Pillars of Society

Sirk’s indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy receives one of its earliest treatments in this gripping adaptation of an Ibsen play. When a Norwegian rancher (Albrecht Schoenhals) living in America returns to his home country after 20 years away, his presence rattles skeletons in the family closet, exposing the moral duplicity and crooked dealings of his fat-cat industrialist brother-in-law (Heinrich George). Sirk guides this stinging condemnation of societal repression (which seems to have eluded Nazi censors) with a cool sense of dramatic irony, until the unresolved tension explodes in a raging climactic tempest at sea.