Word: films
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...film at the Brattle this week and next is not so much seen as experienced. It is a series of powerfully delineated situations in which the loyalty to a national cause is set up against the more universal demands of humaneness and mercy. A German doctor (Maria Schell) working as a nurse in a line hospital in Yugoslavia is kidnapped by partisan guerrillas and forced to tend their wounded. At first she refuses, tries to escape, but gradually she comes to see that the partisans have as much of a claim to her ability to prevent suffering as her countrymen...
...unlikelieness of her meeting the sergeant again, and the often unrealistic tenor of the dialogue, in which peasant women tend to talk in profound concepts of duty, etc., when isolated seem corny. But the situation can hold the actors in such a tension of dramatic excellence, and the film as a visual whole exerts such a physical impact, that the inherent melodrama and sentimentality blur into unimportance...
...director, Helmut Kautner, can speak through the visual medium many times more subtly than through the verbal. He records scenes that express the whole depth of the film in a few seconds. And old woman offers the boots of her dead grandson to Helga, thinking she has deserted the Germans of her own will, and Kautner elicits a dramatic poignancy that is almost unbearable. In just the last few frames of one sequence a kitten appears to follow Helga out of the room, and by his cinematic control the director turns the kitten into a pure manifesation of the faltering...
...somewhat disappointing. As the blinky-eyed ads would imply, she has a bad knack for simpering; she simpers very well, but too much. Her face is wonderfully mobile, but the fine differences of its expressions are limited. She does not stand out over all else in the film, but she does posses a dramatic urgency and an understanding of the excruciating moral dilemma which makes The Last Bridge as profound and important a film...
...Twentieth Century (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). "Perón and Evita" get a well-deserved once-over in a film-clip history; musical score by Darius Milhaud...