Post-war classic of German film with Götz George and Juliette Mayniel
This film drama by Wolfgang Staudte (1906-1984), which premiered at the Berlinale in 1960, is one of the unfortunately somewhat forgotten pearls of the German film industry in the Adenauer era. Wolfgang Staudte, who had already made classics such as "Der Untertan" (1951) with Werner Peters, "Rose Bernd" (1957) with BAFTA nominee Maria Schell and "Rosen für den Staatsanwalt / Roses for the Public Prosecutor" (1959) with Walter Giller, joined in 1956 The two other titans of the German film industry, Harald Braun and Helmut Käutner, who worked together in Freie Filmproduktion GmbH to make socially and historically relevant films such as "Kirmes". The film was shot in the Scharzfels domain, which belongs to the southern Harz village of Barbis (2600 inhabitants / 319m above sea level), which is now part of the beautiful town of Bad Lauterberg. The studio recordings took place in the Real Film Studios in Hamburg-Wandsbek (today: Studio Hamburg).
When a skeleton in a Wehrmacht uniform was found during construction work for a fair in an Eifel village in 1959, those involved at the time remembered a terrible event from the war days of 1944. At that time, the young soldier Robert Mertens (Götz George), who no longer saw any point in fighting against the US soldiers who were only 30 kilometers away, deserted. He seeks protection from his parents (Manja Behrens, Hans Mahnke), from the priest (Fritz Schmiedel) and from a fun-loving French prisoner of war (BERLINALE Silver Bear 1960 for Juliette Mayniel). Nobody has enough courage to help him and stand up for him. When his bombed-out sister-in-law Else (Irmgard Kleber), the widow of his fallen brother, shows up, events come to a head again...
This film is simply worth seeing! The loving and detailed design is confronted with an extremely bitter plot in which none of the protagonists comes off well. The all too supple Georg Hölchert (Wolfgang Reichmann), who was the local group leader of the NSDAP in 1944, will be the mayor of the village in 1959. Very bitter, but unfortunately true!
The young (and later EUROPEAN FILM AWARD nominee) Götz George (1938-2016) and the enchanting Juliette Mayniel (1936-2023) shine in the main roles, who also starred alongside Steve Reeves in "La guerra di Troia / The Battle for Troy" (1961) and alongside Bud Spencer in "They Called "Plattfuß" (1973) could be seen. Juliette Mayniel is also the mother of the actor Alessandro Gassman, who is known as one of the hopelessly inferior opponents of the extremely strong beating master Jason Statham in one of the Transporter films. In smaller roles are the very young Hansi Jochmann (born 1953, known as the German voice of Jodie Foster) as the baby Erika and Reidar Müller-Elmau (1933-2003 / as the son of Eberhard Müller-Elmau, part of an acting dynasty and known for the first two films about "The Girls from Immenhof") as the extremely handsome Lieutenant Wandray.
An important and definitely worth seeing film, which unfortunately turned out to be not so beneficial for Wolfgang Staudte and his colleagues. In the first half of the 1960s, Real-Film and Europa-Filmverleih went bankrupt along with their film production company. The changed audience interest caused the first wave of bankruptcies and thus, in the medium term, the end of the independent German film industry.
