Word: kautner
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Against the backdrop of Paris, where people seem more interesting anyway, the superb German film Mon Petit tells a love story--"sometimes funny, sometimes sad"--which is consistently wonderful to watch. From the moment director Helmut Kautner appears to introduce his audience to "out boy and girl" until he walks down the boulevard at the end, his masterful hand changes ordinary into unique, ennui into comedy, sex into lyricism, and Paris into the colors of Cezanne...
Director Helmut Kautner has taken Karl Zuchmayer's biting leftist script and toned it down, both in political implication and in social description. As the movie proceeds one can see the effect which could have resulted from the blending of abject misery with bitter humor. There are flashes of what must have been really fine pathos on older, flickering, brownish black-and-white film. Blind street singers grind out a Weill-ish ballad, one playing a hand organ, the other tapping a drum with sticks taped to his elbows. A dying consumptive girl cries out in fear of the whiteness...
Outside of the latter rather sticky item, The Captain From Koepenick is highly entertaining, and in a few of the comic scenes, positively brilliant. Helmut Kautner's comic direction is perceptive and lightning fast. His sausage-filled officials are overdone perfectly, and his other minor characters dodge in and out of the story with potent effect. And of course, throughout, there is Heinz Ruhmann's performance, which alone makes The Captain From Koepenick eminently worth seeing...
...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...
...Last Bridge. Another by Director Kautner: the parable of a German doctor (Maria Schell) and how she learns that humanity is more important than her country (TIME, Sept...