Ferryman Maria (Frank Wisbar, 1936)

I have a weird but boring day job. I work for a nonpartisan agency that works for a large state legislature, and the legislature is in session every other year for five months. In that every-other-year stretch, I work long, crazy hours. I'm in the middle of a session now, so if this review seems disjointed or short or even more poorly thought out than usual, it's because I've been working long, crazy hours.

Speaking of weird but boring day jobs, Maria (Sybille Schmitz) mysteriously appears in a small German village without her legal papers and manages to acquire a weird but boring day job as the town ferryman due to the recent death of her long-serving predecessor, an elderly man who had the misfortune of giving Death himself a ferry ride just days before he was going to buy the ferry with his life savings and become a self-employed man. Yes, Maria is the titular ferryman of Ferryman Maria, a German film released in the early years of the Nazi regime by a filmmaker who fled the country one year later. We'll get into that later.

Ferryman Maria is a dreamy, haunting film that feels both ancient and modern. It has some of the flavor of Dreyer's Vampyr (also starring Schmitz), then-contemporary experimental film, and fables and folk tales. There are shots in it that feel like stolen moments from some long-ago century and others that feel like they were taken from films made thirty years after this one. It's a hypnotic blend, and the dazed, deliberate pace is slow but never dull.

The charming but isolated village Maria has unexplainably wandered into is surrounded by a river and a muddy, dangerous moor. Visitors enter and leave by way of the ferry, and the village provides the ferry operator with a modest dwelling near the river. One late night shortly after taking the job, Maria is awakened by strange noises and decides to take the ferry to the other side to see what's happening. She discovers an injured man (Aribert Mog) pursued by strange men on horseback, and she ferries him back to her quarters before they can snatch him. Maria almost immediately falls in love with the man, who reciprocates that love once he recovers a bit. Maria initially appears to have nursed the man back to health, but he starts to decline, and Death appears again for another ferry ride.

Though the supporting characters have plenty of pep in their step, particularly a hard-drinking musician (Carl de Vogt), the major characters (Maria, the unnamed injured man, and Death, played by Peter Voss) have an almost somnambulant deliberateness to their movements and speech patterns that recall the way people move in dreams. We also get lots of hypnotic shots of the ferry being guided by the rope connecting the shores, and Maria and her predecessor gently pulling the ferry along it.

Ferryman Maria also uses sound in strange, dreamlike ways, alternating silence with noise, playing truncated cymbal crashes to announce customers at the ferry, indicating Death's presence with a dissonant, breathy noise that approximates gusts of wind but is just different enough to be uncomfortable.

These artistic touches made director Frank Wisbar a person of suspicion to the Nazis. German critics admired his films, but the new regime found his artistic sensibilities incompatible with the goals of the Third Reich. Wisbar could see where things were heading, and he fled to the United States one year and two films later. It took Wisbar several years to find film work in the U.S., but he finally found a home making B-movies for the Poverty Row studios in the late 1940s, including a loose remake of Ferryman Maria called Strangler of the Swamp. He found greater success in television, directing hundreds of episodes of Fireside Theater in the early 1950s. He moved back to Germany in the late '50s and resumed his film career. His most famous film from this era is the war movie Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?, about a disillusioned German soldier realizing the inhumanity of Nazi ideology. 

In contrast, most of the cast of Ferryman Maria chose to stay in Germany and collaborate with the Nazis. Aribert Mog, in particular, was already a vocal Hitler supporter and Nazi party member. He died fighting on the Eastern Front in 1941.

Sybille Schmitz's story is more ambiguous, possibly even darker, and a cautionary tale about working with fascists. By most accounts (including her own) unhappy with the political direction of the country, Schmitz decided to stay in Germany anyway and keep working in film. Considered by the Reichsfilmkammer to be too non-Aryan in appearance for leading lady roles, she was frequently cast as a foreign menace. A frosty relationship with Nazi bureaucrats in the now fully propagandized German film industry and a rejection of Goebbels' sexual advances (if her story was true and not an attempt to salvage her reputation) led to fewer, and smaller, roles. She claimed to have eventually aided the Resistance, but those facts have never been corroborated.

After the war, the new generation deservedly criticized her for collaborating with the regime, and her acting roles mostly dried up. (It's worth pointing out that many of her male co-stars were just as guilty but didn't take as much heat and continued to work regularly.) She began drinking heavily and using drugs, eventually moving into the home of one of the worst doctors ever, Ursula Moritz, who kept Schmitz doped up on morphine while she burned through Schmitz's money. After the money was gone, a depressed Schmitz committed suicide. Her final years were the inspiration for the Rainer Werner Fassbinder film Veronika Voss.