In working through the films of Stephen Soderbergh, I’ve been dawdling on watching THE GOOD GERMAN (2006) because I’d confused it with The Reader, which was good but nothing I particularly wanted to rewatch. Nope, it’s an entirely different film.
George Clooney plays Jake Geisner, a reporter who arrives in post-WW II Berlin, bombed out and under Allied occupation (divided into a Russian, French, English and American zone). Officially Jake’s there to write; unofficially he’s there to find his former girlfriend, Lena (Kate Winslett), a German Jew. By coincidence, she’s sleeping with Tully (Tobey Maguire), Jake’s military driver, a black marketeer who’s trying to pull enough strings to get Lena papers so he can take her out of Berlin. Then Tully ends up shot dead in the Russian zone. Is Lena in danger? Can Jake save her?
The film is a visual treat, done in the style of a 1940s Warner Brothers thriller from the opening credits through the Casablanca ending. In its own right, though, it’s an unsatisfying film — Soderbergh knows the music but he can’t quite play it. The acting feels self-conscious and the story (involving America’s efforts to smuggle Nazi scientists into the US) doesn’t have enough drama. “Driving to work, he killed more people than Al Capone in Chicago.”
That led me to rewatch a couple of movies from my sizable recorded-off-the-air collection. In Billy Wilder’s A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948) it’s Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur) who’s arriving in Berlin as part of a fact-finding commission. She’s shocked to discover American soldiers are dabbling in the black market and fraternizing with the local frauleins, despite Col. Plummer (Millard Mitchell) insisting it’s only to be expected (“You can’t pin a sergeant’s stripes on an angel.”).
When Frost learns one soldier is keeping Erika (Marlene Dietrich), a nightclub singer and Nazi wife, she recruits Captain Pringle (John Lund) to help find the man … which he could do just by looking in a mirror (you probably guessed that). He decides the best way to fend off Frost’s investigation is to romance her but damned if he doesn’t start falling for her for real (you probably guessed that too). The result is an odd mix of noirish cynicism and screwball romance that didn’t work as well for me as it did when I first saw it. However that may have been my mood more than anything. “There are 12,000 of our boys policing that pest-hole down there and if reports are accurate, they’re being infested by a moral malaria.”
BERLIN EXPRESS (1948) reminds me of the WW II trope where the mixed-ethnicity platoon (the Texan, the Italian American, the Irish American, the guy from Brooklyn …) must unite to become an effective fighting force. Here representatives of the Allied powers (including Robert Ryan as the Yank and Merle Oberon as a French woman) must work together when a cadre of leftover Nazis kidnaps Paul Lukas, the French diplomat who might be the one man who can reunite postwar Germany’s factions (the idea of The One Man Who Can Bring Peace is a trope with a long history, as in Hitchcock’s Man Who Knew Too Much). Can the good guys overcome their mutual antagonisms to succeed? The film is very much a product of its time, conscious the window to build a more peaceful post-war world is ebbing but hopeful it’s not completely shut (sigh). A solid little thriller directed by Jacques Tournier. “Some day my people will understand that peace is also a crisis — and then you will be done.”
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