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Speaker 2: Oh geez bolts, it's showtime.
Speaker 3: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 4: When they go out to a theater, they want clothed sodas,
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Speaker 5: Ut it off.
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Speaker 1: Let's go.
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Speaker 1: Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White
Speaker 1: joined me once again as mister Andrew Nettie.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Also back in the booth is Ms Sam Digan. Hello,
Speaker 1: we continue November twenty twenty five with a look at
Speaker 1: Helmut With a look at Helmut Koitner's film Black Gravel.
Speaker 1: The film tells the story of a city outside of
Speaker 1: a US military base in Germany, where Robert Neihardt played
Speaker 1: by Helmut Wilt, is a black marketeer who runs into
Speaker 1: an old flame inga played by ingmar Zeisberg, who is
Speaker 1: now married to a major on the base. The film
Speaker 1: explores people on the fringes and a dark, gripping tale
Speaker 1: that the Oberhausen critics called the worst achievement by an
Speaker 1: established director in nineteen sixty one. We will be spoiling
Speaker 1: this film as we go along, So if you don't
Speaker 1: want anything ruined, to turn off the podcast and come
Speaker 1: back after you've seen the movie. Maybe just take a
Speaker 1: break afterwards, try to get out of a depressed funk
Speaker 1: that you'll be in after you see this movie. We'll
Speaker 1: still be here, We'll hold your hands, We'll give you
Speaker 1: a hug. You're probably going to need it. Andrew, when
Speaker 1: was the first time you saw Black Gravel? And what
Speaker 1: did you think?
Speaker 2: Our first one to say the ober hous And critics
Speaker 2: can go and get their fucking shinebox on this one,
Speaker 2: because this is an absolute knockout film. I think I
Speaker 2: first saw it when Radiance released it as part of
Speaker 2: a World Noir box set. I mean, I'm living in
Speaker 2: Berlin at the moment, and I was planning on my
Speaker 2: move to Berlin, and I was starting to try and
Speaker 2: watch more German cinema, particularly more German crime cinema, and
Speaker 2: I'd sort of watched a few earlier films, which we
Speaker 2: can talk about that later, in the sort of immediate
Speaker 2: nineteen forties nineteen fifties, and I was really impressed by
Speaker 2: this film. So it takes place in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 2: so it's not a it's not a Troman film, it's
Speaker 2: not a rubble film, and it's not an early sort
Speaker 2: of German postwar noir. It's set in the early nineteen
Speaker 2: sixties when the economy is starting to take off and
Speaker 2: technically things are going really well, but everyone's still incredibly
Speaker 2: miserable and living under the threat of nuclear war. And
Speaker 2: it's such a pitch black, per effect noir that I
Speaker 2: just I was absolutely flawed, Yeah, absolutely flawed by this film.
Speaker 2: And I mean later on I sort of realized that Carltner,
Speaker 2: Bernard sorry, Helmet Cartner, the director, he had a complicated
Speaker 2: history and there were complicated politics around him and Germany,
Speaker 2: but he really knocked it out of the park with
Speaker 2: this one. And it's still really really unknown. I mean,
Speaker 2: I even talked to people here in Berlin in Germany
Speaker 2: who pride themselves on having having had a really good
Speaker 2: expanse of knowledge about crime cinema and German cina in particular,
Speaker 2: and very few of them have seen Black Gravel. It's
Speaker 2: a terrific film. I'm I'm incredibly impressed by it, and
Speaker 2: I think this is the fourth watch I've done on
Speaker 2: it for the Projection booth, and I still found it fascinating.
Speaker 1: And Sam, how about yourself.
Speaker 8: I actually watched it for the first time for this
Speaker 8: episode because, like Andrew pointed out, it really falls in
Speaker 8: this kind of in between zone. So if you're somebody
Speaker 8: like me who's written a lot about World War Two
Speaker 8: era German cinema, cinema in the forties, which are those
Speaker 8: rubble films, or that's the period when those rubble films fall,
Speaker 8: like up to the very early fifties, and I've also
Speaker 8: written a lot about New German cinema which starts after this.
Speaker 8: So this in between zone is kind of uncharted territory
Speaker 8: for me. But this is just amazing, like he said,
Speaker 8: pitch black, but also so incredibly beautiful, like the shot composition,
Speaker 8: the really incredible kind of expressionistic lighting, the bar sequences,
Speaker 8: Like there's nothing about this that I didn't love.
Speaker 1: I just love how well this story comes together, and
Speaker 1: that I mean, the metaphors play throughout so much of this.
Speaker 1: I mean, we begin this movie with the death of
Speaker 1: a dog and bearing that dog under this square. The
Speaker 1: murder of a dog, murder of a dog. Yes, and
Speaker 1: don't worry, folks, it's not a real dog. It's pretty
Speaker 1: obvious that it's a big stuffed animal type of thing
Speaker 1: when they throw it into the pit and you can
Speaker 1: see when it's laying there with the rock next to it,
Speaker 1: you can see the dog's eyes moving, so it's just
Speaker 1: laying there. It's a well trained dog. Don't sweat it it,
Speaker 1: you know, you hear the little yelping things, which is
Speaker 1: always rough for anybody who cares anything about animals. But yes,
Speaker 1: there is a dog quote unquote death at the beginning
Speaker 1: of this, but don't sweat it. But that goes through
Speaker 1: this whole movie and just plays so well with this,
Speaker 1: this whole idea of who knows that the dog is dead,
Speaker 1: that our main character has the collar from the dog.
Speaker 1: He kind of uses that to parlay back into the
Speaker 1: life of this former flame of his who shows up.
Speaker 1: He just kind of happens upon her on the road.
Speaker 1: She and her husband, this major are broken down, This
Speaker 1: whole idea of bearing things, bearing the past, the big
Speaker 1: pit that they have at this air base where they
Speaker 1: throw all of these things in here. I mean, it
Speaker 1: just plays so well into everything when it comes to
Speaker 1: the murder, or well, it's not even a murder later on,
Speaker 1: it's more of an accident that happens and really could
Speaker 1: have been avoided as far as some of the badness
Speaker 1: that goes on in this movie, but it just keeps
Speaker 1: getting worse and worse and worse. I mean, it's that
Speaker 1: whole thing that we talk about with film noir, and
Speaker 1: I keep wondering, like, is this a true film noir?
Speaker 1: Is this out of the date range? I don't really care.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to split hairs when it comes to this.
Speaker 1: It's so dark and there's so many bad things that happen,
Speaker 1: and it does fall into that whole idea of You're
Speaker 1: fucked at the beginning of it, You're even more fucked
Speaker 1: at the.
Speaker 4: End of it.
Speaker 1: And the end of this movie is incredibly dark, though
Speaker 1: not the release version, which just you know, kind of
Speaker 1: ends our main character driving out into the fog. We
Speaker 1: don't see what happens with inga. Yeah, everything's fine, but
Speaker 1: we'll definitely talk about those different versions of this as
Speaker 1: we go along. But yeah, I love how the Dog
Speaker 1: plays through this whole thing and just keeps coming back,
Speaker 1: and the idea of these secrets from the past. I mean,
Speaker 1: we were talking about Germany nineteen sixty one. We're talking
Speaker 1: about a occupation by the Americans inside of Germany. What
Speaker 1: this movie reminded me so much of was the Japanese
Speaker 1: films like Pigs and Battleships or even like The battles
Speaker 1: Without Honor Humanity. This whole idea of the occupying force
Speaker 1: of the Americans in the countries that they fought in
Speaker 1: World War Two, and just the muck that they make
Speaker 1: of everything.
Speaker 8: It's one of those openings where I first assumed that
Speaker 8: killing the Dog would just be kind of setting a
Speaker 8: really downbeat tone, but the fact that the dog keeps
Speaker 8: coming back and the way that the gravel that the
Speaker 8: main character is essentially stealing and selling on the black market.
Speaker 8: The way that that also functions in the plot, like
Speaker 8: the script is just brilliant, Like they thought everything through.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a bit like a Swiss watch, a well
Speaker 2: made Swiss watch, isn't it. The whole thing links together?
Speaker 2: What I going back to those comments, and I was
Speaker 2: thinking about other films because I mean, I remember I
Speaker 2: watched The Lost One nineteen fifty one. Yeah, with that, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Peter Laurey's only directorial, only directorial outing. There's another really
Speaker 2: good one by a director called Wolfgang Starter called The
Speaker 2: Murderers Are amongst Us That was nineteen forty.
Speaker 9: Six, a great one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then Roses for the Prosecutor nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 2: and they all deal I mean, actually Roses for the
Speaker 2: Prosecutors a bit later, but those earlier ones they deal with.
Speaker 2: You know, Germany has just been completely smashed to pieces.
Speaker 2: It's everyone's traumatized. You know. What usually happens is that
Speaker 2: someone will bump but you can't get away from it.
Speaker 2: And someone will bump into someone on the street who
Speaker 2: they've either witnessed do something terror the war, or they
Speaker 2: might have done an atrocity with or just something horrific
Speaker 2: in the war that they're trying to sort of escape from,
Speaker 2: and this chance encounter leads them, leads them back into
Speaker 2: an association and a whole of things. They just don't
Speaker 2: want to have to deal with that. As you say,
Speaker 2: they're sort of bearing, and I think in a sense
Speaker 2: Black Gravel is very much like that. So there's this
Speaker 2: is Robert the truck driver who's got this And I
Speaker 2: love the way that Cartner sort of sketches these character
Speaker 2: backstories very gently. Like Roberts, he's driving gravel as part
Speaker 2: of this big expansion of a US airstrip on this
Speaker 2: US air base, and they're also, of course there's this
Speaker 2: whole black market trade in the gravel. He's been a pow,
Speaker 2: has been a soldier who was wounded in the war.
Speaker 2: You don't really find out a lot about it. He's
Speaker 2: on a road one night, stops at this car and
Speaker 2: this car is driven by this American major, and he
Speaker 2: discovers that the American major's German wife, as you say,
Speaker 2: is Inger, who again very lightly sketched background. She was
Speaker 2: I think a prostitute during the you know, in the
Speaker 2: immediate post war period, although it's not really clear, but
Speaker 2: there's some dark things in her life, and she's married
Speaker 2: this American and Inga and Robert used to have this relationship.
Speaker 2: Then they basically they've drifted apart. Now they've met each
Speaker 2: other again on this road outside this US air base
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty one. And technically everyone should be happy
Speaker 2: because the worst of that fifties period is behind it.
Speaker 2: It's stable, the economy is starting to take off. We've
Speaker 2: comrade out Ardenauer, who's does you know, arch conservative Chancellor
Speaker 2: of Germany has done a good job of bearing any
Speaker 2: kind of effort to hunt down Nazis.
Speaker 9: Yeah, to his own benefit.
Speaker 2: That's another thing that's buried in this film. You know,
Speaker 2: that's another thing that's been bare it in Germany. So
Speaker 2: and things, and we've forgotten the war quote unquote, and
Speaker 2: things are moving forward, but of course you can't forget it.
Speaker 2: And there's all these new things that are at play here,
Speaker 2: these new alienations, the fact that we're still not happy,
Speaker 2: we're still miserable, that the occupation. We're really fucking shitty
Speaker 2: with these occupiers, the fact that we rely on them
Speaker 2: for money and they rely on us for alcohol, sex,
Speaker 2: and entertainment and we hate this relationship. And also this
Speaker 2: thing which you really noticed throughout the film, this constant
Speaker 2: roar of fighter jets from the nearby US air base,
Speaker 2: which is even when I think one scene where Robert
Speaker 2: and Inger are having sex for the first time after
Speaker 2: this very difficult period, sort of meeting each other again
Speaker 2: and she wants to stay with the American and he
Speaker 2: wants to sort of sleep with her, and they basically
Speaker 2: make love again, and you can hear the jets going
Speaker 2: overhead the entire time, and it's like this threat. So
Speaker 2: they've just come out of one war and they're just
Speaker 2: about to be another war potentially, and this war will
Speaker 2: be even more potentially devastating. And I mean, of course,
Speaker 2: this is happening at a time when, as you say,
Speaker 2: and as I say, Ardenow has taken over, he's in charge,
Speaker 2: he's it's all on board with fighting communism. The Nazis
Speaker 2: aren't the enemy anymore, it's the Communists. And I think
Speaker 2: Ardenow has just agreed to place nuclear weapons on German soil,
Speaker 2: so there's also that going on. So it's it's really
Speaker 2: it's it takes those earlier tropes from those earlier German Noirs,
Speaker 2: but it sort of gives them this early sixties makeover
Speaker 2: that I just love.
Speaker 8: I found it really fascinating to watch a film where
Speaker 8: the Cold War is so central, but like it's not
Speaker 8: what you would think of as a more traditional Cold
Speaker 8: War film, Like we have American military personnel, and we
Speaker 8: do have a CIA agent, but the whole thing is
Speaker 8: this tormented, romantic melodrama. And you know, as we keep
Speaker 8: saying noir or at least kind of post noir, but
Speaker 8: the fact that we're seeing how the Cold War in
Speaker 8: process is affecting these working class, everyday people and they're
Speaker 8: not spies the main characters, They're just people trying to survive.
Speaker 8: I think that was maybe my favorite part of this,
Speaker 8: is like how present the political themes are without being
Speaker 8: super central to the narrative in more obvious ways.
Speaker 2: It's the texture, the way that count my textures so
Speaker 2: much stuff. I mean, we'll get on shore, we'll get
Speaker 2: onto the claims about anti Semitism in the film and
Speaker 2: all of that, but the way that he just liars
Speaker 2: all this alienation and depression and tension that's in German
Speaker 2: society without having to construct these big, ornate signposts, you know,
Speaker 2: it's just their going through the film, every single fiber
Speaker 2: of the film.
Speaker 8: The fatalism, it's just sort of from the top down,
Speaker 8: like from the dog being killed to the discussion of
Speaker 8: bringing the warheads in, and the fact that like even
Speaker 8: the American character, the husband is not like he has
Speaker 8: some conventional kind of American stereotypes, but like even he
Speaker 8: isn't really happy either. He seems to love his wife,
Speaker 8: but spends a lot of his screen time talking about
Speaker 8: how dealing with the military is a pain in the
Speaker 8: ass and he wants to get transferred, and like, it's
Speaker 8: not a surprise that this movie got a little bit
Speaker 8: of a censorship slap back, because it's really confrontational, especially
Speaker 8: from a director who's mostly known for making like mainstream
Speaker 8: literary adaptations and that kind of cinema of quality stuff
Speaker 8: that the new Wave was always complaining about.
Speaker 1: It so reminds me sam of when we're talking about
Speaker 1: Jean Pierre Melville and just the way that the young
Speaker 1: Turks kept slapping down like, oh no, we distance ourselves,
Speaker 1: like that's you know, Melville, Renois, any of these great
Speaker 1: filmmakers where they're just like, no, no, that's old fashion.
Speaker 1: Now we're the new flavor. You should be paying attention
Speaker 1: to us, and these oberhusing critics just basically doing the
Speaker 1: same thing. It's like, oh, Quitner, he's been making movies
Speaker 1: since the forties. Ah, forget this guy. He's got nothing
Speaker 1: to say. And I know Quitner was also kind of
Speaker 1: hurting from he went over to the US, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of all like Old Fools and Renoir and these
Speaker 1: guys made two movies over there. I think he had
Speaker 1: a three picture contract, but he never finished up the
Speaker 1: third picture. I think he did not have a good
Speaker 1: time when he went to the US. And this might
Speaker 1: be yeah, exactly, especially these I did.
Speaker 2: I did, but that was ten years ago, but you
Speaker 2: were on vacation.
Speaker 1: But you know, he comes back and then this is
Speaker 1: one of the first movies that he makes, is Black Gravel,
Speaker 1: And yeah, the anti American sentiment that goes through this
Speaker 1: is you know, palatable, and I kind of love it.
Speaker 1: And yeah, the whole idea of major gains. He just
Speaker 1: seems to want inga as arm candy at these different
Speaker 1: events that he has to go to and uses what
Speaker 1: becomes the mystery. I suppose the murder, the accident that
Speaker 1: happens uses that whole cover up as a basically a
Speaker 1: bargaining chip with inga to be like, Okay, this didn't happen,
Speaker 1: and you're never going to mention this again, and you're
Speaker 1: going to just settle down with me and I don't
Speaker 1: want to hear any mention of this Robert character and
Speaker 1: just lays it all out like you are now in
Speaker 1: debt to me, like I have the keys to your future.
Speaker 1: So you better just like you know, straighten up and
Speaker 1: fly right, because now you're my property like you were
Speaker 1: my property before. You know, you're playing the great housewife.
Speaker 1: You're putting together all of the stuff in our apartment,
Speaker 1: the same apartment that looks the same as all of
Speaker 1: the other apartments on this Air Force base. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you better start playing by Marie Roles now, and really
Speaker 1: shows his true colors at that moment in the film,
Speaker 1: very late in the film, because before he's kind of
Speaker 1: like the benign like, oh, don't tell the major and
Speaker 1: we're going to go behind his back and he's not
Speaker 1: going to mind any of this stuff. He's never going
Speaker 1: to find out. Don't ask, don't tell, as they say
Speaker 1: in some military circles. And then boom, once that happens
Speaker 1: when she admits what is going on. Then he's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this is my opportunity.
Speaker 8: That part of it is crazy, especially because of how
Speaker 8: benign he seems. It also ties back into these discussions
Speaker 8: that Robert and Inga have where Robert says to her,
Speaker 8: this is just a different form of prostitution, like you
Speaker 8: are selling yourself to him for economic security and comfort.
Speaker 8: And I'm guessing that that probably was not a popular
Speaker 8: take in the early sixties, with its very kind of
Speaker 8: anti marriage sentiment and the fact that to me, their
Speaker 8: relationship as a married couple starts to kind of hinge
Speaker 8: on this scene where she comes home. They've been to
Speaker 8: this party where he gets really drunk and they're playing
Speaker 8: these ridiculous war games. But there's this really kind of
Speaker 8: depressing sequence where they're both drunkenly getting ready for bed,
Speaker 8: and she's looking at herself in the mirror taking off
Speaker 8: her makeup in a parallel to a scene of Robert
Speaker 8: doing the same exact thing. It's that sort of classic
Speaker 8: film noir looking at yourself in the mirror, questioning everything
Speaker 8: about your life, choices, and about who you are as
Speaker 8: a person. But while she's getting ready, on the verge
Speaker 8: of tears. He's going off on this whole monologue that
Speaker 8: makes it very clear that he is just talking at
Speaker 8: her and she's just kind of this body who's there
Speaker 8: as a wife, and he's not actually expecting any kind
Speaker 8: of conversational response, doesn't care what she thinks. She's just
Speaker 8: like a placeholder. And I think it's interesting how though
Speaker 8: he does seem so benign, you can start to see
Speaker 8: little signs of the shift in their relationship, or maybe
Speaker 8: not the shift, but like the truth of their relationship
Speaker 8: build in the second half of the film.
Speaker 1: So much of this movie is about artifice. I mean,
Speaker 1: the idea of the Robert has well, he's got his place,
Speaker 1: which is above a brothel, and he's got that great
Speaker 1: bedroom where he's got the poster and I don't know
Speaker 1: who that poster is of. It almost looks like Brigite
Speaker 1: Bardoux or somebody. But he's got so good above his bed.
Speaker 1: He basically kind of lives with Ellie, who's a prostitute.
Speaker 1: But he's got this hideaway that he tricks inga into
Speaker 1: coming to later on, and that's filled. It almost feels
Speaker 1: like a clubhouse or something. He's got all these posters,
Speaker 1: he's got this looks like a movie poster with a
Speaker 1: cowboy on it. He's got this Quincy Jones thing. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to remember. There's another musician that he's got kind
Speaker 1: of poster of there as well. But he's got this
Speaker 1: fake church that's outside, and he says that he painted
Speaker 1: it from a calendar. He just like likes this thing,
Speaker 1: and that so reminds me of the other church that
Speaker 1: is in here. There's a church scene where the priest
Speaker 1: is talking about Columbus and discovery and all these things.
Speaker 1: And at the end of that scene you see that
Speaker 1: the church is a multipurpose church that the altar turns
Speaker 1: around for the Protestant ceremony that's about to take place.
Speaker 1: They've got the Catholic version and then the Protestant version,
Speaker 1: and it's all just on like a I believe Sam.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of a lazy Susan the way that
Speaker 1: it turns there. I don't know if you've ever seen
Speaker 1: a lazy Susan.
Speaker 9: Now, please please describe one.
Speaker 1: I can tell you all about that, or you can
Speaker 1: watch the commentary for Black Emmanuel and find out all
Speaker 1: about a lazy Susan. But yeah, I love this whole
Speaker 1: idea of like how fick everything is that it is
Speaker 1: just an image like a front of a church, or
Speaker 1: it's the image of the altar that just switches around
Speaker 1: when you need it to.
Speaker 2: Everything in this film, though, every every relationship in this
Speaker 2: film though, is transactional. That's one of the most incredibly
Speaker 2: dark things about it is that everyone is out for something.
Speaker 2: Everyone is trying to chisel something out of someone Everyone
Speaker 2: is using someone else, and Robert and Inger are doing
Speaker 2: that as well, and the Americans doing it. And then
Speaker 2: there's the on the meta analysis, the American government are
Speaker 2: doing it to the German government, and also the German
Speaker 2: government to getting something out of it as well because
Speaker 2: they're getting money and they think they're getting security and
Speaker 2: US protection. So everyone is getting something out of this
Speaker 2: and there's there's so many I mean, I was thinking
Speaker 2: about this film and the film that it really remind
Speaker 2: me of. There are no similarities at all about in
Speaker 2: terms of plots or content, but this film so it
Speaker 2: got embroiled in I think up from the perspective of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five are completely put up anti antisemitism, claims
Speaker 2: of antisemitism, But there are so many aspects of this
Speaker 2: film that I when I watched it, I think I
Speaker 2: could have been banned for that. It could have been
Speaker 2: banned for that. It could have been banned for that,
Speaker 2: like the sex in it, and the depiction of sex
Speaker 2: and the whole is just amazing. And the film it
Speaker 2: reminds me of is Wake in Fright so by Ted
Speaker 2: Kotschoff in nineteen seventy one, which bombed really badly in
Speaker 2: Australia and Australians. That was not an image of Australia
Speaker 2: that anyone in Australia wanted to see in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2: And I think it's similar with Black Gravel. You know,
Speaker 2: no one in Germany wanted to see this caustic depiction
Speaker 2: of Germans based having this cynical transactional relationship with each other,
Speaker 2: selling themselves to the Americans for money, the anti Semitism
Speaker 2: aspects of it, the reliance on this US base that
Speaker 2: this small German town has none of it is jives
Speaker 2: with where Conrad Ardenauer and the you know, the German
Speaker 2: economic miracle is going in nineteen sixty one. So there's
Speaker 2: so many levels of which it could have been banned.
Speaker 9: I think, oh, it seems inevitable.
Speaker 2: I mean that whole character. She doesn't get a huge
Speaker 2: looking But so Robert has got this wants to rekindle
Speaker 2: this thing with Inger, but he's also got this existing
Speaker 2: relationship with this prostitute at the Atlantic, which is the
Speaker 2: kind of bar coum brothel that he lives on top of.
Speaker 2: And I was struck watching it this time. When so
Speaker 2: when Robert stops on the roadside and sees the Major's
Speaker 2: car has broken down, and he thinks, I can I
Speaker 2: can make a quick ten bucks from this. I'll agree
Speaker 2: to toe it into town for ten dollars. And then
Speaker 2: and he realizes christ this the Major is married to
Speaker 2: this woman. I had a major thing with Inger how
Speaker 2: many years agoing On and Inger and Robert, and Inger
Speaker 2: basically says, so he tows the car, and Inger basically says, look,
Speaker 2: do you mind if I ride in the front with
Speaker 2: Roberts and Robert and Inger are in the front of
Speaker 2: Robert's truck and in between them is this drunk prostitute Inger,
Speaker 2: and she's just completely she's sort of slumping all over
Speaker 2: the place. And they actually have the first serious conversation
Speaker 2: that they have in how many years with Ellie slumped
Speaker 2: on Inger's shoulder and Robert just saying, I don't worry
Speaker 2: about her. She's you know, she's she's used to this.
Speaker 2: Don't don't, don't don't you know it's so caustic.
Speaker 9: And dark, or Ellie.
Speaker 8: This definitely reminds me of this period that I think
Speaker 8: comes So if you think about traditional film noir as
Speaker 8: ending in like nineteen fifty seven, nineteen fifty eight, nineteen
Speaker 8: fifty nine, there are kind of this wave of movies
Speaker 8: that come in the late fifties to the mid sixties
Speaker 8: that all do kind of similar things to Black Gravel,
Speaker 8: and how the sexuality is depicted, like a lot of
Speaker 8: those Robert Hossain movies in France, You've got things like
Speaker 8: Private Property in the US, which seems like all of
Speaker 8: a sudden they're ramping the sexuality up. And I know
Speaker 8: that you see it in horror movies too, where there's
Speaker 8: suddenly more nudity and the suggestion of even with something
Speaker 8: like Psycho, the suggestion of someone.
Speaker 9: Being naked in the shower.
Speaker 8: The way that all of those movies use the sexuality
Speaker 8: as something that's transactional, I think is especially grim. And
Speaker 8: here you just feel so bad for her because everyone
Speaker 8: treats her the same, and for a while, I think,
Speaker 8: kind of like the military husband, she's this benign, sort
Speaker 8: of benign figure in the background, where like we don't
Speaker 8: see too much of her having outbursts. But in the
Speaker 8: second half of the movie, when she tries to make
Speaker 8: him jealous and talks about how she's gonna go to
Speaker 8: Canada with this other guy who no one in the
Speaker 8: movie likes this other guy because he's kind of a weasel,
Speaker 8: And she talks about this other guy like, you know,
Speaker 8: there's just something different about him. But it's kind of
Speaker 8: an echo of Inga's relationship with her husband, where it's like,
Speaker 8: I'm gonna get together with this person because they can
Speaker 8: offer me some financial stability and get me out of
Speaker 8: this bad situation. And so I think you can also
Speaker 8: see these kinds of relationships echoing in the patterns of
Speaker 8: each other. But we haven't talked yet about the people.
Speaker 9: Who get killed in the movie. Is this couple.
Speaker 8: It's a young soul and his even younger a young
Speaker 8: American soldier and his even younger German girlfriend who everyone
Speaker 8: around them acknowledges like they are genuinely in love and
Speaker 8: trying to get married and this one relationship is maybe
Speaker 8: not transactional, and so because it isn't, there's the implication
Speaker 8: that their petition to get a marriage license, which was
Speaker 8: something that you actually had to apply for if you
Speaker 8: were an American soldier working on a base in an
Speaker 8: occupied territory. Same deal in Japan. You learn later on
Speaker 8: that their marriage application was going to be denied.
Speaker 9: And it's like, why why.
Speaker 8: Is this universe so hostile to the two people who
Speaker 8: are genuinely in love.
Speaker 1: Their moment in the car when Robert sees them and
Speaker 1: comes up and I guess he's been talking about fixing
Speaker 1: Bill's cars. Bill and Annie. I think it is when
Speaker 1: he's been talking about fixing Bill's car, and that becomes
Speaker 1: a little bit of a plot point later after this
Speaker 1: terrible accident, and like I said, it's not a murder.
Speaker 5: They are.
Speaker 1: Robert is stealing some gravel from the work site, which
Speaker 1: he continuously does. He's kind of a black marketeer. And
Speaker 1: the other guy that you were talking about that is
Speaker 1: going to go to Canada with Ellie, he's his partner.
Speaker 1: He's Robert's partner, and this whole thing. He is the
Speaker 1: one who can stamp the book and basically like fix
Speaker 1: the papers and do all this stuff so they can
Speaker 1: take this gravel off and sell it for their profit.
Speaker 1: And they're just continuously like siphoning off a little bit.
Speaker 1: You know, they're good fellas. They're just make a little
Speaker 1: couple extra bucks in the side kind of thing, like
Speaker 1: that's their life. And Robert is just continuously a scoff law.
Speaker 1: He's going to do whatever he needs to do in
Speaker 1: order to make a few bucks. And at one point
Speaker 1: Inga finds out, oh, there's going to be a basically
Speaker 1: a sting operation. They're going to find out more about
Speaker 1: this gravel stuff. They're going to arrest the person that's
Speaker 1: stealing this. So she runs out and manages to track
Speaker 1: down Robert in his truck and saves the day. Hey
Speaker 1: this is you know, something bad is going to happen.
Speaker 1: You need to turn around kind of thing. And as
Speaker 1: they are making this turn, they accidentally kill Annie and Bill,
Speaker 1: who are out on the same road that night listening
Speaker 1: to their transistor radio from Japan, which I love that
Speaker 1: little detail in there, and there's a song playing. What's
Speaker 1: it Fraeulein Schmidt. I think it is to find out
Speaker 1: that Helmut Koitner actually wrote the lyrics to that song,
Speaker 1: which I found to be interesting too.
Speaker 2: That song plays throughout them, It's always playing in the
Speaker 2: Atlantic tu box.
Speaker 1: It haunts them to the point where that's the last
Speaker 1: song that you hear in the in the movie.
Speaker 2: And I love that with the jets going overhead, yes,
Speaker 2: and the.
Speaker 1: Echoing that it does, like this song starts one way
Speaker 1: and starts to begin to echo. But the murder quote
Speaker 1: unquote in this movie is not a murder at all.
Speaker 1: It's an accident. But then it's the biggest thing in
Speaker 1: the world to cover up this accident, and again we're
Speaker 1: going to bury this stuff. We're going to bury them
Speaker 1: under this gravel just so that they're out of the
Speaker 1: way and we don't have to worry about it. And
Speaker 1: then it becomes the whole thing of did they run
Speaker 1: away to East Germany? Did they you know, what's going
Speaker 1: on with this couple? Did they elope? Did they go
Speaker 1: back to America? What's happening with these two? And becomes
Speaker 1: the big mystery of it and just starts to get
Speaker 1: bigger and bigger the more that people don't talk about
Speaker 1: this thing that actually happened, Like they could have come clean.
Speaker 1: It was a simple accident, but nope, we have to
Speaker 1: cover it up.
Speaker 2: Then there's this thing with the Americans going on. There's
Speaker 2: problems with the runway, so we have to get this
Speaker 2: investigation in to find out what's wrong with and they've
Speaker 2: got some sort of sonar thing going on the gravel,
Speaker 2: and then Robert is worried, on god, they're going to
Speaker 2: find the bodies I've buried. And then, as you say,
Speaker 2: when when the major finds out about it, he's then
Speaker 2: worried about out what's going to happen. So the whole
Speaker 2: thing just becomes this draying that everyone circles around, and
Speaker 2: it just gets deeper and deeper and deeper, and they
Speaker 2: all end up having everyone ends up having to compromise themselves,
Speaker 2: you know, around around this murder.
Speaker 8: It's also incredible that it really is three overlapping investigations,
Speaker 8: like the two people who are missing, the runway problems,
Speaker 8: and also the problem of who is stealing this gravel
Speaker 8: and selling it on the black market. It's like they're
Speaker 8: all so intimately connected that it gives you this real
Speaker 8: sense of paranoia as you follow Robert as the protagonist,
Speaker 8: because he's involved with all three of these different investigations
Speaker 8: in a sense, and when people start questioning him, it's
Speaker 8: like he doesn't know which one he should be responding to.
Speaker 8: But I do think it's interesting the way that the
Speaker 8: accident itself based stems from sex. Like the reason that
Speaker 8: Bill and Annie are out in the middle of the
Speaker 8: woods at night in the dark is the implication is
Speaker 8: that they've snuck off to listen to the radio, which
Speaker 8: is pretty strongly implied that they're actually just out there
Speaker 8: having sex.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's an implication. I mean it's I
Speaker 2: think we see.
Speaker 8: That, yeah, I think she yeah, she says to him, no,
Speaker 8: not here. But then hours later they're still in the
Speaker 8: woods and are just starting to leave, so it's like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 8: we we put together what happened. But the fact that
Speaker 8: he hits them because he's starting to kiss inga who's
Speaker 8: finally put her head on his shoulder, it just no
Speaker 8: one can catch a break.
Speaker 2: I agree with what you said earlier too, Sam about
Speaker 2: I think that's something of not in a particularly academic
Speaker 2: or inform way, but just from exposure to watching so
Speaker 2: many of these films. I agree Late Noir so La
Speaker 2: Noir from the sort of late fifties to the early sixties.
Speaker 2: It just takes the gloves off on so many levels
Speaker 2: in a way that you know, even earlier no I
Speaker 2: just doesn't do. And sex is obviously one of the areas,
Speaker 2: the cynicism and the sex late of Late Noire which
Speaker 2: you see, and this film sort of falls into that
Speaker 2: sort of category I think, I mean, because that's the
Speaker 2: and that's the other thing that would have just gone
Speaker 2: down like an absolute lead balloon in Germany in nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: One is this is this notion that so there's this
Speaker 2: big American air base, there's this tiny, peaceful town called Sonnen,
Speaker 2: and it's basically through the expansion of the air base,
Speaker 2: this town has sort of turned into this giant sort
Speaker 2: of R and R brothel. We see German women fraternizing
Speaker 2: with American soldiers all the time. And there's that great
Speaker 2: scene at one point where the father comes into the
Speaker 2: bar of the Atlantic and hauls he finds his daughter
Speaker 2: dancing with the Gei and just hauls are out, basically
Speaker 2: just screaming at her get out of here. You know,
Speaker 2: this is not a place for you. There's this really
Speaker 2: interesting two thousand documentary called Stepping Out, which was basically
Speaker 2: made by this German woman who I haven't met, and
Speaker 2: it was essentially about sort of a semi documentary about
Speaker 2: this woman's erotic forays through US Army clubs and barracks
Speaker 2: in Frankfurt. And this is two thousand and especially especially
Speaker 2: with Black.
Speaker 9: GI, that sounds amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is amazing and absolute outraw that this film
Speaker 2: caused even amongst progressive left wing circles. So it was
Speaker 2: still a hot issue in two thousand, So you can
Speaker 2: imagine what it must have been like to depict this
Speaker 2: in the early nineteen sixties, because it's the Atlantic is
Speaker 2: it's not sort of it's not a brothel, but it's
Speaker 2: kind of a bar where German women and GI's meet
Speaker 2: and obviously dance and also sex is negotiated, and then
Speaker 2: there's rooms on the premises and stuff like that. As
Speaker 2: you sort of say, the Americans are also miserable, Like
Speaker 2: there's all these scenes of the Americans basically sitting in
Speaker 2: the bar just being incredibly depressed about having to be
Speaker 2: in Germany. And it also shows the racial tension in
Speaker 2: the US Army because there's that scene where there's a
Speaker 2: bunch of Black GI sitting at a table in the
Speaker 2: Atlantic and a whole lot of white guys come in
Speaker 2: and see the black guys go and go, Now, let's
Speaker 2: go somewhere else. We don't want to be in a
Speaker 2: bar with these guys.
Speaker 1: So I mean, I'm so glad that you mentioned that,
Speaker 1: because nobody in the reviews of the movie talked about
Speaker 1: that at all. And I was just like, that's a
Speaker 1: huge scene for me, these guys coming in and it's
Speaker 1: all in the background, like we're supposed to be paying
Speaker 1: attention to something else. But you see all those white
Speaker 1: guys come in, see the black guys there, and they're
Speaker 1: just like yep, nope, and they turn around and leave,
Speaker 1: and it's like, yeah, nineteen sixty one, yep.
Speaker 2: Countnor doesn't, as I say, doesn't make it into a
Speaker 2: big it's just woven into the texture. Another thing that's
Speaker 2: just woven into the texture of this film.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: It's interesting to see this as a precursor to some
Speaker 8: of the films that Fastpender would make about a decade
Speaker 8: later that explore similar subject matter, especially his use of
Speaker 8: black American characters and gis, and even with something like
Speaker 8: Pioneers in Ingolstadt, which is all about these sex workers
Speaker 8: who get involved with these soldiers who are there to
Speaker 8: just build a bridge and are also bored and miserable.
Speaker 8: That was transgressive when he made those films in the
Speaker 8: late sixties and into the seventies. And so this coming
Speaker 8: from this like established mainstream director, I bet people's heads
Speaker 8: were exploding.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. And on top of that, I mean, it's
Speaker 2: so it's a bad town noir in the sense that
Speaker 2: it's a it's a town where everything is corrupt, everything
Speaker 2: is facile. It's a truck and noir. You know, it's
Speaker 2: a really it's a it's a great truck on noirt.
Speaker 2: It's interesting with I didn't I didn't get a chance
Speaker 2: to watch all the films, a lot of films by Kautener,
Speaker 2: but I did watch I did watch Port of Freedom. Well,
Speaker 2: how is it look? It's we should say this, So
Speaker 2: I think you were one of you alluded to the
Speaker 2: fact that Kauntner basically stayed in is one of the
Speaker 2: few prominent German directors that stayed in Germany during the Nazis,
Speaker 2: and he made films under the Nazis, And I think
Speaker 2: that was one of the other things that the Oberhausen
Speaker 2: group were kind of eluding, you know.
Speaker 8: I think not not to defend people who stayed. I mean,
Speaker 8: there were people like Paps who did, but I think
Speaker 8: he and perhaps are some of the directors who stayed
Speaker 8: and kept making films that did not they were not
Speaker 8: Nazi propaganda films.
Speaker 2: I was going to say that if you and so
Speaker 2: my understanding is that a lot of a lot of
Speaker 2: Countner's films actually they really pissed off the Nazis. And
Speaker 2: Port of Freedom is in nineteen forty four really bizarre
Speaker 2: film watching it today about this group of what's that
Speaker 2: film where the three American sailors have an R and
Speaker 2: R weekend in New York. You know, Gene Kelly's in it,
Speaker 2: and it's kind of like a downbeat version of that,
Speaker 2: these sailors having they're in Hamburg and there's all these
Speaker 2: amazing scenes of Hamburg nightlife. It's totally bizarre because.
Speaker 1: The town or anchors away.
Speaker 2: I think it's on the town, but there's no mention
Speaker 2: of the war in this entire film. It's less completely zero.
Speaker 2: It's kind of bizarre, and it's there's no sense because
Speaker 2: by nineteen forty four, the Allies had basically reduced Hamburg
Speaker 2: to rubble. So there's no sense. Also that you know,
Speaker 2: most of the town is in ruins, so it's it's
Speaker 2: a really I mean, of course it was made these
Speaker 2: these these films that Count and the made for the
Speaker 2: Nazis or made under the Nazis, were designed to entertain people. Yeah,
Speaker 2: exactly like that. But I'm just saying, in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: it is really weird to watch this film. But that
Speaker 2: really I can't remember his name of but name was,
Speaker 2: but the head of German Germany's navy, Donnits, I think
Speaker 2: his name was Admiral Donnets, complained, I think to Goebels
Speaker 2: personally about this film because he was really pissed off
Speaker 2: about this depiction of these German merchant seamen and this
Speaker 2: loose life in Hamburg and drinking in Hamburg bars and
Speaker 2: like that. He didn't think that. So, as you say, Sam,
Speaker 2: even though Count was staying, he's still making these quite
Speaker 2: subversive films that are also kind of pissing off the
Speaker 2: Nazis as well. But of course all those nuances are
Speaker 2: lost in the sort of the tumult of the sixties
Speaker 2: and the rise of the rise of the New Left,
Speaker 2: and a whole lot of this sort of stuff, you.
Speaker 8: Know, It's so frustrating though, because it's like, yes, you
Speaker 8: don't want to say, sure, I stayed in Germany and
Speaker 8: kept making movies under the Nazis, Like that seems terrible
Speaker 8: for many reasons. But I think the reality is that
Speaker 8: under totalitarianism or fascism, not everyone can leave, not everyone
Speaker 8: can afford to leave. And I think a lot of
Speaker 8: artists and filmmakers and creative people who did leave it
Speaker 8: was sort of a you're damned if you're do, You're
Speaker 8: damned if you do, damned if you don't type of situation.
Speaker 8: And the same thing happened and occupied France, where like
Speaker 8: if someone left later on, they were attacked for leaving
Speaker 8: and not sticking it out and trying to fight. And
Speaker 8: sometimes if people left and went to Hollywood, they just
Speaker 8: had a fucking miserable time. Like I know we talked
Speaker 8: about this a little bit earlier, but when you think
Speaker 8: about the people who returned from the US, like Peter
Speaker 8: Laure making The Lost One in the early fifties, Robert
Speaker 8: syadmac coming back in the late forties, those films were
Speaker 8: so gloomy and miserable, full of all these lonely characters
Speaker 8: who can't find anyone to communicate with. So it's like, yeah,
Speaker 8: maybe politically it's a better move to go to Hollywood,
Speaker 8: but like, is it really a better move?
Speaker 2: And also Countener made I think it's is it sixty
Speaker 2: one films? I think he directed I think sixty one
Speaker 2: films and fifty nine of those as he was also writing.
Speaker 2: And so he's got a huge filmography which I haven't
Speaker 2: even got an even scratched day, and even having nicked
Speaker 2: the surface of it, it's like, so this, you know,
Speaker 2: so this guy, and I mean, so he's canned, and
Speaker 2: he kind of gets lost sort of black gravel, and
Speaker 2: we can talk we should probably talk about the anti
Speaker 2: Semitism stuff. But so black gravel kind of gets buried
Speaker 2: hah in by the critic, by the critics and by
Speaker 2: everyone else. And he goes on to do things, and
Speaker 2: he goes into Cantner, goes on to make TV, and
Speaker 2: he continues his career, but his career and then he's
Speaker 2: what the critics don't sort of bury on black gravel.
Speaker 2: New Germans, the New German cinema are basically saying, oh, look,
Speaker 2: you're an old guy. Now you get out of the way.
Speaker 2: Where're coming. So he's kind of kind of falls away
Speaker 2: after that, but it has a real, real filmography there
Speaker 2: that is rife for rediscovery. And that's again NodD into
Speaker 2: another thing that you're saying, Sam, that's a complaint that
Speaker 2: a lot of people I know here in Berlin have
Speaker 2: about things like Deutscha Kinemattak and things like that. It's
Speaker 2: either the Weimar era or it's new German cinema. And
Speaker 2: then and there's a good decade and a half of
Speaker 2: film there which really is kind of lost, and Countner's
Speaker 2: in that lost decade and a half of cinema. That's
Speaker 2: really right, I think for reappraisal.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean, even if you think about something like
Speaker 8: the German crime films, which I think people are a
Speaker 8: little bit more aware of than these crime movies, even
Speaker 8: those are still hard to get a hold of in
Speaker 8: English language friendly releases. There aren't that many restorations. It's
Speaker 8: just this period that I don't know, it definitely kind
Speaker 8: of got lost, especially I would say from the late
Speaker 8: thirties onwards to the early seventies, like genre cinemas barely
Speaker 8: being made.
Speaker 9: It's so strange.
Speaker 2: So there's the Rubbel films, Am I asked, starting to
Speaker 2: get a bit of a bit of recognition. As you say,
Speaker 2: there's the crime films, heapes of other crime films that
Speaker 2: were being produced. There's those he films. Those are strange, homeled,
Speaker 2: those sort of weird films set in rural.
Speaker 9: In villages and mountains, And it kind of reminds me
Speaker 9: of the way that in the fifties and sixties.
Speaker 8: And early seventies, the way that some Japanese artists and
Speaker 8: filmmakers start to flirt with this idea of this idea
Speaker 8: traditional pre war Japan. That's what the Heimat films are.
Speaker 8: It's like, let's imagine this domestic paradise where we're all
Speaker 8: living in a wholesome village in the Alps. But I
Speaker 8: do think there is a nod to that in Black
Speaker 8: Gravel with his cabin, because it's like he has this
Speaker 8: secret hideaway that doesn't look like the rest of the town.
Speaker 8: It looks like it could be aside from like you know,
Speaker 8: maybe some of the posters inside it could be straight
Speaker 8: out of a Heimat film, and the fact that he
Speaker 8: has that church painted. There's a scene where he says
Speaker 8: to her, like when they're talking about her apartment, and
Speaker 8: how as you mentioned, everything is just sort of bland
Speaker 8: and generic and this very kind of middle class, affluent sameness.
Speaker 8: He's like, remember when we were in Heidelberg and the
Speaker 8: view that we had there, and like how distinctive it
Speaker 8: was and how real it felt. And Heidelberg, which is
Speaker 8: incredibly beautiful if you've never been there, also has similar.
Speaker 9: Views of like all these old buildings and churches.
Speaker 8: And universities, and so it seems like this to me anyway,
Speaker 8: the cabin and the painting of the church, it's a
Speaker 8: little bit of a nod to that idea of idealized
Speaker 8: traditional German village life, like without the occupation and the
Speaker 8: war and you know, urban culture.
Speaker 2: Can we just forget for a moment that you know,
Speaker 2: the entire country was laid waste to during the war,
Speaker 2: and you know that's what which is what those Heimat
Speaker 2: films are. They are very strange films, but I mean
Speaker 2: again kind of an amnesia by a lot of German
Speaker 2: film critics because the crimes the Heymat films we just
Speaker 2: let we just we won't talk about that. That's just
Speaker 2: sort of genre trash that was sort of banged out,
Speaker 2: banged out in the fifties to keep people entertained. But
Speaker 2: Cartner is right, and I think he actually made a
Speaker 2: couple of pseudo Pimot films as well too. I think
Speaker 2: some of hist and my period period film.
Speaker 1: Well, this is the second time we've felt about quite
Speaker 1: nir before Sam, because we talked about the Apple Fell
Speaker 1: from nineteen eight, which did happen so strange, also very strange.
Speaker 1: And you remember that the Satan character basically played a
Speaker 1: Nazi officer in that he had the swashtika and he
Speaker 1: had the uniform everything. So yeah, that was very pointed
Speaker 1: when it came to that. And yeah, we should talk
Speaker 1: about the anti semitism in here, because there were a
Speaker 1: few changes that were made to this film after the
Speaker 1: charge of anti semitism, and they even changed the ending
Speaker 1: of the film, even though that had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with the one Jewish character that is prominent in here,
Speaker 1: which is the owner of the brothel, and that was
Speaker 1: I believe offensive to some people that a concentration camp
Speaker 1: survivor would go on to run the brothel, would run
Speaker 1: the Atlantic Club. And it sounds like he's got a
Speaker 1: agreement with a former Nazi that he bought his barn
Speaker 1: and turned it into this and that former Nazi character
Speaker 1: is the one who well, even the Jewish character throws
Speaker 1: out a few things, like he talks about a yid
Speaker 1: from Vienna, but it's like, yeah, he's making fun of
Speaker 1: himself pretty much. But then there is one very pointed
Speaker 1: scene that happens in the brothel itself where the German
Speaker 1: guy is playing an old marching song, though it sounds
Speaker 1: a lot like Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. Did we take that
Speaker 1: from this marching song or did the marching or did
Speaker 1: they take that for the marching song? It's very odd,
Speaker 1: but he's playing this and the Americans and other people
Speaker 1: in the bar are complaining, you know, hey, can you
Speaker 1: lay off? Because it sounds like he's just playing it
Speaker 1: over and over again and reliving his glory day. He's
Speaker 1: talking about bearing the past again. And when the proprietor
Speaker 1: comes up and it's just like, hey man, you know,
Speaker 1: knock it off. That's when he calls him a dirty
Speaker 1: jew and then smashes I believe it's Robert smashes the
Speaker 1: actual jukebox, and that when you see the proprietor turn
Speaker 1: off the jukebox, you see the numbers tattooed on his arm,
Speaker 1: and that I guess was very offensive. This whole thing
Speaker 1: about calling him a dirty Jew. Seeing the numbers all
Speaker 1: that was what really, you know, first laid some charges
Speaker 1: against this movie and gave it a bad reputation, whereas
Speaker 1: I see it as not anti semitic at all. It
Speaker 1: feels like the character's anti Semitic, not the film.
Speaker 8: It's a really telling instance of what's going on in
Speaker 8: this period where the way that Germany and I think
Speaker 8: a lot of Europe and a lot of the United
Speaker 8: States wants to deal with the Holocaust is to just
Speaker 8: pretend that it didn't exist, because you even get I
Speaker 8: don't know, someone like kind of a Rent, Holocaust survivor
Speaker 8: writes a book about basically about the Holocaust, how it
Speaker 8: is possible, how it happened, and gets death threats, hate
Speaker 8: mail from lots of different kinds of people, but especially
Speaker 8: from other Jewish people because a Rent is Jewish, and
Speaker 8: I think what you really see throughout the sixties and
Speaker 8: the seventies and Fastpender got in trouble for this too
Speaker 8: because of this play, that he was involved with any
Speaker 8: depiction of nuanced Jewish characters, or Jewish characters who are
Speaker 8: maybe unsavory or who are also capable of exploiting other people.
Speaker 8: Is just like no one can handle it. And so
Speaker 8: I think having this brothel owner character not be this
Speaker 8: kind of stereotypical victim angelic figure would have been way
Speaker 8: too much for the censor board in the early sixties,
Speaker 8: even though we're not even fully getting to a lot
Speaker 8: of the Holocaust trials yet, like this is just before them.
Speaker 1: The movie comes out in April of sixty one, I
Speaker 1: believe there's the premiere of it, and it's the same
Speaker 1: month as the Ekman Trials. It's about six months before
Speaker 1: the beginning of the building of the Berlin Wall. I
Speaker 1: knew that sixty one was a big year.
Speaker 8: Okay, so he's still like he's writing the script and
Speaker 8: starting production before that happens.
Speaker 2: It's important, I think, to know the script and the
Speaker 2: film get passed by the senses. It's not the sensors
Speaker 2: that bring up this anti Semitism charge. It's a sort
Speaker 2: of prominent Jewish citizen in Germany who brings it up,
Speaker 2: and the charge gets dismissed everyone basically, really, I means
Speaker 2: Cartner moves very quickly exercises the scene from the film.
Speaker 2: Basically he said, look, this is not supposed to be
Speaker 2: anti Jewish, it's actually anti German. Actually it's actually it's
Speaker 2: actually it's actually criticizing our own past. It's not truly
Speaker 2: sizing Jewish people, so it's not the census who do that.
Speaker 2: And then the critics hate it anyway, so it's so
Speaker 2: it's a sort of it's all wobbly fight already. After
Speaker 2: that anti Semitism charge charge, it gets edited, gets edited
Speaker 2: quite heavily from that scene, and then you know, the
Speaker 2: critics sort of past it.
Speaker 8: We have decades of separation here. But I don't understand
Speaker 8: how you could watch this and see the sequences with
Speaker 8: the black American soldiers and the scene with the Jewish
Speaker 8: brothel owner and think that this is a movie that
Speaker 8: has like specifically targeted racism in it. It's targeting racism culturally,
Speaker 8: like it's it's.
Speaker 9: Not siding with any of that.
Speaker 8: And the scene that I think underscores this the most
Speaker 8: is the absolutely insane church sermon where during the mass
Speaker 8: he talks about Columbus, and Coyner must have done this
Speaker 8: on purpose, because if he had some understand of racism
Speaker 8: and America and colonialism and things like that, the speech
Speaker 8: about Columbus is basically like, here's this guy who went
Speaker 8: along and discovered things, and if you have this mindset,
Speaker 8: every day can be Columbus Day for you. And it's
Speaker 8: a speech being delivered to American gis, so it has
Speaker 8: to be translated for Robert. But it's so disturbing because
Speaker 8: it's like thinking about Columbus now, like, yeah, he's a
Speaker 8: guy who kicked off a genocide that basically wiped out
Speaker 8: an entire continent of indigenous people. But we should use
Speaker 8: him as our role model while we're occupying Germany as
Speaker 8: a military forces. There's a lot happening here.
Speaker 2: We're under the chancellorship of Comrad Adnow he's actually a
Speaker 2: chancellor of Germany from nineteen forty nine to nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he was there forever, and I think he's one
Speaker 8: of the people who really attracted the ire of the
Speaker 8: group that would become known as the New German Cinema
Speaker 8: Directors because he, I think, was what they saw as
Speaker 8: being totalitarianism light He just sort of replaced fascism with capitalism,
Speaker 8: and anyone who disagreed or challenged the German economic miracle
Speaker 8: that was developing, he sort of tried to silence in
Speaker 8: a variety of ways that would just get worse throughout
Speaker 8: the sixties. But there's also a line in here that
Speaker 8: kind of nods to that, where Robert says to Inga
Speaker 8: when she's begging him, just turn yourself in.
Speaker 9: They'll Noah was an accident. You won't get punished.
Speaker 8: It won't be that big of a deal. And he
Speaker 8: says to her, justices only for people in power. And
Speaker 8: it's like who plastic film noir, classic film noir, but
Speaker 8: also very post World War Two.
Speaker 2: Anaw oversees that switch from without getting into the details
Speaker 2: of it too much denazification to anti communism. So and
Speaker 2: that's I mean under the tutelage obviously of the of
Speaker 2: the of the Americans of Washington, who's very very keen
Speaker 2: to go look now, stop, don't give us.
Speaker 9: Your Nazi scientists, and then we will never mention it again.
Speaker 2: And the Iikman trial is a huge international news story.
Speaker 2: And my understanding is also what's happening is that now
Speaker 2: that's when Arden now kind of does this deal with
Speaker 2: the israelis going? Well, look, I mean if you or
Speaker 2: the German state gond doesn't deal with Israel, go, which
Speaker 2: is continuous, you just soft pedal on a lot of
Speaker 2: this stuff. A bit. We don't want too much of this.
Speaker 2: We understand you've got to try trial, you know, we've
Speaker 2: got you've got to try Iikman, but we don't want this.
Speaker 2: And in return you've got our political and military support.
Speaker 8: And you can also just you know, fine stream Nazis
Speaker 8: and execute them as you see fit.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so just don't tell anyone.
Speaker 2: So this is completely against that. This is completely know
Speaker 2: this is this runs totally so because and part of
Speaker 2: that ard. Now, the thing is, we're just not going
Speaker 2: to talk about this. We're just going to basically push
Speaker 2: this to one side. We support Israel now, we support
Speaker 2: what's going on. We're happy. We're a key military backer
Speaker 2: of them. So to have this scene in this film,
Speaker 2: as you say, Mike, of not only the bar the
Speaker 2: Atlantic barkeeper is up, you know is Jewish. But that
Speaker 2: scene where that guy calls him an old jit or
Speaker 2: an old you know, gives him that racial slur about it,
Speaker 2: and then you see his tattoo. Wow, mind blowing, really,
Speaker 2: I mean absolutely mind blowing.
Speaker 1: Well, it's just so casual. And there's the casual racism too.
Speaker 1: There's the soccer game that's going on on TV and
Speaker 1: Robert's partner is there and it's with he's with I
Speaker 1: can't remember the character's name, but it's an older woman
Speaker 1: who apparently runs a shop in town.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, the woman who won't let any any let
Speaker 8: America people in her establishment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, shopping is shopping, but this is a private place
Speaker 1: and so I won't let any riff raff like refugees
Speaker 1: and Americans in here. And it's like, oh, I feel like.
Speaker 8: The implication is that this is a lady who would
Speaker 8: have been totally fine with the Holocaust as long as
Speaker 8: it didn't affect her personally.
Speaker 1: And Ellie is standing three feet away from her.
Speaker 2: The Atlantic's owner and his wife kind of are avadue
Speaker 2: moral center in this film in a way, because they're
Speaker 2: kind of they just run this establishment. They try and
Speaker 2: the countner shows them trying to look after the girls.
Speaker 2: They're worried about Ellie. There's that scene we talked about,
Speaker 2: that scene where the US soldiers walk in, the white
Speaker 2: soldiers walk in, and the black soldiers are there, and
Speaker 2: there's actually a very clear saying that the wife sort
Speaker 2: of looks at her partner, the owner, and goes, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, the races they're not going to come in
Speaker 2: the racism, and you know, so they're kind of they're
Speaker 2: actually the they're not so bad, those two. They're just
Speaker 2: running a business. Yeah it's six whatever.
Speaker 9: But you also kind of see that same sense of
Speaker 9: these are decent people.
Speaker 8: Just trying to survive exactly exactly. You see that with them,
Speaker 8: but you see that also with the other female sex
Speaker 8: worker characters that are kind of in the background.
Speaker 9: Like one of the only.
Speaker 8: Sort of uplifting scenes, you see this group of six
Speaker 8: or seven women all walking in a line, arm and
Speaker 8: arm down the street, singing together, and I think the
Speaker 8: implication is like, these are sex workers heading back to
Speaker 8: the brothel. But they're the only people in the entire
Speaker 8: movie who seem happy.
Speaker 9: For a minute.
Speaker 1: Everybody's dreams are crushed. Everything alays goes wrong for people
Speaker 1: they think they're going to escape. Something always has to happen,
Speaker 1: no matter who it is, whether it's Elie Otto, Robert Inga.
Speaker 1: And then what happens with Inga. You know, I'm glad
Speaker 1: it gave spoiler alert. I mean, the whole thing of
Speaker 1: her trying to stop him, hanging on to the door
Speaker 1: and falling off to her death at the end of
Speaker 1: this film, because she goes back and forth. He keeps thinking,
Speaker 1: I'm going to escape. I'm not going to escape. I'm
Speaker 1: going to escape. I'm not going to escape, Like what's
Speaker 1: going to happen. Finally thinks that he's in the clear.
Speaker 1: She kind of blows the whistle on everything, and he's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, that's it. I'm leaving, and she tries to
Speaker 1: grab onto the door, falls off and dies. And then
Speaker 1: you have one of the most depressing endings that I've
Speaker 1: seen in a long time, because now we get to
Speaker 1: bury something else, which is inga and that just the
Speaker 1: cold automation of and the the very determined way that he,
Speaker 1: you know, opens up the back of the truck goes
Speaker 1: up to it starts the whole process of the truck
Speaker 1: lifting up so it can pour out the gravel onto
Speaker 1: her body. And then what do you guys think as
Speaker 1: far as him just jumping into that gravel? I mean,
Speaker 1: is that just a sudden like momentary loss and he
Speaker 1: just says that's it, I'm done, I'm throwing it all
Speaker 1: away right now. Or do you think he had that planned?
Speaker 8: I think he had it planned. The use of the gravel,
Speaker 8: like we said at the beginning of this episode. Just
Speaker 8: the way that they bring all of these details together
Speaker 8: constantly throughout the film, It's like it had to happen.
Speaker 8: He had to jump into the gravel. There is no
Speaker 8: other way to end this. I mean, I guess there's
Speaker 8: the quote unquote happy ending version or the ambiguous ending
Speaker 8: version where he just drives off into the mist, like
Speaker 8: you said, But that doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel
Speaker 8: like the actual narrative conclusion thought.
Speaker 2: I thought it was a spur of the moment thing myself.
Speaker 2: I just because I don't there you go. I mean,
Speaker 2: I he just was got so overcome and upset by
Speaker 2: what happened at the end. He just basically through and
Speaker 2: he loved it because there are flashes of that love.
Speaker 8: Yeah, him him holding onto her shirt and having this
Speaker 8: picture of her, and keeping those things in his secret
Speaker 8: cabin that no one knows about and no one else
Speaker 8: is allowed to go to. And I think you also
Speaker 8: see that love show up in more genuine ways in
Speaker 8: the second half of the movie, where he's really trying
Speaker 8: to make decisions that might inconvenience him but will allow
Speaker 8: her to keep this stable life that she's fought so
Speaker 8: hard for and.
Speaker 2: She's trying to keep it together because she and she
Speaker 2: Because there's a couple of scenes, I think at least
Speaker 2: two scenes where she basically says to her coming with
Speaker 2: the major's name is, but she basically says to her
Speaker 2: American serviceman husband, look, we need to go back to
Speaker 2: America or bad things are going to happen. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: I'm going to sleep with this with this guy, I
Speaker 2: this truck driver that I obviously had a great passionate
Speaker 2: relationship with I ages ago after the war, and even
Speaker 2: though it was poor, it was real. We were we
Speaker 2: were real. If you don't take me out of here immediately,
Speaker 2: this is going to go really badly. So she's kind
Speaker 2: of she's kind of poorn too, you know, between us.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it reminds me of some classic noir, like like
Speaker 8: something like Guilda where she's with the husband. And granted
Speaker 8: the husband in Gilda is way more nefarious, but it's
Speaker 8: like she has this comfortable life with a husband who
Speaker 8: she's made this kind of bargain with, like I will
Speaker 8: be this sort of ideal and you will give me
Speaker 8: this life of stability and comfort and security. Except when
Speaker 8: this person comes from the past, like we got to
Speaker 8: get rid of them because this is going to ruin everything,
Speaker 8: the very like tenuous relationship they actually have, and I
Speaker 8: I think that's what's so interesting about how this unfolds.
Speaker 8: And I know we talked about this earlier, but you
Speaker 8: just see how superficial her relationship with her husband is.
Speaker 1: There was a hanging animal, stuffed animal in Robert's truck
Speaker 1: that gets very prominent placement, and I think it's an elephant.
Speaker 1: Do you think that's the whole thing of you know,
Speaker 1: memory and you know, not letting things go and never forgetting.
Speaker 9: Maybe I didn't even think about that.
Speaker 2: Have you been in soco analysis again?
Speaker 1: When did I stop?
Speaker 2: What's the elephant? A stuffed elephant?
Speaker 9: Yeah, elephants never forget.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I didn't really notice the elephant either. Actually,
Speaker 2: I must admit I didn't really.
Speaker 1: You will never not see it now next time you
Speaker 1: watch it.
Speaker 2: I don't watch it after the phrase Freeman.
Speaker 9: See the elephant.
Speaker 8: But there's also the kitten that I was convinced something
Speaker 8: terrible was going to happen to. One of the first
Speaker 8: scenes where Ellie shows up and she's not in the truck,
Speaker 8: she has this like kitten resting on her chest, and
Speaker 8: I was just like, oh God, when's this kitten getting
Speaker 8: run over? But luckily the kitten doesn't make a reappearance.
Speaker 2: Poor old Ellie, because I mean, Ellie hitches her wagon.
Speaker 2: So when it's clear that Robert's not gonna the thing
Speaker 2: with Robert's not going to work out, when he.
Speaker 8: Kicks her out when they're about to have sex, he
Speaker 8: kicks her out and even says, you have to get
Speaker 8: dressed out there, it's so cold.
Speaker 2: And then she so she hitches her wagon to Robert's
Speaker 2: partner in the in the black the gravel black market
Speaker 2: business is going to go to Canada, and of course
Speaker 2: the authorities are investigating the black gravel business. And that's
Speaker 2: that we talked about that earlier where Inger but and
Speaker 2: that this is Inga's first fatal mistake. Well Inga's first
Speaker 2: matal mistake was getting him a truck with Robert actually,
Speaker 2: but then but then Inga basically contacts Robert and says,
Speaker 2: they're investigating. The police are on the road tonight. You've
Speaker 2: got to dump the gravel that you're stealing, otherwise you're
Speaker 2: going to get arrested. And as a result, a whole
Speaker 2: lot of the drivers get arrested, but Robert doesn't get arrested,
Speaker 2: but that eventually the investigation leads back to I can't
Speaker 2: remember what his name is, but it's a Roberts partner
Speaker 2: who Ellie is planning to go to Canada with, and
Speaker 2: he gets arrested and gets led out of the of
Speaker 2: the Atlantic and he just says, oh, well, that's that's
Speaker 2: my Canada dreams gone as the police Canada and poor
Speaker 2: old Ellie and another one of these incredibly graphic scenes.
Speaker 2: There's so many, so many points at which this film
Speaker 2: could have been banned. She just goes and throws up
Speaker 2: on almost throws up on the screen because she's so
Speaker 2: emotionally destroyed by I was about to say seeing her
Speaker 2: meal ticket to Canada basically get arrested by the police,
Speaker 2: but I think that's probably being a bit cynical.
Speaker 9: But basically that's too Seneca.
Speaker 2: Yeah, by basically seeing her chance at another life outside
Speaker 2: of this town basically taken away.
Speaker 8: And I love that she makes it up the stairs
Speaker 8: but then is just shown throwing up over the railing
Speaker 8: onto what looks.
Speaker 9: Like some kind of ceiling over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that design of that building is great. Where it's
Speaker 1: like bar down below and then you go up through
Speaker 1: the ceiling with the staircase up into the barn area.
Speaker 1: I guess it is. And Sam, you're talking about like
Speaker 1: the layers of mystery that we have with all of
Speaker 1: these things. It's the black gravel investigation. Is that the
Speaker 1: couple that's missing, you know? Is it the CIA guy
Speaker 1: who's looking for people running over to the east, all
Speaker 1: these kind of things. But then overlaying everything is the
Speaker 1: search for the dog and just how that keeps coming back,
Speaker 1: Like he's using that as a manipulation tool with inga
Speaker 1: where it's like, oh yeah, this guy called me and
Speaker 1: he's got more information about Tug the dog, and oh yeah,
Speaker 1: he sent me the collar and stuff. And like the
Speaker 1: even after he accidentally kills Annie and Bill, like he
Speaker 1: reaches into his pocket and the collar falls out and
Speaker 1: it falls onto the ground, the same ground where like
Speaker 1: basically the blood is from their corpses, and I'm like yeah,
Speaker 1: and as they're like digging up stuff, the dog comes back,
Speaker 1: you know, the dog the corpse comes back, like that
Speaker 1: gets dug up rather than Bill and Andy, And it's
Speaker 1: just like constantly that dog is at the center of everything. Like,
Speaker 1: I love that amazing shot of the two separate beds,
Speaker 1: and he does make a reference to how the major
Speaker 1: and inga sleep in separate beds, and what's on her
Speaker 1: bed is the leash, and we get that twice of
Speaker 1: the leash being right there, dead center on her bed,
Speaker 1: and it's just like, Tug is so much the heart
Speaker 1: of this movie, starting off with him and basically ending
Speaker 1: with the mystery of what happened to this damn dog.
Speaker 2: All right, p Tug and the cynicism of the Cold War.
Speaker 2: So because you've got I think we know we noted
Speaker 2: this earlier. So one of the layers the investigation into
Speaker 2: the Missing Americans young American service model and he's young
Speaker 2: German bride to build a bride to be he wants
Speaker 2: to marry it. And there's this sketchy CIA German CIA
Speaker 2: agent who's sort of nosing around, and Robert thinks, of
Speaker 2: this guy is onto us. But of course then he
Speaker 2: just basically says, oh, look, I've investigated with these two
Speaker 2: are and because their marriage certificate got knocked back, I'm
Speaker 2: pretty sure they basically just affected to the east. And
Speaker 2: so that's over and Robert, Robert can hardly believe it.
Speaker 2: It's like, what, so that's that's it. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: can hardly believe he's believe he's he is.
Speaker 8: It just makes the whole thing worse though that, like
Speaker 8: there are these potentially huge legal issues that he's going
Speaker 8: to get swept into, and then everything seems to kind
Speaker 8: of resolve on its own in a way that it
Speaker 8: never does in film noir except just kidding.
Speaker 9: Everyone dies anyway.
Speaker 2: It really is bad. It actually is bad, but like
Speaker 2: it makes.
Speaker 8: Their deaths feel so much more senseless and nihilistic, like
Speaker 8: they didn't have to No one had to die here.
Speaker 8: Even the dog didn't have to die, Like that was
Speaker 8: just a sheer, selfish act of cruelty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was just in the way. They could have
Speaker 1: just you know, and Robert's striining his best to get
Speaker 1: the dog out of the way. But then here comes
Speaker 1: this asshole who just throws a big fucking rock at
Speaker 1: the dog's head and murders them. And yeah, just for me,
Speaker 1: it sets off everything.
Speaker 2: The only thing that really had to die in this
Speaker 2: film is everybody's desire just to forget what's happened in
Speaker 2: the past. That's the one thing that has to die
Speaker 2: and does die on a daily on a you know,
Speaker 2: a minute by minute basis, you.
Speaker 8: Know, which I think it's important to point out. I
Speaker 8: feel like in a lot of ways, you could read
Speaker 8: this as a reflection on the rubble films, especially because
Speaker 8: of the fact that it quite literally deals with like
Speaker 8: gravel and rubble and rebuilding. But the rubble films are
Speaker 8: often all about like the moral at the end of
Speaker 8: them is everything will be fine. We just need to
Speaker 8: forget and move on like it never happened, And this
Speaker 8: movie is like, I'm Minutera bitter. I'm just going to
Speaker 8: be thinking about the Columbus Day speech forever.
Speaker 9: It's so twisted.
Speaker 2: They also, I believe, used Americas because it was filmed
Speaker 2: near an actual US Air Force base, and they used
Speaker 2: American I mean, the guy who plays Inga's husband, who's
Speaker 2: quite a competent American, but he's actually German.
Speaker 8: He speaks way too fluent German to actually be an
Speaker 8: American actor in the early sixties.
Speaker 2: Hans Cassie Major John Gaines. They used real American servicemen
Speaker 2: from that base, and I can only imagine what the
Speaker 2: American occupation authorities must have thought when they saw black
Speaker 2: gravel too, because it's you know, it's damning of them
Speaker 2: as well. What's that scene Robert basically says at one
Speaker 2: point in the film, are ye, the first occupiers are
Speaker 2: open handed. Now they're just typefisted. It's this massive, massive
Speaker 2: conflict they've got because the occupation soured by now and
Speaker 2: they're basically they're pissed off at them.
Speaker 8: You wouldn't have been able to make this film at
Speaker 8: all when the rubble films were being made, because the
Speaker 8: Rubble films were overseen by the US Military Media Office,
Speaker 8: so they weren't censored exactly, but there was this agreement
Speaker 8: that like, okay, certain subjects we're not going to make
Speaker 8: films about in the first couple of years after the
Speaker 8: war while everything gets stabilized. But by the early sixties,
Speaker 8: guess it was fair game, even though no one was
Speaker 8: happy about it.
Speaker 2: And that's that's saying at the very beginning of the
Speaker 2: film with the again with the Dog, when the dog
Speaker 2: is I think in the why of the gravel trucks
Speaker 2: getting unloaded and so this this German trucker throws a
Speaker 2: rock at the dog and kills the dog, and the
Speaker 2: American Service there's an American serviceman watching on and he
Speaker 2: just by think this really.
Speaker 9: Makes punches them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so that the German and the German and
Speaker 2: miss American get into a fight, and the and the
Speaker 2: German Trucker is a pretty reptilian character, but he actually says, look,
Speaker 2: this is yeah, listen, Yank, it's not like this anymore.
Speaker 2: You're not in charge anymore. Okay that's not the exact words,
Speaker 2: but it's basically words to the effect that we're not
Speaker 2: taking this from you anymore. You know, you're not going
Speaker 2: to bully us around.
Speaker 9: It because you're not me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 9: If I want to kill a dog by gad, I well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that might be Bill that is the
Speaker 1: one that's fighting the German trucker.
Speaker 9: I think I think so too.
Speaker 2: Bill is a Tubbs's honor.
Speaker 9: But Bill is also such a wholesome character in general.
Speaker 9: For the little that we see him.
Speaker 2: He has to die, he does.
Speaker 9: He's too good for this world.
Speaker 2: And he's as you say, what does Robert call them?
Speaker 2: Good kids? I think the only the only people in
Speaker 2: the entire film that Robert has got anything positive to
Speaker 2: say about, and that he doesn't try and rip off,
Speaker 2: and everyone seems to like them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, even tries to fix his car after he's dead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so of course I have to bicyclely get accidentally
Speaker 2: run out of by Robert's truck because that's that's where
Speaker 2: we're going.
Speaker 9: Of course, down the drain.
Speaker 1: The guy that plays Bill is Peter Nessler, and he
Speaker 1: was a writer director in his own right. I never
Speaker 1: saw any of his films yet, but he directed like
Speaker 1: forty some movies.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: There.
Speaker 8: Like Andrew said earlier, there really is this whole world
Speaker 8: of German cinema that I think it's hard to get
Speaker 8: access to. There's not a lot of these films that
Speaker 8: have been restored or released, but I think that's changing slowly.
Speaker 1: I hope so. I mean because Quaitner is just fascinating
Speaker 1: to me. After watching The Apple Fell I was just
Speaker 1: in love with that movie and wanted to see more.
Speaker 1: So that Black Revel was noir. I was talking to
Speaker 1: Andrew last week and just saying, you know that I
Speaker 1: think it was Kristaph Faust. She wrote about it, and
Speaker 1: I was just like, wow, this sounds amazing. That poster
Speaker 1: image of the legs coming out from underneath the car.
Speaker 1: I was like, Okay, yeah, this is great, And I
Speaker 1: was so glad that they restored this. I mean the
Speaker 1: print you can see a little bit of damage around
Speaker 1: the real changes, but otherwise it's just absolutely gorgeous. And
Speaker 1: you see some of these shots, like when the guys
Speaker 1: pull over Robert and they're looking at his truck to
Speaker 1: see if he's got gravel in it, and you've got
Speaker 1: the one guy talking with Robert, and then in the
Speaker 1: side view mirror you see the guy looking inside of
Speaker 1: the truck and it's just perfectly framed. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: this is somebody who knows how to shoot a movie,
Speaker 1: and obviously he'd been shooting movies for like twenty years
Speaker 1: at that point, if not more. And it's like, okay, great, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd love to see the craftsmanship. Everything looks so good
Speaker 1: in this movie. And I'm just like, all right, bring
Speaker 1: on more, give me more of these Koitner films. I
Speaker 1: just can't wait to dive in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean real grasp, but I mean it's a
Speaker 2: sign in port of Freedom that will real grass scene,
Speaker 2: which I always like to throw into a projection booth podcast.
Speaker 1: That word, it's a perfect word for us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of quite the realistic parts. Yes, it's
Speaker 2: very influenced by the realism. So there's and it's got
Speaker 2: and then there's the outside scenes with the truckers are
Speaker 2: quite almost documented. There's almost a documentary feel with those,
Speaker 2: and then there's there's there's there's amazing scenes in the
Speaker 2: Atlantic and some of the some of the setups that
Speaker 2: he doesn't you know, look at mirrors, looking in you know,
Speaker 2: looking through doorways with guy people. His use of windows
Speaker 2: just absolutely so it's just absolutely amazing.
Speaker 8: There's this scene that I love so much where he's
Speaker 8: in his bedroom above the bar, and there's a scene
Speaker 8: of him standing shot from below, and the poster of
Speaker 8: the naked woman that's on the ceiling above his bed.
Speaker 8: He's like bisecting her so that you can't see her
Speaker 8: torso or any kind of like genitalia, And then the
Speaker 8: camera shifts so you see the mirror reflection of that
Speaker 8: where he's standing, but instead of it being shot from below,
Speaker 8: it's shot from above, and his body is similarly blocking
Speaker 8: Ellie's naked body or nearly naked body, and that it's
Speaker 8: like that kind of shot composition and framing and cinematography
Speaker 8: I think just is constantly reminding you of how superficial
Speaker 8: things are, how people are exploited, how people are often
Speaker 8: treated as just like filler and huh, but such a
Speaker 8: beautiful sequence.
Speaker 2: So it does make you wonder what else is out there? Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, I've been trying to home away through. I've
Speaker 2: got a few of these German sixties films and I've
Speaker 2: been trying to watch them, and now in Black Gravel
Speaker 2: is the best, but there's some good ones, and there's
Speaker 2: I'll just scratch the surface.
Speaker 1: I want to even see his American stuff, the Restless
Speaker 1: Years and Stranger in my Arms. I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: chance to see Sandra D again and Stranger in My
Speaker 1: Arms and June Allison, and then Restless Years has John
Speaker 1: Sexon in it, so sign me up, and sander D again,
Speaker 1: so Gause he and sander D had a little bit
Speaker 1: of a thing going him and her and Koitner.
Speaker 2: He must have heighted Hollywood.
Speaker 8: But I feel like so many of those forties movies
Speaker 8: where directors came over to make films here are all
Speaker 8: really either downbeat or weird, like what's that genre? Woman
Speaker 8: on the Beach so weird? But that last Year, Yes,
Speaker 8: it's great, but they all have this sense of displacement,
Speaker 8: like I am working in a studio system that is
Speaker 8: a monstrous and b doesn't make any sense and is
Speaker 8: also just a propaganda machine.
Speaker 1: Those are fools movies that he made. He was over
Speaker 1: here those.
Speaker 9: Oh my god, Yeah, I love those so good.
Speaker 8: Those movies are all very anti conservative, heteronormative capitalism.
Speaker 9: It's amazing he got them made at all.
Speaker 1: All right, guys, let's go ahead and take a break
Speaker 1: and play a preview for next week's show right after
Speaker 1: these brief messages. Looking for something superior to streaming, a
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Speaker 4: What city please like, I'm in Hollywood and I want
Speaker 4: to report a murder.
Speaker 10: I'm detective starting a Lloyd Hawkins with the police department.
Speaker 11: It's about Julie Nemar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, actually I can about calling you, and I just
Speaker 2: didn't know what to say.
Speaker 4: Killer there's a dangerous man on the loose.
Speaker 10: All I care about is stabbing his maniac before he
Speaker 10: kills a can do you understand? Come on Dutch, you're
Speaker 10: blown away abroad state. The least you can do is
Speaker 10: drive her home.
Speaker 4: His boss thinks he's trouble. If you go to the media,
Speaker 4: I'll crucify you. You wanted that day, don't you? How
Speaker 4: can you tell?
Speaker 5: You?
Speaker 1: Always shake just a little.
Speaker 4: His friends think he's crazy.
Speaker 2: Now one day should spend up in the forest breaking
Speaker 2: an entering, robbery and now possible murder. But you gotta
Speaker 2: line up for tonight.
Speaker 4: Women think he's a menace?
Speaker 2: Would you do that?
Speaker 4: Try to think of a three letter word for explosive?
Speaker 4: A cop, you gotta take me here.
Speaker 11: Well, there's some good news and there's some bad news.
Speaker 11: The good news is you're right. I'm a cop and
Speaker 11: I got to take you in. Bad news is I've
Speaker 11: been suspended and I.
Speaker 4: Don't give up. Cop James Woods in the most startling
Speaker 4: performance of his career with Leslie Ann Warren and Charles Derning.
Speaker 4: When a man cares too much? How far is too far?
Speaker 1: As right? We'll be back next week. When they look
Speaker 1: at James b Harris's cop Until then, I want to
Speaker 1: thank my co host Sam and Andrew. So, Andrew, what
Speaker 1: is the lad this with you, sir?
Speaker 5: Just not.
Speaker 2: I'm not working on much at the moment. I've got
Speaker 2: a couple of book projects that I'm sort of working on,
Speaker 2: but probably not doing as much as I should be
Speaker 2: on them, frankly distracted too much by the by the
Speaker 2: lure of Berlin. I have a substack. Paulpe Curry is
Speaker 2: my substack, or you can find it under my name
Speaker 2: Andrew Netti, So subscribe. I might even write about Black Gravel. Actually,
Speaker 2: when this episode comes out, I think.
Speaker 1: And Sam House's busiest woman in New York City.
Speaker 8: I would very much like to be feeling the lore
Speaker 8: of New York City and wandering around and going to
Speaker 8: art exhibits and not working.
Speaker 9: I guess the things I should shout out.
Speaker 8: I recently wrote an essay about gen Rolan for Criterion,
Speaker 8: who were doing a Roland series this fall.
Speaker 9: I just did a very long.
Speaker 8: Hammer Dracula series episode for my Aeros plus Massacre podcast,
Speaker 8: and a million other things not sleeping. But if you
Speaker 8: like Black Gravel, you should also check out the Robert
Speaker 8: Hossein set that Radiance is putting out which very different
Speaker 8: because they're French, but also have some very very interesting
Speaker 8: late fifties early sixties examples of kind of neo noir
Speaker 8: where this same type of exploitative sexuality is really at
Speaker 8: the heart of the films. And I did an essay
Speaker 8: or a video essay for that set.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to talk about Cemetery without Crosses next year,
Speaker 1: just to talk about more Husseins.
Speaker 9: It's great, another underrated one, totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm just glad that more of his movies are
Speaker 1: getting out there, so that's fantastic. Well, thank you so
Speaker 1: much folks for being on the show. Thanks to everybody
Speaker 1: for listening. Want to support physical media and get great
Speaker 1: movies by mail, head over to Scarecrow dot com and
Speaker 1: try Scarecrow Videos incredible rent by meal service, the largest
Speaker 1: publicly accessible collection in the world. You'll find films there
Speaker 1: entirely unavailable elsewhere. Get what you want, when you want
Speaker 1: it without the scrolling. And yes, Black Gravel is available.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear more of me shooting off
Speaker 1: my check out some of the other shows that I
Speaker 1: work on. They are all available at Wirningwaymedia dot com.
Speaker 1: Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to
Speaker 1: join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth.
Speaker 1: Every donation we get help some Projection Booth take over
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 3: Hey Joe, Joe, come on, stand up, Let's go please
Speaker 3: dont non Schmidt. Hey Joe, come on. Joe's so good
Speaker 3: and I'm very in the mood. Smid, Joe, come on, Joe,
Speaker 3: she says, no, come on, stand up. Let's both Smid
Speaker 3: and later, I'm gonna have some COVID with rum hob
Speaker 3: rum hope when we had enough fat town more. Hi Joe,
Speaker 3: Hey Joe, come on, stand up. Let's go to the
Speaker 3: honest play stand no lunchmid, Hey Joe, say Joe, come on,
Speaker 3: stand up. Let's go an play stand though lunchmid.
Speaker 5: Joe.
Speaker 2: You know what, Joe the.
Speaker 3: Back that says no common stand up. Let's go some
Speaker 3: bron and Schmidt. Later, I will have some cloth with rum,
Speaker 3: cloth with rum, cloth with rum and whenever we had
Speaker 3: a number, that's happen bo from buff Roun with Bronn Schmidt,
Speaker 3: Rodin Schmidt. H That's it.