Des Teufels Erbe

This is a Gene Kelly film which I had never viewed and only associated Kelly as a song and dance actor in many musicals. Kelly plays the role as Capt. Jeff Eliot who visits the Lehrt family in Germany who protected him and his plane during WW II. However, he finds out that the family was killed and the only member in the family remaining was Wilhelmina Lehrt,(Pier Angeli). Jeff Eliot finds Willie working in a nightclub and they seem to fall in love with each other, until Jeff finds out some very dark secrets Wilhelmina had been keeping from him and they have a fight between the two of them. Claus Clausen,(Heisemann) plays the role of a Nazi Commander during the Neo-Nazism Post WW II and has complete control over an underground movement that wants to continue the Hitler movement in Germany. There are really outstanding photography inside Adolph Hitler's Berchtesgard Eagles Nest, which is all bombed out and you see Heisemann standing in front of the large window in Berchtesgard. There is plenty of suspense and good supporting actors like Richard Egan, (Lt. Parker) and even some romance. Enjoy

The movie grabs your attention immediately and doesn't let go until the end. Post WII Germany is one of the main characters here and it's fascinating to see the bombed out buildings and how people had to live after the war. The fact that it was filmed on location in winter only adds to the mystery.

As for Gene Kelly not being an actor but only a showman, watch him in Inherit the Wind, and you may change your mind. His non-dancing roles were not really all that rare, even during his heyday as a dancer.

Pier Angeli, who was Italian, is cast as a German girl. That doesn't quite work for me, as her German isn't good enough for her to have been a native, yet her appealing nature, her huge eyes and her inherent sweetness help her performance as woman whose innocence has been lost.

The corruption and struggle to rebuild in Germany and Austria after the war is something that most people do not really know much about. Other recommended movies that deal with this subject are A Foreign Affair and The Third Man.

The concept of the movie is pretty interesting; The post WW II effects on Germany. Too bad that the movie chooses a completely uninteresting approach.

The story seems to be going nowhere and for an hour it mostly consists out of continuing drivel between Gene Kelly and Pier Angeli. The movie shows some mystery and action tendencies but none of them really pushes through. It makes "The Devil Makes Three" an unsatisfying and also quite redundant movie to watch, despite its very interesting and also original concept. There really aren't that many movies that concentrate on post WW II Germany. Too bad that they couldn't come up with a more interesting story and approach of it.

The movie does get much better and interesting in the end, when a new Nazi order comes in the story but there is nothing in the story before this that even hints to this plot-element. The movie as a whole therefor feels disjointed and the ending comes too late to safe the movie as a whole.

Director Andrew Marton had more success working as a second unit director, with movies such as "Ben-Hur", "Kelly's Heroes" and "The Day of the Jackal".

It definitely helps that the movie was obviously shot at location and in the early '50's, right after WW II. Germany was still in ruins for some parts and the movie uses this backdrop gratefully. It helps to make the movie look and feel realistic and it works obviously better than the normal fake- and studio work. All of the locations seem to be the real thing, including Hitler's Eagle's nest (The Kehlsteinhaus), that was near Berchtesgaden, which at the time of filming was subsequently used by the Allies as a military command post until 1960, when it was handed back to the State of Bavaria.

Guess lots of people are having trouble with seeing Gene Kelly in such a serious role as this one but in all fairness, he pulls it off quite well. He shows that he also knew how to act, besides being normally mostly just a 'show-man' or entertainer. Pier Angeli also plays nicely but her character just isn't the most compelling one. At first you mostly hate her and she is irritating, in the second halve of the movie you're supposed to care about her. This approach just doesn't work out, at least not good enough.

Not an awful movie but still an uninteresting and redundant one.

6/10

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The same year (1952) that Gene Kelly would become immortal with his "Singing in the rain"-film he also made another movie that is one of his more obscure ones and probably one of the lost classics. Directed by Andrew Marton, a very dubious director who worked on "The longest day" but who also gave us the vehicle "Clarence, the cross-eyed lion" shows us a part of history that is mainly forgot. We are in Munich, 1947 and while the American troop^s seem to handle the new German way of living in a rather good way there are also those left who think the Third Reich can live on without their fuhrer. This costs money and they smuggled the gold to neighbourcountries (in this case Salzburg) for getting financied their new evil plans. Captain Jeff Elliot (Gene Kelly) who knows nothing about it wants to visit a German family Lehrt as they saved his life at the end of the war. Packed with Christmasgifts he stands before a bombed house and learns later that the family has been killed by American bombs, except the little girl Willie (Pier Angeli) but she is nowhere to be found. All pretty German girls seem to work in cabarets and that's where Kelly finds the girl. The meeting between the two is rather based on hated feelings (after all it were American bombs who killed Willie's parents) but Kelly is Kelly and they soon fall in love. By the question of Kelly what could the girl happy she answers that she'd like to visit Salzburg again. The captain thinks it's a small effort but knows nothing that he's driving a car that is full of smuggled gold, and of course as you can imagine the girl is innocent but she has the choice of being beaten by some German gestapopigs or obey them... This little classic (that seems to be forgotten by everyone) is a very nice film that has both its adventuredose, good acting (Kelly doesn't dance for once but proves he is a big actor anyway and Pier Angeli is gorgeous) and its historical worth (tons of locations are filmed in postwar Germany). A quite whole mystery why this film isn't more known as it's a brilliant movie that stands out from tons of mediocre films from that time

The film's plot is solid yarn but not much above average. What makes the film interesting are two things: First Pier Angeli as the girl. And more than that, that the film gives a strong impression of how Germany looked like during the first years after WW II. There is a very atmospheric photography which shows some original locations in Munich and Bavaria: the Bavarian landscape, some villages, the post war Munich. Beyond it the film focuses on the everyday life of the German people more than other films with a similar topic, and it does it in an interesting way: you see some clothes, cars or flats of that time for example and some of the cabarets, clubs ore Night Shows, which obviously where quite typical for the post war era in Germany (and can be found in some other films about post war Germany ). And by this "The Devil Makes Three" manages to be  a nice contemporary document along the way.