Friday, October 24 @ 7:00 PM – The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (Film Studies Center) – 915 E. 60th St
Tickets: Free
LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW?
Directed by Frank Borzage • 1934
Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle was never shy about his affection for German subjects, but even by the studio’s standard, Little Man, What Now? might sound today like a perversely uncommercial, socially critical outlier. Yet this hardscrabble chronicle of bookkeeper Pinneberg (Douglass Montgomery) and his pregnant wife Lämmchen (Margaret Sullavan) struggling to stay afloat in the last days of Weimar Germany was based on an acclaimed novel by Hans Fallada, which had topped the New York Times best-seller list for three weeks in 1933 and had even been a Book of the Month Club selection in its English translation. Pinneberg’s futile efforts to hold down a job expose the fissures of Weimar society: caught between the capricious abuses of the small family firm, the quota-mad efficiency of the modern department store, and the inscrutable rules of an illicit underground economy operating in plain sight, the young family begins to contemplate radical solutions to their plight. Communism? Nudism? Everything’s on the table in Frank Borzage’s deeply romantic, deeply funny, gauzily beautiful screen adaptation. Released mere weeks before Hollywood began enforcing the Production Code, Little Man, What Now? radiates an effortlessly earthy carnality: Montgomery and Sullavan sleep in the same bed, and when he proclaims “I love my wife!” in a moment of erotic exultation, his trad declaration sounds genuinely sexy. No wonder Little Man, What Now? was among the first films condemned by the Legion of Decency upon its formation. (KW)
98 min • Universal Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Preceded by: “1934 Fox Movietone News” – (1934) – 10 min – 35mm
NEXT UP: Chicago Home Movie Day on Saturday, November 1 at the Chicago History Museum