Wienerinnen (1952)

Anni works at a Viennese brickworks in one of the city’s rather unattractive outer districts. One day, she begins an affair with Fritz, the foreman’s son, and it threatens to turn into a disaster. When Anni’s mother was young, she too worked at the brickyard and was raped by that same foreman. Anni was the result of that crime. This makes Fritz Anni’s half-brother, so the two cannot be together. Anni’s mother is deeply worried that, under these circumstances, her terrible secret might come to light. She practically begs her alcoholic husband to separate the two lovers, whatever it takes. This sets a terrible tragedy in motion. The two men fight on the brickyard’s rubble heap, and both fall into a pond and sink into its mud. Half-mad with grief, the mother rushes over and shouts at the stunned Anni: “Fritz was your half-brother.” The respectable Helene runs a small puppet theater for children, entertaining the youngest pupils at schools in Vienna. The brunette puppeteer has fallen in love with the young composer Walter, who accompanies her and her puppet shows on the accordion during performances. But Walter has grand ambitions. Although he feels attached to Helene, he wants to achieve more than touring schools with her and her puppet theater. He wants to make a career as a musician. When he meets a new woman, his colleague Edith, who knows how to wrap a man around her finger, he decides the time has come to move on. Walter leaves Helene and her puppet theater. Helene is left in despair, finding support only in her professional calling. One night, in a delirious state, she acts out her own story with Walter and Edith using her puppets at school. A pupil breaks into the school during the night to secretly play Walter’s accordion, bringing Helene back to reality. The pretty brunette Gabriele earns her living by posing nude for a painter. Her fiancé Hans was convicted of murder and sent to prison. The young woman firmly believes he is innocent, and so plans to track down the real culprit and see him brought to justice. She already has someone in her sights: a certain Paul Rosenauer, who seems the very embodiment of a sinister, devious criminal. He knew the murder victim, and Gabriele plans to question him. Meanwhile, during a prisoner transport on the snow-covered grounds of Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof, Hans manages to escape from custody. When the paths of the three protagonists cross, Gabriele is in mortal danger … The hydrogen-blonde Olga works as a prostitute in the seedy district around Albern Harbor, a Danube cargo port. Her pimp is a thoroughly nasty, sleazy type named Anton, who does not shy away from violence against his “little horse,” as he calls her. Olga wants to leave it all behind and stop working the streets. As might be expected, Anton the pimp is opposed. One day, Olga really does get the chance to start a new life: she meets the good-natured, burly Carlo, who travels up and down the Danube as an inland waterway boatman. He offers Olga a place on his boat. This is entirely against Anton the pimp’s wishes, and he tries to split the two up. Just as Olga is about to accept Carlo’s offer, Anton abducts her to a grain silo, where he intends to sink her forever into the depths near the Cemetery of the Nameless. But Carlo proves dependable … The focus of this episode, which can no longer be reconstructed in its entirety and survives only in its final nine minutes, is Therese, a Heurigen singer who is no longer in her first flush of youth. She soon finds herself competing with the considerably younger colleague Jaqueline for the favor of two Heurigen musicians—or, rather, of the man she loves. Given the rough tone, both in its realism and in its visual style, of the preceding four episodes about Viennese women, this episode—with its closing pan across the lovely vineyards on Vienna’s outskirts—seemed like a cinematic foreign body. This was probably one of the reasons it was ultimately omitted from the finished film.