Sous les ponts

Recently I wrote about the films of Wolfgang Staudte who made political films in the 50's, when most Germans preferred to forget about politics. "Unter den Brucken" is made by Helmut Käutner at the end of World War II. He made an a-political movie when the pressure to make a propaganda movie must have been enormous.

"Unter den Brucken" is a film about two men (Hendrik played by Carl Raddatz and Willy played by Gustav Knuth) and their old barge. They both have sometimes girlfriends but are longing for a stable relationship. One night they see a sad girl on a bridge (Anna played by Hannelore Schroth) and fear that she might commit suicide. They convince her to come onboard and when they both fall in love with her the story really gets going.

A story about men working in inland shipping and their complications with women sounds like "L'atalante" (1934, Jean Vigo) and that's true. However "L'atalante" is an all time classic and "Unter den Brucken" an almost forgotten film. That's not right, because "Unter den brucken" is in my opinion not the lesser one of these two films. It has a good story (right mix of romance and comedy) good actors and beautiful images.

There are beautful images of river landsscapes but also of the barge entering Berlin. The last mentioned images reminded me of Harry and Monica leaving Stockhom in "Summer with Monica" (1953, Ingmar Bergmen). By the way, given that the shooting took place in the final stages of World War II, it is a miracle that there is no war damage visible in the Berlin scenes.

The best thing of the film is the camerawork in the scenes between Hendrik and Anna. There are several of them.

• Anna cannot sleep because of the unusual sounds on the barge. Hendrik explains them one by one.
• Anna taking care of a small wound on the hand of Hendrik. Meanwhile they keep looking at each other.
• Hendrik leaving the appartment of Anna in Berlin. Anna looks out of the window and her shadow is projected on the walls of the building block on the other side of the street.
• Anna running up the stairs (only her legs are visible) when Hendrik is back from Rotterdam.

Another comment said that this film "completely transcends its time". That's true, but I wonder how the contemporary audience interpreted this "transcendence". Was not-talking-about-war in the last days of WW2 understood as talking about war in a different way or simply as escapism?

This film was made in the last months of WWII. Because of the allied bombers flying over the set on their way to Berlin and because of the destruction of many locations shooting often had to be stopped and was resumed later when the alarm was over.

And yet "Unter den Brücken" became the most beautiful love-story in german cinema (apart from Ophüls' "Liebelei" of course) without any trace of propaganda. The acting of Hannelore Schroth is wonderfully natural even today and the cinematography reminds me of Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante" and Charles Laughton's "The Night Of The Hunter". This movie stands out as a real miracle and as a singular event in UFA history.

Made in the last year of the Third Reich by Helmut Käutner, one of the major figures of post-War German cinema, UNDER THE BRIDGES decisively shucks off its cardinal historical hallmark and taps into an alternative realm where warfare and defeatism make no trespass in its blueprint. A proletarian love triangle between one woman and two men which predates Truffaut's JULES AND JIM (1962), but in Käunter's head space, ménage à trois is a too risqué cop-out, monogamy is still the keynote and one of the two men must be friend-zoned.

The two bachelors are Hendrik (Raddatz) and Willy (Knuth), good friends and co-owners of a towed barge, who lament that living and working on the Havel river has taken a heavy toll on their chance of meeting a decent woman and getting married. Even their taste for the opposite sex is quite similar, both dally with a waitress called Vera (Grabley), who cannot choose between them because sometimes she cannot tell them apart, so naming a fatty goose Vera is their petty revenge, and Vera the goose will meet a very sorry ending when the suitors move onto their next target.

One night, they accidentally clock that there is a distressed girl leaning on the bridge's balustrade and it seems that she is going to jump but instead, she drops a 10-mark note into the water. And in the quirks of fate, the young girl Anna (Schroth) takes shelter on their barge while they sail toward Berlin where she lives on her lonesome. Both men take a fancy to her, whereas Anna is too defensive to reciprocate hers, and after learning that she earns her 10 marks from modeling, it casts a shadow on their courtship, and strains the bonhomie between the two men, whereupon Willy abandons their Amsterdam freight delivery and stays in Berlin with Anna, but her heart wants what it wants (a little friction is always the best catalyst of romance), three months later, everyone will find his or hers right place, on the barge of course.

Gauged as a progenitor of poetic realism, UNDER THE BRIDGES is visibly eking out its skimpy sustenance but graced with a beguiling silver allure (although the restoration is far from immaculate) through its embracing of both classic stock-in-trade (soft focus, glamorous close-ups, stark chiaroscuro) and unconventional montage choices (Dutch angles, heady editing, rustling flashback shots etc.), and remarkably, Käunter holds the central story tenably empathetic through its rational building of his three protagonists' inscape. Hannelore Schroth comports herself as a melancholic damsel-in-distress, but not without touching niceties; Carl Raddatz gives a convincing turn in solidifying Hendrik's amenable yet skeptical make-up and Gustav Knuth zippily runs away with his avuncular innocuousness.

In a word, UNDER THE BRIDGES is a heart-winning romantic imbroglio level-headedly earns its auspicious ending fair and square, a fitting morale booster and divertissement to its frazzled populace of the time.

This can be considered one of the very last films to be made in Nazi Germany - it passed the censorship in March 1945, but for obvious reasons didn't make it to the cinemas as the street battles were about to commence in Berlin in a few weeks. It's true that at least three new movies had their opening nights in Berlin as late as in March 1945, and reportedly two in April, which seems quite unbelievable. In most of his films Helmut Käutner succeeds in creating a world of his own, a sort of microcosm that holds only the people that we see on the screen. He did also excel in historical costume epics, but his forte was a simple, intimate film about what goes on in the soul. People often wonder, how is it possible that Käutner managed to create his films which are seemingly totally free of any kind of propaganda or references to the war and destruction around him during the time when propaganda was becoming the only remaining weaponry. But I don't think that's quite true: if Under the Bridges were made in a period of peace, it would totally lack the mesmerizing feeling that is attached to this film as we view in proper context. Suddenly it becomes amazingly human, allowing us to realize that even as most of the people in Germany must have thought they were facing total destruction and annihilation literally any day soon, they still kept living and loving and at some point the inner world must have eclipsed the world outside, were death was running amok. Being of the generation that hasn't seen war, I can only imagine how intense one's love or loneliness can grow in the world where there seems to be no tomorrow.

Whatever the story or the genre, Käutner manages to find aspects that make it interesting and wake a lot of human compassion. His storage of empathy and his skills to share it are bottomless. He truly was a great maker of great films about little people.