Pillars of Society

The most respected man in a Norwegian port town is the shipowner Consul Bernick. His firm is large, his word carries, everyone trusts him. When the brother-in-law who fled to America years ago returns, the lie beneath that respectability comes back with him: a woman's reputation, and a ship sent to sea that was certain to sink. The film is not interested in family drama. It is interested in whose back a reputation is built on: all of Bernick's wealth and standing rests on a crime loaded onto other people. It neither makes him a monster nor absolves him; it simply watches the decision to send the rotten ship out of the harbour. The form is studio drama: the harbour, the yard, the consul's house and the town square. Sirk uses space to state class; the rich man's house is wide, the worker's hut is narrow. Douglas Sirk directed, working in Germany at the time as Detlef Sierck. The source is Henrik Ibsen's play of the same name. It comes from his early period and is one of the first plain instances of the class criticism in his later Hollywood melodramas. Heinrich George plays Bernick. Who it is for: viewers curious about Ibsen adaptations and Sirk's German period. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot set aside the political context. The film was made in Nazi Germany, in a studio under state control.