Gilgi: One of Us Review - Brigitte Helm is surprisingly normal here

If you only know Brigitte Helm as the creepy gold robot-woman from Metropolis, you should absolutely track down Gilgi: One of Us. It is a total trip seeing her play a normal, fast-typing modern girl who just wants to pay her own rent and live her life.

But if you cannot stand scratchy 1930s audio or plots where people talk endlessly about the "duty" of getting married, you will probably want to throw your remote at the wall. It is very much a product of its time, but in a way that feels strangely alive.

The Typewriter vs. The Bohemian

The setup is pretty simple. Gilgi is doing great, organizing her day down to the minute, until she finds out she was born illegitimately.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Gilgi: One of Us (1932) through its definitive frames.

Then she meets this writer guy named Martin—played by Ernst Busch—and her neat little life completely derails. Honestly, Martin is kind of the worst, but you can see why she falls for him. He has this smug, sleepy energy that screams "I don't have a real job."

What is crazy is that Emeric Pressburger worked on the script. Yes, that Pressburger, way before he went to England to make his famous technicolor movies. You can feel some of his sharp wit in the dialogue, even if the subtitles on my copy were clearly translated by a machine.

There is this one scene where Gilgi is trying to type her work while Martin is just lounging around her tiny apartment, being utterly useless and distracting. It felt so incredibly real. Anyone who has ever tried to work from home while their partner is on a "creative break" will feel this in their bones. 😅

Not Your Typical Melodrama

This film handles the marriage pressure differently than something like The Guilty One. Instead of high society drama, this is grounded in the dirty, noisy streets of Cologne.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Gilgi: One of Us (1932) through its definitive frames.

Though if you want something light and easy, go watch Pop Tuttle's One Horse Play instead. This movie has some dark corners, especially when Gilgi realizes that independence costs more than she can actually afford.

Some odd notes from my notebook:

• The hats in this movie are absolute madness. One of them looks like a collapsed cake sitting on Helm's head.
• The background music sometimes just cuts out completely, leaving these massive, awkward silences where you can hear the hiss of the old film reel.
• I swear one of the extras in the office scene was looking straight at the camera for a solid five seconds.

There is a strange subplot about Gilgi's birth mother that feels like it belongs in a completely different, much older movie. We go from a modern story about a working girl to a dusty melodrama for about fifteen minutes, and it almost ruins the pacing.

But Brigitte Helm carries it through. She has these incredibly expressive eyes that make even the dumbest plot twists feel important. It is not a perfect film, and the ending feels incredibly rushed—almost like they ran out of money and just stopped shooting.

Still, it is a fascinating, messy look at a Germany right before everything changed. Definitely worth a watch if you like old cinema with some actual dirt under its fingernails.