Sex In Chains (1928)

Sex In Chains isn’t the exploitation film it sounds like, but if you did find it shelved—accidentally, we’ll say—next to a stack of early-70s convent skin flicks and womens’ prison dramas, you wouldn’t be wholly misled. Those films, like this one, are about people veering to extremes. They’re about people in heat. And Sex In Chains—an often delicately shot, honest, human film with compassion for its suffering married couple, Franz and Helene—is at low boil even in its quietest moments. But director (and star) Wilhelm Dieterle isn’t satisfied with mere melodramatics, even of a kind lurid or borderline nymphomaniacal enough to hold our attention. He wants us to be more than observers. He makes us care about these people, all the while tackling social issues that remain, to this day, contentious. I’ll not soon forget Sex In Chains, or the people in it.

Franz and Helene are troubled, but only because they’re poor. Franz has been laid off from his job and ekes out a living snapping candid photos of people in the park. ‘You’ve been caught on camera,’ reads the little card he hands to his subjects, who smile, decline to buy, and keep walking. Later, he finds work selling Electrolux’s door-to-door. We see a bored socialite recline on her bed while he demonstrates the vacuum cleaner’s prowess; Franz makes a great pitch, but she doesn’t care. Her pampered cat hisses at him in closeup. Meanwhile, Helene (Mary Johnson) takes a job as a cigarette girl. One night she’s harassed by a patron while Franz is sitting close by. A scuffle ensues, and Franz kills the man. He gets three years for involuntary manslaughter.

This is catastrophic for Franz and Helene, who want desperately to be together. Dieterle isn’t too bashful to show us why—we saw how their eyes locked after Franz told Helene of his new job; he carried her toward the camera and, we presume, straight to bed. They are a young couple and their sex life is vigorous. So much so that Franz begins obsessing about his wife soon after he enters his prison cell, which resembles a hostel room with three other stir-crazy prisoners.

Sex In Chains considers intercourse a necessity of life, once food, water and shelter have been accounted for. I wouldn’t argue the point. For Helene, the basics are covered through the goodwill of an industrialist named Steinau (Gunnar Tolnæs), who was briefly held by the police, due to the wiles of an informant. While incarcerated, he met and befriended Franz. Once freed, he becomes Helene’s benefactor, and comes to like her even more. He gives her a job in one of her factories, and they begin socializing.

It’s not what you think—at least, I’m not certain it is, though the three years do go hard on Helene. Her basic needs met, the refusal of conjugal visits starves her in a different way, and by year three, she finds herself whirling through her bedroom, burying her face in her husband’s old suits, drawing breaths of his scent; seeing his reflection in their mirror; glaring at their bed as his image superimposes itself over the sheets. She shows up at Steinau’s door in a swoon, mumbling ‘husband… husband…’ and he pulls her inside.

They do something in there, but I wonder what. Mostly because I wonder about Steinau, the wealthy bachelor who throws himself so zealously into causes like prison reform—issues that redirect one’s energies and passion. I wonder about the fineness of his features; the precise lines of his lips and eyebrows, which contrast with Franz’s handsome, but more bluntly masculine face. Steinau does love Helene, but is he in search of a trophy wife to compliment his image as a social crusader? Are we watching a silent precursor to Shane (1953)?

Franz is certainly a man loved by other men. They watch him, though at first he’s oblivious to their attentions as he lies on his prison bed and dreams tortured dreams of Helene. He makes love to her in soft-focus fantasies of astonishing beauty and eroticism; but as the months drag by, his visions degrade—he takes to drawing her likeness on a cell wall, with dirt, then kissing it. Their real time together is cruelly limited to quarter-hours, and always in the presence of a guard. Sex In Chains makes it clear that, in the absence of any reasonable sexual release, even the most moral man could turn to his fellow men for comfort.

For Franz, homosexuality is a last resort—a product of extreme circumstances—but that doesn’t stop the film from looking positively on a character who is gay without being ‘forced’ to be. A new prisoner named Alfred (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, looking innocent), arrives in Franz’s cell and after not too long, they are holding hands across their beds.

Sex In Chains is a message movie, and the message isn’t that homosexuality is OK. Rather, it’s that conjugal visits are a humane and necessary reform to the German penal system, and if they’re ignored, consequences like gay sex are to be expected. This doesn’t make Sex In Chains enlightened by modern standards, but, by making ‘social deviance’ less the product of bad character or mental illness and more a simple, but universal reaction to torture, the film takes a giant leap forward. There are no real villains in this movie, only men and women with needs worthy of being met.

Where to find Sex In Chains:
Sex In Chains is part of Kino International’s Gay-themed Films of the Silent Era series, along with Different From the Others (1919) and Michael (1924).