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Beethoven unto gunfire states the brutal situation, a devolution clinched with a Paul Anka ballad in the credits ("Our love is... verboten"). Samuel Fuller paints the Teutonic village at the very end of the war with swift strokes, the American sergeant shot in the ass (James Best) falls in the rubble before the doleful fräulein (Susan Cummings), between them hangs a Hitler portrait. "I will show you there is a difference between a Nazi and a German." A divided nation is perilous terrain for a generation "raised on hate," the cause of the Reich is taken up by "fearless delinquents" who call themselves "The Werewolves" but turn out to be rabid cubs in a boxcar. The returning soldier (Tom Pittman) runs the underground group with ruthless insolence and recycled rhetoric, the heroine's younger brother (Harold Daye) joins him, "Ride of the Valkyries" underscores their depredations. Amid black markets and conflagrations, the "blood transfusion" of the Occupation. "We're not here as liberators! We're here as conquerors, and don't you forget it!" Fuller's Germany Year Zero, a moral tempest whipped up with a couple of shabby sets and stitched newsreel footage. A toxic family matter, the Hitlerjugend, a frenzied legacy examined in extended, unblinking takes. Scrawled slogans ("Democracy on empty stomachs," "Go home lying Yank") predict Godard's agitprop staging in La Chinoise, elsewhere a memory freezes and superimposes the image in a layered effect. The medium itself points the way, thus a stopover in Nuremberg for documented horror—the fallen regime's Nacht und Nebel laid bare on a flickering screen provide the shock needed to break the trance. "Cinéma direct," declares Truffaut in his review, admitting admiration and jealousy. With Paul Dubov, Dick Kallman, Stuart Randall, Steven Geray, Anna Hope, Sasha Harden, Paul Busch, Neyle Morrow, and Joe Turkel. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |