Sous les ponts

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!

"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 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.

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 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.