Word: kautner
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...Helmut Kautner's The Rest Is Silence is an especially futile example of the genre. This heavy-handed German film concerns a young Harvard philosophy professor who returns to a post-war, boom-time Germany, suspecting that his mother has conspired with an uncle to murder his industrialist father...
Hardy Kreuger is competent as the young professor, but severely limited by the narrowness of colloquial Hamlets, who, it seems, are not permitted the exuberant swings of mood of their renaissance ancestors. Director Kautner is a victim of the modern fallacy that complicated people are incapable of being drab and shallow, and his Hamlet--alas for poor Kreuger--is a predictably intricate Harvard Square neurotic...
...Helmut Kautner's Sky Without Stars, a story about despair in the divided Germanies, won the first prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Somewhat surprisingly, it is a flat-footed film with plodding photography and drab symbolism; the plot line (roughly Romeo and Juliet) has been reworked often enough; at least a fifth of the script might have been cut; furthermore, the propaganda element is badly disguised, and modern audiences tend to balk at any propaganda as a sign of poor taste. Despite these faults, Sky Without Stars succeeds absolutely; it has a shockingly desperate story to tell and three...
Director Helmut Kautner's point is that loneliness and pride make communication well-nigh impossible between people. The seventeen-year-old girl feels she must invent rich relatives, fiancees, pipe dreams, in order to be loved, and these lies set up a terrible barrier between herself and the boy who would love her. He feels too proud to marry a rich girl when he is too poor to support even himself and a duck. Similarly, the married woman thinks she has to go on sleeping with her husband and her other lover so Jacques--soft, revolting Jacques--won't lose...
While Mon Petit may play with reality, the audience remains aware that this is fiction, even surrealistic fiction. To heighten this effect, Kautner limits his palette so that orange (the oranges), black (the sophisticates), white (our boy and girl), and grey (the edifices of Paris) predominate. And, of course, the characters seem too attractive to be realistic. Horst Bucholz especially stands out as a sort of Jimmy Dean for the quality trade...