Unter den Brücken

Hendrik and Willi are co-owners of a cargo barge on the German River Havel. Goods are sent along the river's lifeline to the major ports of Germany. Rotterdam to Berlin and back again. Life is good on the river as far as it goes yet something is missing. Quick jump-offs in the towns along the way become habit. Loneliness can be baggage that we all pack unwittingly. Hendrik played by Carl Raddaz, realizes that real life is going by without them. Especially absent is the company of true female companionship. The river becomes a willing partner to the player who wishes to tempt fate for the rewards of life.

Fate draws a 'pat hand' when late one evening, from the moored barge, a pretty, young women is observed on a bridge ahead. Her lone lamp-lit silhouette showing against the background of night. Appearing distraught, she is crying. The men whisper she might end it all with one last step off the bridge and into cold eternity. Suddenly, she drops something into the black depths below, but by this time our bargemen are there, under the bridge, in their small dingy to retrieve the article. They observe the girl much closer. What to do?

For fate, in it's seeming randomness, allows a new chapter to unfold in three people's lives in post-war Germany. Their meeting becomes a driving gamble of need, and hope. The reward of human companionship, acceptance and the search for true happiness becomes a riddle these players must unravel only to discover that everyone are amateurs in this pageant. What are the mysterious steps required to win the battle over an almost predestined lonely future?

Director Helmut (The Devil's General) Kutner's allegorical tale is a canvas of light and shadow. Mixing pre-war German Industrial high-contrast themes with a kind of pre-natal Cinema Verite he presumes life's outward evidence of happiness is salted with an inner, lonely core which cannot be purged until the lessons of hope are proffered and dangled to the whole world to judge these volunteer competitors. Win or lose? Is the game worth the reward? You 'betcha!

This truly exceptional film, considered by its director Helmut Kautner to be his best, is even more remarkable in that it was filmed in arduous conditions during allied bombing raids and less than an hour's drive from the ravages of war in Berlin. The director, cast and crew were lucky for in Kautner's words: "We lived dreamily alongside time and distracted ourselves from all the horror through work."

It depicts working-class lives in the poetic realist style of Marcel Carné and echoes the lyricism of Vigo's 'L' Atalante'. Courtesy of cinematographer Igor Oberberg it is an etude of light and shadow whilst the haunting theme tune by Bernard Eichhorn is perfectly suited to the film's elegiac, melancholic mood.

Renowned for his gift with actors Kautner has drawn splendid performances from Hannelore Schroth, Carl Raddatz and Helmut Knuth, all of them familiar to German audiences. There is a simpatico between Schroth and Raddatz which is hardly surprising as they were husband and wife, albeit briefly.

Classified as a 'defector' film, one of those completed at the end of the National Socialist era but not premiered until after cessation of hostilities this masterpiece epitomises Kautner's refusal to use his work in the service of Nazi ideology which enabled him to pursue a highly personal approach to mainstrean cinema. As a result he is one of the true 'auteurs'.

Cinéphiles are obliged to shift tons of **** in order to find a diamond and discovering this beautifully realised, heart-winning film makes the effort worthwhile.

"Under the Bridges", made in the last year of the Third Reich, proves that artistic genius can flourish even under the most difficult circumstances. The film completely transcends its time and presents a simple love story, the themes of which are universal. Through both his settings and his actors, Kautner achieves a naturalism which has seldom been equaled. That he managed to do this in 1944-45 Germany is almost unbelievable. A fortunate and unexpected treasure from a most unfortunate 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.

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?