Now about movies

I have been watching over the past few months several of the DEFA films now on DVD. These are films from the East German studio DEFA that have not been available in America until recently. For the most part they are pretty good, showing a lot of film technique mainly derived from expressionism that the Germans (then in the one Germany) developed with silent films in the 1920s and early 1930s. Think M, the great Fritz Lang picture about the serial child murderer in pre-Hitler Berlin. These are films that had a social conscience, and a sense of social satire. For example, in M, members of a German crime syndicate band together despite their differences and use their exploited workers, particularly the street beggars, to find the culprit in the face of police failure (on order of "round up the usual suspects") because fear of the killer is emptying the streets of patsies and murdering their profits. (To complete the irony, Peter Lorre as the pedophile murderer is tried by a jury of his peers--the criminals, thieves and murderers who captured him.)

The latest DEFA film I saw is Die Mörder sind unter uns (TheMurderers Are Among Us), the first film made in either Germany immediately after the end of the war. It opened in 1946 and was not a hit. The writer/director Wolfgang Staudte, based in Berlin, could not interest the West German authorities he showed the script to, but the Communist East Germans put up the money. Not a lot, I imagine, as it seems to have been filmed on location in a war-smashed Berlin in rubble. It is easy to see why the film drew lackluster interest—it takes place as the war ends and two people return to an apartment in Berlin, a young woman who has taken refuge in the country and a man who was in the Wermacht. It is the same apartment in fact, but this is just a device to throw two strangers together. It turns out the man, who is constantly drunk, is haunted by an atrocity he could do nothing to prevent, the murder of around 100 apparently Jewish civilians, ordered by his superior. The man, Hans, was a surgeon, an arrogant surgeon in training before the war. He becomes obsessed by his superior who is now a factory owner with lots of money, a family, and an elegant apartment. One nice scene is the midnight mass service on Christmas 1945 in a packed church with many candles and a beautiful altar. Snow is falling on the congregants -- the camera moves up to show that the church has only part of its outer walls, the rest having been smashed to smithereens by the bombings.

Clearly, this idea of responsibility for crimes against humanity was not popular in either Germany. Both Germanies were the same Germany that gave overwhelming support to Hitler (Fritz Lang above, by the way, left soon after Hitler’s rise to power and ended up in Hollywood).

More to come on these DEFA movies. Yesterday I saw the total hoot movie Taken, starring a low-key Liam Neeson with a script by the great comic book figure Luc Besson, responsible for The Professional with the fabulous Jean Reno. Neeson plays a near zombie pining to be involved in his teenage daughter's life. She is a total twit, shallow and boring, a cipher. The only near character in the movie, in fact, is the zombie Neeson. The key point of the movie is when Neeson in L.A. tells the kidnapers over the phone in Paris, "I have spent 30 years learning a special set of skills. I am going to hunt you down. And then I am going to kill you." It seems that zombie Neeson is a retired CIA assassin. He is a killing machine, almost as fast in hand to hand combat as Matt Damon in The Bourne Supremacy. Of course Neeson is 20 years older. By my count he kills 50 men in the movie, mostly the latest Hollywood scuzz, Albanians, but also a bunch of Arabs. Like any good Paris situated movie there is a high-speed car chase going the wrong way (see Ronin--a great Jean Reno movie--although Ronin always evokes for me the death of Princess Diana), and crooked French cops. Neeson goes to the Albanians' hideout with a French cop photo ID; he speaks English the whole time and so do they. Nobody questions this; plus Neeson struggles with using an American accent (although I'm sure there must be British operatives in the CIA). The outdoor action scenes are mostly filmed at night, probably to disguise the fact that sets were probably used. The movie is terrible. How do actors not get hurt in that incredibly fast martial arts? I enjoyed almost every minute of it.