A few films.

Immensee (1943), directed by Veit Harlan. Here is a tearjerker from mid-war Germany. Immensee is a film that aspires to the condition of Hollywood’s Casablanca, even echoing that film at the end when our two protagonists part ways, one leaving on a plane and the other staying where she is. These two are star-crossed lovers, their stars crossed mostly because of the wanderlust of Reinhardt Torsten (Carl Raddatz), a music conductor and composer of international fame. The woman he leaves behind when he embarks on his peripatetic journeys is Elisabeth Uhl (Kristina Soderbaum), a woman hopelessly in love with Reinhardt, but also loved from afar by her neighbour Erich. What happens is this: Reinhardt stays away too long and Elisabeth marries Erich, only to have Reinhardt return looking to pick up with Elisabeth from where he left off. What is a poor girl to do: go off with the man she pines for or remain with the steadfast husband who loves her deeply, even to the pojnt of self-sacrifice? In this very Aryan world, there is only one thing she can do: fulfill her duty to her husband. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this film is its colour cinematography. The music is by Wolfgang Zeller. The melodrama has, I suspect, lost effectiveness over the years.

 

Opfergang (The Great Sacrifice 1944), directed by Veit Harlan. Once again Carl Raddatz and Kristina Soderbaum are star-crossed lovers in this melodrama concerning duty, the human heart, and behaving stoically in the face of a dire fate. Raddatz is the adventurer Albrecht Froben who finds himself infatuated with the chilly Octavia (Irene von Meyendorff). In fact, he is so infatuated with Octavia that he proposes to her, and she accepts. Then comes next door neighbour, the peripatetic Finnish woman Äls Flodéen. Äls is adventurous and flirtatious, and, of course, Albrecht is smitten. Oh, but wait, Äls is also ill with something that portends her imminent demise. So we have a love triangle and each person involved must make sacrifices. So we have love, duty, sacrifice, and even honour working their way into the viewers’ feelings. This is a movie made during the worst of times, and yet it holds onto hope. As with Immensee, we have sumptuous colour and excellent set designs. The actors perform with conviction. 

The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes (1937), directed by Karl Hartl. This film from UFA in Germany just a couple of years before the war is a romp. We have two con men, Morris Flint (Hans Albers) and his sidekick Macky McPherson (Heinz Ruhmann), stopping a train and after boarding being taken for the famous English sleuths, Holmes and Watson. Many hijinks follow involving a master forger, a gang of thieves, and two young female innocents, Mary Berry (Marieluise Claudius) and her sister Jane (Hansi Knoteck). At times I was reminded of Pabst’s Threepenny Opera (1931). The film has lots of energy, much action (even a song and dance number performed by the supposed Holmes and Watson), many changes of scenery, a courtroom sequence, and sly talk. There is also much spying and many mistakes of identity which just may be a comment on the state of things in 1937 Germany. The early scenes on the train are reminiscent of Hitchcock in such films as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Finally, I will confess that the mysterious laughing man was an irritant.

The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962), directed by Harald Reinl. The first Dr. Mabuse film arrived in 1922, courtesy of Fritz Lang. The series continued into the early 1970s. This one from 1962 is rough. Lex Barker, one time Tarzan, plays agent Joe Como, out to find a murderer in Berlin and then finding himself on the trail of the dastardly Dr. Mabuse who has a plan to create an army of invisible fighters to take over the world. He is ambitious, to say the least. We have the familiar stuff with invisibility. The invisible man, however, is not Dr. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss), but rather a scientist who has invented a gadget that renders its wearer invisible. This scientist also happens to be infatuated with cabaret singer, Liane (Karin Dor). We have the invisible stuff with opening doors, footsteps in a carpet, chairs sagging and so on; we also have a disfigured person, and a melting face. I must not neglect the clown who plays an important role in the action. Fights are furious, if a tad unconvincing. The acting, well enough said. The film is a mix of H. G. Wells, James Bond, and The House of Wax.

Fata Morgana (1971), directed by Werner Herzog. Christopher S. Long ends his review of this film with the remark: “But really, there’s just no way to describe it.” And yes, the film is a hallucinatory experience offering the patient viewer the simulation of a mirage. The opening of the film gives us four minutes (seems like more) of airplanes of various sizes landing on the same strip in the rippling heat. This opening should tell us we have arrived on a strange planet, a planet with beauty and ugliness and devastation and hilarity and sadness and things seen that remain unseen, mysterious, disturbing, shaped and shifting. Meanwhile a voice over gives us remnants of a curious creation myth. Curious and curiouser, we travel a wonderland of desert images. We have abandoned places and vehicles, an assortment of people, including child soldiers, a frogman scientist, a man with a monitor, a child holding a strange fox-like creature, a musical duo the like of which you have probably never seen before, and a fellow lying back and puffing a small ball up and down. As we watch these strange goings-on, the soundtrack gives us everything from Mozart to Leonard Cohen, Blind Faith, and Third Ear Band. What does all this add up to? Is this a documentary or simply a vision of Hell pretending to be Paradise? The tourists, or are they tourists, near the end who bend and wave from beneath the sand dunes just might remind us of the Inferno, or they just may be having fun. In any case, we have enough shots of destroyed spaces and desiccated carcases to let us know the planet has not fared well under the stewardship of human beings. This is quite an amazing film, even for Werner Herzog.

Baal (1970), directed by Volker Schlondorff. Rainer Werner Fassbinder stars as the eponymous character, bad-boy poet Baal, in this exercise in “New German Cinema.” The film is an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first play, and it has that Brechtian manner of alienating the viewer. Be prepared. While watching the film, I kept thinking of Chatterton, the marvelous boy who died sleepless in his pride, although Baal is the antithesis of the Romantic Chatterton. Baal is the quintessential bad boy, rebel without a real cause, except for a general disdain of everything. The film proceeds in some 24 short chapters in which Baal displays disgust for everything and everyone he meets. He is supposedly a poet of some genius, the film Bucket of Blood kept coming to mind whenever Baal began intoning his “poetry.” Perhaps the one thing Baal, both the film and the character, have going for them is an, what shall I call it?, appreciation for earthiness, even dirt and the body’s place in the earth. What comes to mind here are the likes of Norman O. Brown and Wilhelm Reich, and a certain aspect of the 1960s. In short, this is not a film that will “entertain” you in the usual sense of the word, but it is a film that may set you thinking about such things as conformity, celebrity, non-conformity, anonymity, sexuality, and the surprising unpleasantness of humanity.