Review of Wet Asphalt

Wet Asphalt (1958)
8/10
DVD version badly subtitled
12 June 2008
An amazing indictment of falsifying news stories and twisting the truth. Eeerily foreshadowing the 2003 New York Times scandal focusing on Jayson Blair who was fired after he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating elements of his stories. The film dialogues contain a lot of humor and fast paced, generally good to follow. Gert Fröbe and an excellent Marti Held create relatively multidimensional characters, in addition to Horst Buchholz's main character. Even though the latest dubbed version is (obvioulsy) in English, the subtitles contain one important recurring error: The town they talk about is Gdingen, a former German town in 1958 Poland. The subtitles, however, keep referring to Goettingen, which is confusing at best, but in the plot it is completely nonsensical. I would withdraw the DVD and redo the subtitles and replace them free of charge. Other than that the plot is nicely developed and another example of Frank Wisbar's talent. Wisbar had only come home from the US a few years earlier and would one year later make "Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen" in which he described the plight of refugees from former Polish territories from where he was from as well.
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