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Despair in a materialistic world starts early, a matter of foundations. "No house ever fell down because of a bricklayer." As a child the protagonist tries to please his parents with stolen flowers and gets a coat hanger smashed across his bottom for his trouble, neither the pain nor the bouquets ever leave him. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder certainly remembers Hitchcock's own tale of a boy and his mother, a stuffed bird looms in the background.) Mom (Erni Mangold) is cold and Dad (Alexander Allerson) holds the wallet, the laborer (Vitus Zeplichal) builds them a home and they're proud for two weeks, "then everything was the same as before." A wedding is a joyous occasion stopped short, a flat in Munich with the missus (Elke Aberle) is the dream. At the boss' office the camera peers out the window for a slow dolly zoom on construction cranes against an overcast sky, the muted dread of overtime work and debt is like that, "a heavy feeling." A low income collides with the pathological need to be loved, the husband has the nervous wife fitted into a dress they can't afford in a note adduced from Ray's Bigger Than Life, champagne and gold bracelets follow. The crackup comes softly, one simply does not get on the train when it pulls into the station. After Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? and The Merchant of Four Seasons, the Bavarian Schnauzer in human form, it bites at last. Separated in mirror reflections or effaced behind frosted glass, the working-class couple in a fierce, delicate, compassionate portrait. The paternal doppelgänger gets it in the end, a freeze-frame further entraps the prisoner. "Yes, money makes money." Kurosawa's analysis in Tokyo Sonata displays a rare understanding. With Johanna Hofer, Wolfgang Hess, and Erika Runge.
--- Fernando F. Croce |