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In the late 1970s the German secret service fights against RAF terrorism and searches for constitutional enemies in the public service. A liberal teacher named Brasch “Helmut Griem” takes on V-man Körner “Martin Benrath” and loses his job.Read More »
Max Baumstein is a reputable businessman, a rich self-made man with a conscience – he founded a highly visible and active international organization fighting against violations of human rights. Why would he commit an act that apparently negates the principles he has striven for so long to uphold? Eventually, he reveals a secret about himself that he kept hidden from his younger wife Lina, and that in a roundabout way concerns her as well. It is the conclusion of a struggle that started many decades earlier, when Elsa Wiener, a German singer exiled in Paris, without money or relations, a refugee among many others, faced two daunting problems: surviving in a foreign city, and saving her husband Michel from the clutches of the Nazis.Read More »
Malou feels that the difficulties she is experiencing in her relationships lie in her past and so she searches out information about her mother. Her mother, a nightclub singer who lived in Germany, France and Argentina, becomes the focus of a series of flashbacks through which we learn of her mother’s stormy life and the difficulty she had in bringing her up. These insights enable Malou to sort out the difficulties in her own life.Read More »
from Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis, “Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema”
Volker Schlöndorff based his film “Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass” on a rather spectacular murder case that involved a rich Düsseldorff industrialist’s wife, Minouche Schubert. The case was the stuff of tabloid newspaper exposés, and to some extent “The Morals of Ruth Halbfass” was a calculated attempt by Schlöndorff to win over a popular audience.Read More »
Hans Schnier has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother’s fanatic Nazism, he is appalled to discover many of the people he knows and loves swept deeply into involvement in the Catholic Church.Read More »
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This brooding, operatic movie about Nazism makes Cabaret look like wholesome family fare. The family in The Damned is a symbol of German society circa 1934. The Krupp-like steel magnate Baron von Essenbeck represents the spineless establishment. The Nazis kill the baron, then frame one heir apparent, a socialist (married to the stunning Charlotte Rampling). A bearish, boorish Essenbeck representing the SA, the Nazis’ early goon squad, takes the reins. But Hitler murdered the SA in the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” providing The Damned with its bravura action scene, a Nazi massacre at a gay SA orgy. The winning Essenbeck is the murderous, pedophilic, transvestite, mother-rapist Martin (sharp-featured Helmut Berger), who represents Nazism. Though he’s better in director Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice, Dirk Bogarde is classy as Martin’s stepdad. The Damned got an Oscar screenplay nomination, and Vincent Canby called Berger’s Martin “the performance of the year.”Read More »
The architect Phillip Braun is framed by his former employer Lasky that embezzles the money that should be used to buy suitable material of a construction that collapses, killing a person. Phillip is wrongly imprisoned and for five years his lawyer David Reinalt is not capable to prove that Lasky is the responsible for the accident. When Phillip is released, he meets his beautiful wife Lisa Braun and then his son Timmie. Soon Lasky seeks Philip out to poison the relationship of his wife with David. Lisa is very close to David and Phillip becomes suspicious of their friendship. David finds a job for Phillip with a friend of him and he tells that Lasky is pressing him because he is still trying to prove Phillip’s innocence. Soon Lisa confesses to her husband that she had a brief two-week love affair with David a long time ago when he was in prison, but now they are only friends.Read More »