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Between East and West, between Greene and Le Carré. Divided Berlin, rubble and snow, rather exciting terrain for the London schoolteacher (Claire Bloom) visiting her army-doctor brother (Geoffrey Toone). "Next time, ride a rollercoaster." The sister-in-law (Hildegard Knef) is the solitary unsmiling face at a clown show, it has to do with the furtive fellow in the wings. A former law student and doleful participant in Nazi atrocities, a husband returned from the dead and an operative looking for a way out, the melancholy James Mason elegance in full bloom. The "international incident" at hand is a bungled kidnapping, atonement is the mirage beyond the border. "In my honor, why not tell the truth?" "The truth passed me by a long time ago." A pendant to The Third Man with elements from Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol, Carol Reed's acerbic camera suspended between location vérité and tilted expressionism. Ambiguous circles rather than straight lines for postwar morality, couples looping in waltz halls and ice rinks, round and round with the enigmatic bicycling juvenile (Dieter Krause). The abduction is orchestrated through the frosted windshield of a Volkswagen, billboards of mighty mustaches and goatees adorn the eastern sector: "Es Lebe der Grosse Stalin der Bannerträger des Weltfrieden." Escape on opera night, searchlights on a construction site's skeletal grids. Her naïve gaze skewered by Knef's Teutonic weariness ("There isn't a great difference between our ages... but there's a hundred years between the ways we've lived"), Bloom must pose as a cig-dangling demimondaine to throw off Stasi guards. The coda is not the fixed frame of ironic Vienna but a despairing reverse track in a frozen city. "The girl will only make trouble for you." "I am used to trouble." Repercussions arise for Torn Curtain and The Quiller Memorandum. Cinematography by Desmond Dickinson. With Aribert Wäscher, Ernst Schröder, Hilde Sessak, Karl John, and Ljuba Welitsch. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |