be the only woman on set. When the nude scene was announced, she refused to participate but Machaty produced her contract and insisted. “What else could I have done all alone in the godforsaken Carpathians?” she demanded. Hedy first saw the finished film in Prague and wasn't too upset by what she saw, since no one knew her there. In Vienna, however, the situation was extremely embarrassing as all her friends and acquaintances would see her performance. Now she wanted Machaty to remove the sequences but he refused.
She also claimed a body double had been used for some of the sequences (indeed, it seems that a body double was deployed in certain of the scenes, although not in the swimming shot). Perhaps most surprisingly Hedy announced that she was shortly going to Berlin and then would return to Vienna before leaving for America with her mother, where she had a contract with Paramount and would soon be appearing in Hollywood films.14
In another interview she said that she was never paid for the role and had taken it, “because I was in love with somebody.” This “somebody” was presumably Aribert Mog. Even more salaciously, a further rumor claimed there was a version of the film where the two really made love.15
This is after all the story of Adam and Eve, with the emphasis on the pleasure rather than the punishment that temptation brings. Hedy's nudity is associated with the outdoors and freedom, sentiments that might have recommended it in Germany, where naturism was enjoying a boom and where Machaty hoped the film would reach a wide audience.
“In the 1920s,” according to Chad Ross,
organizations and publications—often working in tandem—that advocated nudism proliferated at a fantastic rate. As befits the first great age of mass culture, during the Weimar Republic nudism became a mass cultural phenomenon in which millions of Germans participated, whether as members of nudist leagues or more simply (and far more likely) as weekend beachgoers. Furthermore, nudist ideologues and proponents made use of the latest technology of the day—photographs, cinema—to further their movement.16
The difference, of course, was that German nudism (and its equally popular Austrian counterpart) was inspired by a moral outlook that equated the naked body, male or female, with a healthy, wholesome lifestyle. Machaty's ambition was to dispense with the conventions of bourgeois decorum; the heavy-handed Freudian symbolism that saw Eva's first encounter with Adam marked by wildly galloping horses was just one detail in a creation that would test the limits of the art film across Europe.
Hedy's parents must indeed have been horrified. Across their hometown, posters announced that Ecstasy was the “Talking point of Vienna” and promoted the film with the slogan “An erotic play of uninhibited natural drives.” The film's premiere was held on 18 February 1933 and it opened in four of the city's biggest cinemas. In a two-week period Ecstasy attracted audiences, so the publicity posters claimed, of 71,000. Viennese cinemagoers were able to see the uncut version of the film, though it may have been altered after its release.17 The reactions of the Viennese film critics were mixed. In the Neue Freie Presse, the reviewer noted that it was Hedy Kiesler's beauty and the expressiveness of her fine, spirited face that was the artistic achievement of Machaty's film. Otherwise, the writer continued, the film was confusing and a failed experiment in form, but striking in the beauty of its images. The nudity, he said, was tasteful, and nothing people had not already seen in pictures of lake and river bathing. The Wiener Zeitung reviewer Edwin Rollett also found fault with Machaty's ambitious attempt at a new kind of cinema and considered Eva's motives hard to understand. It seemed to Rollett that the film started three times and each time came to a halt. Yet again, however, Rollett was full of praise for Hedy Kiesler, who was not only beautiful but, as the many close-ups demonstrated, intense and expressive. The Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung's critic wrote lyrically of Hedy Kiesler's beauty. The Neue Zeitung was less appreciative of the film's finer qualities. “It shouldn't be called ‘Ecstasy,’” its critic stormed, “it should be called ‘Scandalous'!…Nudity in cinema is never aesthetic.” Even worse, Machaty's effort was boring and its narrative, mindless. It could only have passed the censors, the writer continued, warming to the theme, because they fell asleep during the screening, a dereliction of duty that might otherwise have saved the public the disappointment of seeing the film.18
If the Viennese film critics were divided over the artistic merits of Ecstasy, for the citizens of Vienna, the issue was a little different. At the seven o'clock screening on the film's opening night at the Ufa-Tonkino, some audience members hissed and booed; four people were forcibly removed by security staff. This evidently prompted the rest of the audience to join in, filling the auditorium with catcalls, hissing, and shouting. Some left of their own free will during the screening; others remained to the end and started demanding that management be called. Cries of “We want our money back. It's a scandal!” were heard. As cinemagoers for the next showing began attempting to take their seats, the police were called to restore order.19 Similar public outcries accompanied other screenings elsewhere; much of the public's unhappiness was not about the film's erotic content, but its misleading advertising, which had, according to Rollet, “awoken in them unjustifiable expectations of obscenity.”20 This kind of response, over frustrated expectations, would be echoed by filmgoers from Paris to New York.
Audiences in Germany, where the film was first banned and then released under the title Symphony of Love (Symphonie derLiebe), also greeted the screening with laughter and whistles from certain seats and with reproaches for this behavior from others. The German version was heavily censored and contained two scenes shot especially for it. One scene made it clear that Eva was already divorced from her husband when she met her lover, a second added a happy ending, with the lovers united. Later, Machaty claimed that the film had been banned because Hedy Kiesler was Jewish, though there is no evidence to support this. More spicy rumors spread after the war: that a copy of the film had been found in Goebbels's private safe; that it was Göring's favorite film and he also had a private copy.21
Ecstasy in America
Ecstasy was distributed in the United States by Eureka Productions, which also traded under the name Jewel Productions. In January 1935, the Customs Bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department denied entry to a print of the film. The case came to court, and the judge, District Judge John C. Knox, ruled in favor of the plaintiff, declaring, “I think that this is the only verdict that properly could be returned…this picture, in my judgment, had no purpose to serve and was intended to serve no purpose other than to bring about a glorification of sexual intercourse between human beings and between animals and to arouse lustful feelings in those who might see it. It is suggestive of sexuality throughout.”22
Despite a swift appeal lodged by Samuel Cummins, general manager of Eureka Productions, a zealous U.S. marshal burned the film. No pushover, Cummins simply ordered another print and won on appeal. Cummins's interest in film distribution was not limited to controversial Czech pictures: In 1934, he imported a film made by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. from Germany, which Cummins renamed Hitler's Reign of Terror; the film introduced many Americans to the realities of Nazi dictatorship. Cummins also produced War Is a Racket that year, which aimed to discredit arms dealers. He ran a sharp business distributing exploitation films and was familiar with the art cinema circuit where such releases were often shown.
With the new print of Ecstasy, he did, however, exercise some sleight of hand. This version contained a scene of a typewriter moving along its carriage while a voice-over read that the girl's divorce had been granted and she was now free to remarry (a close-up of the typed letter ends with the line “I hope that your next marriage will be a happy one”); a new ending showed Eva standing with a baby in her arms while Adam gazed wistfully at the hill where he first glimpsed her.
Cummins's new 1935 print went into immediate circulation in independent picture houses and in states where it was not banned outright. He had thirty-six
