The greatest critical and popular success of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s prodigious career, “The Marriage of Maria Braun” ((star) (star) (star) (star)), which screens at 4 p.m. Saturday at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, is often taken as his allegory of West Germany after the war: how the country lost its soul as it gained economic freedom.
Set in post-war Germany from 1945 to 1954, and recounting the rise of Maria Braun (Hanna Schygulla), an ambitious young woman who stays emotionally faithful to her absent husband (Klaus Lowitsch) while sleeping around to get ahead, Fassbinder’s film is an exemplary social document, a crackling tale and a piece of grand movie iconography.
“Maria Braun” is the film in which Fassbinder’s disgusted and fascinated view of his homeland most captivated the German audience. But it’s also the movie where one of his female stars, Schygulla, who had been with him from his first film, “Love Is Colder Than Death” (where he played a Munich robber-pimp to her hooker), suddenly assumed an imperishable movie persona. (The part also won her best actress honors at the Berlin Film Festival.)
As tough, beautiful and ambivalent as Marlene Dietrich (in “The Blue Angel”), Schygulla here becomes the supreme Fassbinder movie woman, her childlike face and huge eyes reflecting somehow the relentless drive, seductions and moral blankness of ’50s Germany. The cast around her — Lowitsch, Ivan Desny, Gottfried John, Gunter Lamprecht — is equally strong; the movie itself one of the great postwar German films.
My two favorite Fassbinders are “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” an obvious masterpiece, and the less obvious and sometimes disparaged 1980 “Lili Marleen” ((star) (star) (star) (star) ) — screening at 4 p.m. Sunday — in which he carries the romantic iconography of Schygulla to even greater extremes. This is the story — more factual than you’d expect — of the great, romantic pop ballad of the World War II, written by Hans Liep and Norbert Schulze, sung by Lale Anderson for the Germans and Dietrich for the Allies.
Schygulla plays Anderson here, though she’s given the fictitious name “Willie” and a slightly different history. Still, this withering melodrama, with its depictions of her exotic political contacts and equivocal relations with the German elite, does have a basis in Anderson’s life. An unusually huge budget allowed Fassbinder to create a vision where style — grand and tawdry, fiery and gloomy — overpowers all.
1970’s “Rio das Mortes,” screening at 2 p.m. Sunday, offers a third view of Schygulla: not as artistic or economic German icon, but as a nervy little Munich moll in miniskirts who wants to keep her lover from running off to Peru with another man. This is one of Fassbinder’s early Z-budget film noirs, one of the 10 films he shot in 1969 and 1970 before his first “real movie,” “Beware of the Holy Whore.” “Rio das Mortes’ ” weird onscreen triangle also includes Michael Konig and Fassbinder’s then-lover Gunther Kaufmann.
On the “Fassbinder’s Favorites” series, the Film Center is screening, at 2 p.m. Saturday before “Maria Braun,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 “Suspicion” ((star) (star) (star) 1/2). Based on Francis Iles’ masterful suspense novel “Before the Fact,” this is an often equally masterful tale of a neurotic wife (Joan Fontaine) who begins to suspect that her charming and irresponsible husband (Cary Grant) intends to murder her. If Hitchcock had kept the book’s devastating original ending, though, “Suspicion” might have been one of his three or four best films. As it is, it’s a superb thriller that manages to survive a ridiculous turnabout climax.
The Film Center is at Columbus Drive and Jackson Boulevard. Call 312-443-3737.
