Helmut Griem

  • Jeanine Meerapfel – Malou (1981)

    Jeanine Meerapfel1981-1990DramaGermanyRomance

    Malou feels that the difficulties she is experiencing in her relationships lie in her past and so she searches out information about her mother. Her mother, a nightclub singer who lived in Germany, France and Argentina, becomes the focus of a series of flashbacks through which we learn of her mother’s stormy life and the difficulty she had in bringing her up. These insights enable Malou to sort out the difficulties in her own life.Read More »

  • Volker Schlöndorff – Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass AKA The Morals of Ruth Halbfass (1972)

    Volker Schlöndorff1971-1980CrimeDramaGermany

    from Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis, “Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema”

    Volker Schlöndorff based his film “Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass” on a rather spectacular murder case that involved a rich Düsseldorff industrialist’s wife, Minouche Schubert. The case was the stuff of tabloid newspaper exposés, and to some extent “The Morals of Ruth Halbfass” was a calculated attempt by Schlöndorff to win over a popular audience.Read More »

  • Vojtech Jasný – Ansichten eines Clowns AKA The Clown (1976)

    1971-1980DramaGermanyVojtech Jasný

    Hans Schnier has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother’s fanatic Nazism, he is appalled to discover many of the people he knows and loves swept deeply into involvement in the Catholic Church.Read More »

  • Jacques Rouffio – La passante du Sans-Souci AKA The Passerby (1982)

    1981-1990DramaFranceJacques Rouffio

    Max Baumstein is a reputable businessman, a rich self-made man with a conscience – he founded a highly visible and active international organization fighting against violations of human rights. Why would he commit an act that apparently negates the principles he has striven for so long to uphold? Eventually, he reveals a secret about himself that he kept hidden from his younger wife Lina, and that in a roundabout way concerns her as well. It is the conclusion of a struggle that started many decades earlier, when Elsa Wiener, a German singer exiled in Paris, without money or relations, a refugee among many others, faced two daunting problems: surviving in a foreign city, and saving her husband Michel from the clutches of the Nazis.Read More »

  • Luchino Visconti – La Caduta Degli Dei (Götterdämmerung) AKA The Damned [English dub] (1969)

    1961-1970DramaItalyLuchino ViscontiQueer Cinema(s)War

    Quote:
    This brooding, operatic movie about Nazism makes Cabaret look like wholesome family fare. The family in The Damned is a symbol of German society circa 1934. The Krupp-like steel magnate Baron von Essenbeck represents the spineless establishment. The Nazis kill the baron, then frame one heir apparent, a socialist (married to the stunning Charlotte Rampling). A bearish, boorish Essenbeck representing the SA, the Nazis’ early goon squad, takes the reins. But Hitler murdered the SA in the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” providing The Damned with its bravura action scene, a Nazi massacre at a gay SA orgy. The winning Essenbeck is the murderous, pedophilic, transvestite, mother-rapist Martin (sharp-featured Helmut Berger), who represents Nazism. Though he’s better in director Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice, Dirk Bogarde is classy as Martin’s stepdad. The Damned got an Oscar screenplay nomination, and Vincent Canby called Berger’s Martin “the performance of the year.”Read More »

Back to top button