Hedy's Folly Read Free Page B

hears the music and agonizes. There’s a shot. The hotel staff crowds around the door to Emile’s room. Adam breaks in: Emile has killed himself, his fussy pince-nez lying broken on the floor. Adam and Eva go to the station to wait for the next train to Berlin. He falls asleep. She decides to return home and leaves him sleeping—their night of passion was a deliverance but not an obligation.
    In this simple and largely pantomimed story, only three brief scenes challenge what would otherwise be at most a PG-13 rating today: a glimpse of Eva’s breasts as she swims nude, a long shot of her running nude through the woods, and a gauzy close-up of her face in passion during the couple’s night of lovemaking. Not nudity but blatant Freudian symbolism communicates the film’s sexual themes: a jackhammer drilling, a bee pollinating a flower, a stallion rearing and snorting before servicing a mare off camera. More challenging than nudity or symbolism to the sexual canons of the day, in America in particular, was the story itself, which reversed the prevailing Victorian paternalism. Eva falls for Adam, seeks him out, seduces him, takes her pleasure, and drops him when she’s done, while Emile, when he realizes he isn’t vital enough for her, obligingly shoots himself. Had the film been released in the 1960s instead of the 1930s, it might have been hailed as feminist.
    Certainly Ekstase embodied the new spirit of personalfreedom which Zweig observed of that time and place. “The world began to take itself more youthfully,” he writes, “and, in contrast to the world of my parents, was proud of being young.… To be young and fresh, and to get rid of pompous dignity, was the watchword of the day. The women threw off the corsets which had confined their breasts, and abjured parasols and veils since they no longer feared air and sunshine. They shortened their skirts so that they could use their legs freely at tennis, and were no longer bashful about displaying them if they were pretty ones. Fashions became more natural; men wore breeches, women dared to ride astride, and people no longer covered up and hid themselves from one another.”
    Ekstase illustrates these changes both in situation and in costume. It also dramatizes the corresponding changes in values that Zweig observed:
This health and self-confidence of the generation that succeeded mine won for itself freedom in modes and manners as well. For the first time girls were seen without governesses on excursions with their young friends, or participating in sports in frank, self-assured comradeship; they were no longer timid or prudish, they knew what they wanted and what they did not want. Freed from the anxious control of their parents, earning their own livelihood as secretaries or office workers, they seized the right to live their ownlives. Prostitution, the only love institution which the old world sanctioned, declined markedly, for because of this newer and healthier freedom all manner of false modesty had become old-fashioned. In the swimming-places the wooden fences which had inexorably separated the women’s section from the men’s were torn down, and men and women were no longer ashamed to show how they were built. More freedom, more frankness, more spontaneity had been regained in these ten years [after the turn of the century] than in the previous hundred years.
    As if confirming Zweig’s insight, Hedy announced during the production of Ekstase that she had been offered a Hollywood contract and had turned it down. “I don’t want to become the slave of film,” she told an Austrian magazine grandly, “but rather want to make films or take breaks when I feel like it.”
    After filming Ekstase , she returned to Vienna. In November she celebrated her eighteenth birthday. She was ill with influenza and lost weight, enhancing her already striking beauty. When she recovered, she nearly won the role of Caroline Esterhazy, the young Hungarian countess whom Franz