Well worth seeing social drama from the "Adenauerland" with GOLDEN GLOBE nominee Lilli Palmer and Peter van Eyck
On October 24, 1957, this remarkable film by Harald Braun, who had already shot "Nachtwache / Night Watch" (1949) and "Solange Du da bist" (1953), premiered in Stuttgart. Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996), the author of the important novels "Tauben im Gras / Pigeons in the Grass", "The Treibhaus" and "Death in Rome", one of the most important writers of German post-war literature, was involved in the script. The filming (producer Hans Abich for Bavaria Filmkunst) took place in Berlin and Munich.
The former actress Katja Fleming (Lilli Palmer) is married to the rich industrialist Robert Fleming (O. E. Hasse, also known from the Hitchcock film "I Confess" (1953) with Montgomery Clift) and lives with him in an extremely chic glass high-rise tower and marble. Both reside above the (former) rubble of the war-torn city. When Katja meets the aspiring writer John Lawrence (Peter van Eyck, "Le salaire de la peur / Wage of Fear" / "Liebling der Götter / Darling of the Gods"), he offers her a role in his new play. Katja is enthusiastic and really wants to go back to her traditional job. Her husband Robert has a completely different opinion and pulls out all the stops to dissuade his wife from her plan. It comes to the extreme...
You can tell that it's not so much the slightly melodramatic plot that makes this film so important. It's about the excellent actors (above all, of course, the fantastic Lilli Palmer, who had finally become a super star in the West German film industry) and the intelligent production, which already refer to the upcoming films by Michelangelo Antonioni from Italy. At the retrospective "Loved and Repressed. The Films of the Young Federal Republic," which was shown at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, "The Glass Tower" rightly occupies a prominent position. The film is a significant example of the films from "Adenauerland", which encompasses both the heyday of the German post-war film industry and Konrad Adenauer's chancellorship.
Brigitte Horney (who was also in "Solange Du da bist") and Hannes Messemer (1924-1991) can be seen in other roles. After his breakthrough alongside Maria Schell and Raf Vallone (probably the most passionate couple in German film, pure sexiness!) in "Rose Bernd" (1957), the linguistically gifted Hannes Messemer became one of the busiest actors in international film. In the 1980s he was seen as one of Grandma Drombusch's admirers in the very successful ZDF television series "Diese Drombuschs / These Drombuschs".
This classic, also known as "The Glass Tower", should not be missed under any circumstances!
