Sous le gravier noir

While I disagree with Eddie Muller's opinion, voiced on TCM's Noir Alley, that this 1961 German film is a masterpiece...the American characters, played by Germans, are too stiff/caricatured, for one thing, and the key scene where Bill/Anni are killed is badly edited, for another...I do think it's a very good late era noir. It does what all fine entries in this darkest of genres must do, namely create a believable moral hellscape. In this case it is West Germany in the uneasy period when WW2 was still very much alive in the hearts/minds of the defeated Germans and relations with the victors is fraught, to say the least. The key visual symbols of this tense, fearful and more than occasionally violent mood are the gravel pit/burial ground and the divey bar/brothel where ceremonies of moral corruption, from stealing to anti Semitism to murder, are enacted. And through these images the tawdry, bleak, lost atmosphere is powerfully conveyed by director Helmut Kautner. Indeed, too powerfully for the German censors of the time who preferred a more "uplifting" vision of their country in the Kennedy 60s (think Elvis in "GI Blues") and thus falsely accused the film of hostility toward Jews (it is, actually, quite the opposite) and ostracized Kautner from film making . Hard to feel too sorry for the guy who, after all, worked steadily in Germany under the Nazis, but certainly not difficult to feel exasperation at the willful misunderstanding from the cultural establishment. B plus.

Helmut Wildt works on the regrading of the road leading to the US Air Force, transporting gravel. He also steals some of it and sells it on the black market. The US officer in charge of the work, Hans Cossy, is married to Ingmar Zeisberg, a former lover of Wildt's; she claims to prefer her new, settled life, but she keeps returning to Wildt's side. When they are out driving in his dump truck, he runs into a young couple, killing them. They wind up under the road's gravel. But a investigation puts pressure on the two. Will Fraulein Zeisberg's faltering remorse overcome Wildt's implacable nihilism?

Helmut Käutner's dark tale of Germany's lingering, evil underside is a tough watch, what with survivals of fascist archetypes, old men with blue numbers tattooed on tir wrist, and a hunger for something solid and real. It was denounced, edited to remove social commentary, and given a lighter ending. The original cut was restored in the 2010s.

In post-war Germany, in a dreary small town near a US air force base, some of the local truckers hired by the Americans to supply the base with gravel and other construction supplies have a side job in the black market. Trucker Robert, underplayed to anti-hero perfection by Helmut Wildt, lives in a room above a brothel-bar in town and has an emotionless relationship with one of the B-girls (Anita Hofer) who has a yen for him. One day he spots an old flame(Ingmar Zeisberg), now married to an American officer running the base, and attempts to relight their fire in secret, a decision that leads to a tragic accident. It's all downhill after that.

It's downbeat, but one of the most compelling dramas about post-war Europe I've ever seen. It was cut to remove an anti-Semitic outburst by a bar drunk but restored in 2009. The tech credits and all of the performers, from the main actors to the extras, are excellent. It hasn't been shown on Noir Alley--it should-- but Eddie has programmed it at several festivals. Directed and co-written by Helmut Kautner, it was not the kind of commercial film the West German studios were producing in the late 1950s and 1960s.

This is rather terrific and very different something like a noir, but certainly very dark and nasty with some surprisingly, sudden moments of nudity. Set in Sohnen, a fictional village, in Hunstrueck near by a US airbase using to train jet pilots although here we do not see these but instead we have the black market and this amazing bar and brothel. There is death from the very beginning and some more but none of those sexy kills and there is something worrying amidst the rubble and muddy sites while overhead the whine of those jets. In that bar there is fun and sex and music from the jukebox but dark outside there is death and passion and nothing sentimental at all. The location shooting was done at the Hahn Air Base and the interiors in Berlin. Helmut Kautner filmed throughout the war but after this one there were clearly problems and even making some cuts it disappeared and afterwards he moved into TV.

"Schwarzer Kies" is an extremely bleak movie that makes me wonder it ever found enough supporters to get made at all. The dark, disturbing story is portrays a German village living off an American Air Force Base (around 1960) mostly by cheating and prostituting. It is not surprising that the film didn't do much money at the box office. And the film was hurt by an accusation of antisemitism, which led to being recut to avoid a bad press. The accusation was a clear misinterpretation. What the film really did, was to show that antisemitism was still around and some people had not changed.

The Americans (all played by German actors) do not appear much better than the Germans. Their plan to build a rocket launch base does not sound very promising for peace. The soldiers are shown mainly frequenting a local bar/bordello and the officers checking bills and hoping to leave soon for a better post. Director Helmut Käutner did not spare many, most people in his film are in some way cunning, every one seems to be involved or at least in the know of the black market around the base. From the very first scene to the very last, the film is most uncompromising in his portrait of greed, lust and bondage.

The actors are all unknown today although they did a good job. It is a Germany we have never seen on film before or even after. It took guts to get this film made. The Friedrich Wilhem Murnau Stiftung did a great job restoring the film to its original lenght and optical quality.