Word: utner
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Dates: during 1957-1957
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Nevertheless, as long as Lieschen was crying in her beer, Maria was wasting her talent, and in the fall of 1953 she took thought, went to work for the most gifted moviemaker in Germany. Helmut (The Devil's General) Käutner. In The Last Bridge, cast as a woman doctor in wartime, she gave a memorably jolting performance, and in 1954, at the Cannes film festival, Maria was voted the year's best actress. Overnight she had a world reputation, and the films that followed impressively sustained...
...manage, in the puny form of Adolf Hitler, to gobble up all those meaty burghers of the German middle class? How could so many "good Germans" have been so bad? This picture, based on a play by Carl (The Blue Angel) Zuckmayer and magnificently directed by Helmut Käutner (The Captain of Köpenick), gives an answer that apparently satisfies the Germans. Made in Hamburg in 1955, the movie has been running for 18 months in West Germany and has grossed 4,000,000 DM. But the U.S. moviegoer, while acknowledging the film's superlative skill...
...gallantry, in fact, is the false note. Zuckmayer and Käutner have mocked up a marvelous illusion of life in the Nazi ruling circles at the turning point of the war. The scene, as they paint it, is a seething roach nest of military puritans, rat-eyed party fanatics and servile chimney barons, of endless work, nonstop parties, public arrogance, private Angst, Germanic sentiment and rotting will, of spies, lies and a dirty, interminable fight for personal power. And through the scene but somehow above it, like let's-pretend Valkyries, wanders a tribe of strangely ambivalent German...
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