Monday | April 3, 2000 9:00 pm

The False Step
(Der Schritt vom Wege)

Screening on Film

Directed by Gustaf Gründgens.
With Marianne Hoppe, Karl Ludwig Diehl, Paul Hartman.
Germany, 1939, 35mm, black & white, 101 min.
German with English subtitles.

Theodore Fontane’s tale of a woman who forsakes respectability and obligation in the name of personal happiness, famously remade by Fassbinder in the 1970s, indicts the strict codes of an unbending Prussian order. The film represented a challenge for Nazi observers since party logic dictated that the tragic figure must be the betrayed officer-husband; but Marianne Hoppe’s performance as Effi was so engagingly sympathetic one had no problem understanding why she had strayed.