Word: brauns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...years, consumers are choosing $600 and $700 Sonys, the industry's standard of excellence, whose sales are up substantially. At Beverly Hills' trendy Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf shop, the all-metal $99.50 Eva brand coffee maker outsells by 3 to 1 the part plastic $79.95 Braun coffee brewer. Sales of Kodak's low-priced Instamatic cameras have been sluggish, but sales are really clicking for Nikon, Olympus and Canon cameras, which retail for some $250 and up, and provide all the features that most people are ever likely to want in a lifetime. The understated lines...
...Maria Braun, epitome of the country's post-war "economic miracle," proves that Germany cannot only survive, but flourish. "I prefer making miracles to waiting for them," she stoutly adjures. Married in 1944 for half a day and a whole night, her soldier-husband Herman Braun (Klaus Lowitsch) is sent off to the Russian front. Maria pledges unfailing devotion to Herman--a silent, morose type--yet her notion of love takes on strange forms...
...Bill provides Maria an ample quantity of chocolate, silk stockings, and affection; he beseeches her to marry him. Maria playfully hedges; she is ever in control of the situation. "I am fond of you, Bill, but I love my husband," she declares solemnly, insisting upon the appellation of "Mrs. Braun...
...movie comes in rapid, staccato strokes. By now Maria is rich, established, with a house in the country. Oswald is dead, having bequeathed all to the Brauns. Herman has been home for a day and they are preparing to make love. "I gave you everything," Maria tells Herman. "My whole life. Got a match?" Mistakenly, she left the gas on. Boom. Both go up in flames, a tragi-comic resolution to the whole affair. After evincing such uncanny survival skills, Maria Braun is undone by a measly cigarette. In the background Fassbinder adds the last little fillip of irony...
...Maria Braun, Effie Briest, and The Merchant of Four Seasons are Fassbinder's masterpieces; significantly, Hanna Schygulla starred in all three. She is to Fassbinder what Giancarlo Gianini is to Lena Wertmuller: a charismatic presence who carries the entire film. Despite arresting cinematographic touches--chilling musical inserts, the startling shot of an unidentified man pawing a women's breasts in the foreground--and solid performances by other actors, The Marriage of Maria Braun depends for its success upon the all-pervasive influence of Schygulla. The film has already garnered prizes at this year's Berlin Film Festival...