So this is a movie about two women and their daughters, right.

One of them is Lora, a blonde-haired white woman. As the movie starts, she’s poor, but wants to be an actress. After a lot of futility, she finally goes to a promising meeting with an agent… who then goes on to say that he’ll rep her if she sleeps with him, poses nude when asked, etc, which she refuses in outrage. More futility follows over a period of months, and she falls in love with this Steve guy, who proposes marriage to her right as she receives a phone call about another promising audition. Steve is all “if you love me you’ll stay, I don’t want you to be focusing on your career now that I’m here” and she’s all “uh, okay, bye, Steve,” and goes off to the audition. She gets the part and then we montage forward with her name in increasingly large type on the front of theaters as her career goes into hyperdrive.

The other woman is Annie, a black woman. As the movie starts, she’s super-poor (like, homeless) when she meets Lora. Lora takes her in as a maid, but can’t really pay her, so their relationship is kind of a friendship… but also ps Annie is totally her maid. But also, Annie has a daughter who’s very light-skinned and can pass as white, and tries to… until, e.g., her mom shows up at school and outs her real racial identity, a pattern that occurs repeatedly throughout the movie.

So Lora’s story is allegedly about how she’s greedy and selfish (“self-aggrandizing” is the word a contemporary NYT review uses), and keeps pushing away people who offer her love to further her own childish desires of, uh, having a career and doing the thing she loves, which ps she’s empirically very good at. It really reads to me like a movie about the difficulties of being a woman in a deeply sexist era, and the compromises one has to make just to get by in the world (for instance: that sleazy agent? is the one who ultimately gets her a part, so even though she’s not giving in to his bullshit, she does have to work with him for a long time).

As for Annie’s story, it’s largely about the difficult relationship she has with her daughter, how the daughter keeps pushing her away because she believes she can rise above her constraints if only her mother would quit giving the game away. And Annie keeps wanting her daughter not to reject her race and her family… but ultimately reluctantly lets her go off on her own, which sets up the tragic ending where the daughter comes back in tears.

But, too, the movie is about the relationship between Annie and Lora. To a large extent, this is kind of old-style progressivism — Annie is a blameless saint at all times, and they take great pains to say that Lora “never treated her any differently” and they have a genuine friendship even through their employer relationship. Which is the kind of thing that would have been making a strong ideological point in 1959, but would not be so well-received today. But… there’s more depth that pokes through occasionally. Like, at one point, Annie casually mentions her friends, and Lora is surprised that she has black friends that Lora has never met and doesn’t know. “You never asked,” Annie says, sweetly but with the twist of a knife.

And really, that’s maybe a good microcosm of the movie as a whole. When the movie was released, it wasn’t particularly well-received, and was treated as a weepy melodrama; but over time, Sirk’s reputation got a boost from the French New Wave reconsideration of his work, and then directors like Fassbinder loved him (in fact, Fear Eats the Soul is itself an homage to another Sirk film), and basically, everyone went from treating them as just tearjerker “women’s” movies to being laced with social commentary and irony. For all that this movie looks like a piece of Old Hollywood, with its glamorous stars and sets and mannered acting, it’s undercutting itself and doing something a lot more sophisticated than it appears at first.

ALSO: if you’re doing letter-counting (and you get it right), you’ll notice that this is actually movie #100. But because there’s a nine-way tie at 93, there’s one movie left on the list, so we’re not done quite yet.