You've no idea what goes on in some marriages.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder must have been in a terribly sadistic frame of mind when he wrote the script for his 1974 television film Martha, because he drags the title character -- a virginal, 31-year-old librarian brilliantly played by a brittle Margit Carstensen -- through hell and then some. When we first meet her, Martha is vacationing in Rome with her demanding father (Adrian Hoven), who clearly wasn't long for the world since he drops dead during one of their outings. With the help of an official at the German embassy (Kurt Raab), she arranges to have the body sent home and immediately takes up smoking -- something that was forbidden by her father. Upon her return home -- to a boozy, highly strung mother (Gisela Fackelde) and friends who all seem to be abandoning her as they get married off -- she rejects a longstanding proposal from her boss and takes up with a dominant engineer (Peeping Tom's Karlheinz Böhm) who seeks to control her just like her dear old daddy used to.
In a way, Böhm sets the stage for their marriage by taking Carstensen on a roller coaster and proposing to her immediately after she's thrown up. After getting her grandstanding mother out of the way (by having her committed to a mental hospital), he really starts in on her during their honeymoon, telling her what she can eat and drink and deciding that he doesn't want her to work at all. Once they settle into their new home, he then dictates where she can smoke, what music she can listen to and what books she can read, and severely limits where she can go and who she can talk to. She seeks out a former co-worker (Peter Chatel) as a confidant, but eventually Böhm's physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuse takes its toll and drives her into hysterics, leading to an inevitable (and damn near pitch-black) conclusion. In fact, she's so shattered by the end you'd almost think Fassbinder wanted to drive his lead actress around the bend himself.