The Glass Tower - Der gläserne Turm
Harald Braun
This film has no current screenings
One of the most significant films of West German cinema in the 1950s, The Glass Tower stars Lilli Palmer as a tycoon’s wife who, no longer content merely to be one of her husband’s many possessions, turns to both adultery and her first love: the theater. A rich melodrama that slowly mutates into something like a courtroom procedural, this film offers an especially bold and critical portrait of Konrad Adenauer’s FRG as a locus of cold modernity with a stultifying rigid conception of beauty, harmony and freedom. The Glass Tower can be seen as a precursor to the later work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in its sophisticated use of the tropes of melodrama to undertake incisive social critique.