Hitler's most ruthless henchman, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, is a fiend to all who
resist him. As the Minister of Propaganda for the Nazi party, he has absolute
authority over Germany's newspapers, radio, film and theater. With this imposing
power, Goebbels has Germany's most beautiful women at his beck and call, but he
is obsessed with the lovely actress, Maria Brandt, who had humiliated him by
rejecting his pathetic advances years earlier. After secretly orchestrating her
incredibly successful film career in order to gain influence over her, he
ruthlessly destroys that career and everything else she holds dear when she
continues to spurn his twisted love.
Filmed while Goebbels was alive and the war in Europe was still raging, The
Enemy of Women is itself a sly Hollywood propaganda piece, and the darkly
stylish melodrama has a strong ironic undertone as a result. By nesting the
fictional tale of a young woman ravaged by the grotesque machinery of the Reich
within the greatly simplified but generally factual story of Goebbels' nefarious
Nazi career, director Alfred Zeisler succeeds in giving the larger-than-life
tableau of war-time Europe an intimately human scale. He is greatly aided in
this effort by the outstanding shadows-and-light "noir" cinematography of John
Alton, who won an Academy Award seven years later for his camerawork in An
American in Paris.
Starring: Paul Andor & Claudia Drake Directed by: Alfred Zeisler
