|
For Germany and the warped double, a remembrance and a confession. Peter Lorre, who learned much from Lang and even more from Brecht, opens with a stark composition (looming gray sky, silhouettes, train smoke) twice revisited with variations. As the physician administering vaccinations in a cramped refugee camp, his eyes seldom evinced more weariness and rue. "The past years have left their mark," the new assistant and the old Gestapo colleague are one and the same (Karl John), one night of cigarettes and schnapps unearths plenty of memories. Back in 1943, the doctor used to study bacteria until his mind was unmoored by the fiancée (Renate Mannhardt) who leaked top-secret data to the enemy. His hands idly caress the maiden's neck, and soon enough the State has swept the strangulation under the rug. "From murder to murder, and nobody asks anything..." In a regime of mass killings, why stop with one death? "Debts must be paid" in Lorre's solitary, singular directorial effort, a tour of despairing psyches shot through flashes of expressionism. Spiraling staircases and sweltering subways, the bombed-out building tagged "home," Destiny as the locomotive with the last word. (A plot to assassinate Hitler pops up only to be readily curtailed, a dash of modernist disregard for the noir mystery of "grown-ups playing hide and seek.") Bonnard domestic interiors and dark alleys half-illuminated by the unbalanced moon that is the protagonist, a visage so death-scented that a glimpse is enough to reduce a seasoned streetwalker to shrieks (cf. Siodmak's The Devil Strikes at Night). An indelible mélange of irony and vulnerability, a meditation from the sensitive artist personally acquainted with the façades of terror. With Helmuth Rudolph, Johanna Hofer, Eva Ingeborg Scholz, Lotte Rausch, and Gisela Trowe. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |