`Madchen In Uniform' Highlights National Gay, Lesbian Film Tour

The National Gay and Lesbian Film Tour, which takes over the Neptune tonight through Thursday, includes one internationally acknowledged classic on its schedule: the original 1931 ``Madchen in Uniform,'' which plays at 1:30 p.m. Sunday.

Directed by Leontine Sagan, an Austrian stage director who was born at the turn of the century and died in 1974, this German-language production is based on Christa Winsloe's play about attempted suicide and implicit lesbianism at a strict Prussian girls' boarding school. Widely regarded as an anti-Nazi allegory, it was rarely shown in its original, uncensored version.

``A film dealing with German militarism as an evil heritage, it had the authority of Athena leaping full-grown and armed from Zeus's bow,'' wrote film historian Parker Tyler. Another critic called it ``a strident warning against the consequences of Hitler's regime.'' But what ticked off the censors was the lesbianism.

As the late Vito Russo pointed out, it was ``one of the few films to have an inherently gay sensibility (and) one of the few to be written, produced and directed by women.'' In his book, ``The Celluloid Closet,'' Russo gave a full account of the film's run-in with New York censors, who permitted it to be shown only after several cuts were made.

Among them was a scene in which a teacher defends a student's affection for her and tells the headmistress, ``What you call sins, Principal, I call the great spirit of love, which has thousands of forms.'' As a result, one New York critic claimed the re-edited movie wasn't about lesbianism at all, but ``a simple, clean, wholesome little tale of schoolgirl crushes.''

Russo called the edited version ``a classic example of how American society has willfully deleted the fact of homosexual behavior from its mind, laundering things as they come along, in order to maintain a more comfortable illusion.'' Five years later, Hollywood filmed Lillian Hellman's Broadway hit, ``The Children's Hour,'' removing the lesbian theme, turning the plot into a heterosexual triangle and renaming it ``These Three.''

``Madchen in Uniform'' was remade in 1958 as a more sentimental color film in the late 1950s, with Lilli Palmer and Romy Schneider in the leads, and the lesbianism intact.