|
Serial killers versus genocidists, a simple matter of who gets caught. Germany toward the end of the war is a corroded state, ceiling stains loom over office conversations like the regime's oozing pustules. (Furniture from the upstairs floor comes crashing down when "Heil Hitler" is uttered, practically a Billy Wilder joke.) A string of murders around Hamburg, the culprit is no "athlete with iron claws" but lumpish Bruno Lüdke (Mario Adorf), perpetually looking for potatoes and schnapps and, almost as an afterthought, strangling women. The latest victim is a waitress with a sweet tooth—she reaches for canned fruit during a nighttime raid and her screams are lost amid flashes and sirens. "The Reich fights for its life and this one gets cherries," grumbles the philandering SS officer (Werner Peters) who takes the fall in order to protect Aryan-purity ideology. From Expressionism to film noir and back, the Robert Siodmak homecoming (cf. Lorre's Der Verlorene). The manhunt is quickly resolved but the Gestapo has its own interests, the inspector (Klaus Holm) returns from the Russian front to discover reigns of terror within reigns of terror. Before his capture, the maniac wanders into a locked-up abode for an absorbing brush with a Jewish widow in hiding. After his capture, he leads the captors to the scene of the crime and mock-throttles a lady reporter once the shackles are off, "all in fun." (Siodmak visualizes his reenactment as a fit of kino-delirium, the camera tilts up to the towering treetops and spins into a frenzy.) The wanted poster behind the wallpaper, the official story ahead of the hanging patsy. "Miscarriage of justice? Such things do not happen in German courts!" With Annemarie Düringer, Hannes Messemer, Monika John, Carl Lange, and Margaret Jahnen. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |