1933’s Ecstasy is famous for a couple of reasons. It was the first non-porn movie to show a woman having an orgasm, or so its reputation insists. And it was the film that introduced Hedy Lamarr to the world.
Ironically, the actress so shockingly beautiful that other Hollywood screen goddesses were wary of being seen with her doesn’t actually look that hot in this infamous but rarely seen Czech drama. Or not always. From certain angles she’s devastating. From others fairly plain. In some she even appears to have the shadow of a moustache. The same thing happened to Marlene Dietrich. On home turf in Germany she looked like a hausfrau, but once Hollywood had got hold of her, she was utterly transformed.
However, Lamarr (going by her original name of Kiesler) is plausible enough as a young woman who we meet on her wedding day. Clad in white, Eva appears to be a sweet, practical bride who, right after her husband has carried her over the threshold, busies herself with a couple of minor domestic details in the marital apartment before preparing herself for sex.
But Emil (Zvonimir Rogoz) does not want to go there, preferring to take an age over cleaning his teeth and so on. The pattern is set and in more detail and at greater length than is strictly necessary director Gustav Machatý takes us through the following days and weeks, reinforcing the idea that she wants it and he does not. Eventually, hot and bothered after weeks in the sexual desert, in a moment of wild abandon out in nature, we get the scenes that caused the fuss. Eva throws off her clothes to go skinnydipping.
It’s after swimming, with her horse having done a bolt with her clothes, that Eva meets Adam, (yes, Adam and Eve) and an initially coy but eventually tumultuous affair gets underway, with lusty man’s man Adam satisfying the needs that Emil cannot and giving her the orgasm that is so tastefully shot it’s easy to miss.
Lamarr would later claim that the nude stuff – naked into the lake, rolling over onto her back so we can see her breasts – was shot without her knowledge with long lenses. From the angles and perspectives this is clearly nonsense and Lamarr would have known that (she was also, not so well known until recently, an inventor and knew her way around science and technology).
Machatý is an elegant film-maker and mixes up the technical – difficult crane shots – with the poetic. There’s stark lighting, expressionist angles and impressionist montages along with the sort of heroic-worker poses loved by Soviet film-makers and borrowed and repurposed around this time by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite director.
Like Riefenstahl, Machatý is fascinated with the brute power of nature – wind howls, horses buck and rear – and we get the idea that Eva is being driven by urges bigger than herself.
Later, when Adam cadges a lift from Emil, Emil somehow intuits that there’s something going on with this stranger and his wife and attempts to kill his passenger and himself in a scene that’s full of dramatic cross-cutting and editing. If nothing else this sequence points up how dry the rest of the film has been. More Emil and Adam and a bit less Eva bemoaning her dry spell would have made for a much more satisfying experience.
There’s a little song and dance number towards the end, where Adam and Eva dance to the sound of a romantic violin and zither, but for the most part the film is shot with very little sound on screen – snatches of dialogue here and there but largely this is a silent movie nodding to the voguish talkies rather than embracing them.
If you’re going to watch it, and it is dramatically as well as historically fascinating, make sure you have the restored version, by the Austrian Film Archive. It’s got a good, scratch-free image and the sound has more beef in it.
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