Crisis

Coming between The Love of Jeanne Ney and Pandora's Box, this is the least known of GW Pabst's silent classics. Exploring the ennui of bourgeois marriage and the scandalous temptations of the Berlin underground, it's both a compelling human drama and an invaluable record of socio-cultural life in Weimar Germany. Rather like another recently restored melodrama, Germaine Dulac's L'Invitation au Voyage (1927), its depiction of decadence now seems rather quaint. But there's a sting in the tail, as bored housewife Brigitte Helm agrees to remarry Gustav Diessl, the stuffed shirt of a lawyer whose neglect drove her to dalliance and divorce.