceptible to this threat. it treats germany and america as polar but that's not a fair assessment and it's not good storytelling. if carol had…
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A pretty good anti-fascist noir directed by the Blacklisted Irving Pichel. In the film, Joan Bennett visits Germany with her husband (where he’s from) in order to teach the audience about the evils of fascism. It’s didactic, but I think we can give it a pass for that given the Nazi threat and the fact that Americans didn’t want to think too much about the war. It shares some similarities with the “I married a murderer” (or did I)-type films, but it is less about him having previously hidden his secret. In fact, he seemed like he was a good guy until they went to Germany and he got sucked into the propaganda machine.. So this film is a warning about the power of ordinary citizens to become evil when seduced by a megalomaniac authoritarian.
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Joan Bennett and her German husband Francis Lederer decide to take their son to Nazi Germany on vacation. Before too long, the Lederer character is far too enamored of the direction Germany has taken and the Bennett character is wondering what the hell happened to him.
I had my doubts, but it’s pretty good. Direction is solid. Joan Bennett gives a decent performance.
And yes, that is Otto Kruger with a lot of old age makeup.
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Unlike too many other pre-war anti-fascist exposés, this doesn't pussyfoot around calling Nazis Nazis or depicting virulent anti-semitism in unambiguous terms. But unfortunately, the material is too programmatic, and the reversals and reveals regarding Lederer's Nazi husband character feel too overdetermined and inorganic. Plus, Pichel's direction is curiously placid - this needed just a touch of hysteria and stridency, but instead it folds everything rather neatly into the conventions of the wronged wife melodrama, so it's not as radical as one would hope, or as it needed to be in 1940. Benefits from its forthright intentions and Bennett's typically credible performance, but there's a reason this film is largely forgotten in spite of the provocative subject matter.
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This is rather a remarkable film if you put it into context. From the title one might expect a romance, but this is far from that. This is a furious attack against fascism and Nazism in 1940. What is surprising about that is Hollywood was very restrained until war was declared in 1941 about criticizing Germany. For one thing Germany was a big film market and for a second the Congressional isolationists in America - you know the America First folks - demanded that Hollywood not in any way try and influence American sentiment against Germany. The films Blockade made in 1938 and Foreign Correspondent in 1940 were clearly anti-Fascist but in neither case was Germany or Spain actually named.…
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Not only is this uncomfortable viewing knowing what was happening at the time and what would come afterwards, but it feels increasingly relevant today. What we call ‘post-truth’ today is how fascism operates and how it operated then.
The film doesn’t pull any punches. I need to read now about how this and other anti-Nazi films were taken by US audiences.
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This film was released in August 1940, about a year after Hitler had invaded Poland. It was also more than a year before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the US entered the war.
It’s important to place it in historical context because in 1940, isolationism was still a strong sentiment in the US and even US aid to Britain and France had to be done indirectly.
This matters because the movie is a fact-based propaganda film, presenting the truth about the atrocities already occurring in Germany under Hitler’s rule.
Is it heavy-handed at times? Yes, very much so, but you can tell that the producer (Darryl Zanuck) and director (Irving Picgel) are doing everything they can to knock some sense…
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The Man I Married (1940) is basically Hollywood catching-up with world politics using the entire movie telling us how bad German Nazi's are in form of a marriage drama, one German, the other American. And we follow the gradual brainwashing of Francis Lederer as they visit the 3rd Reich. Absolutely nothing subtle about this one!