'Die Andere Heimat', or 'Home from Home' (2013)

Before I get to ‘Die Andere Heimat’, let me tell you a little about the Heimat trilogy.  ‘Heimat’ (1984), is either a film, or a series of films, or a TV series shown in cinemas.  It was followed by ‘Die Zweite Heimat’ (1993), and the more-boringly-named ‘Heimat 3’ (2004).  Between them, they make up an epic of Biblical proportions - and I’m not just flinging that around as a cliché: one of my favourite things about the Heimat series, and about the Old Testament (in particular the Pentateuch and the books of Samuel and Kings) is the way they take their time to tell a very long story, spanning generations; by necessity full of gaps, but peppered with great details, character sketches, and sudden moments of focus on things that are either significant or charmingly domestic.  In each case, it suggests that the whole of history is one long story, and helps us see how intimately the present day is linked to the beginning of humanity.  I really like stories, and I especially like these great hunks of story, into which all others fit.

‘Heimat’ tells the story of the small German village of Schabbach, out in a neglected corner of Germany where the people talk like farmers, from 1919 to 1982 - in particular, we focus on the family of Paul and Maria Simon.  Paul Simon (pronounced ‘Powell Semen’) walks out of the village, and out of the movie, at the end of the first couple-of-hour instalment, leaving Maria to take the focus and raise the next generation.  As per the Books of Kings, time passes, the new generation gradually take the focus, and by the end of 15 hours real-time and 60 years of story, everyone we were watching at the start is dead.

‘Die Zweite Heimat’ (sort-of meaning ‘the second home’, or ‘the second homeland’) focuses on my favourite character from the series, or from anything, Hermann Simon, a sexually precocious child who leaves to study music composition in Munich - and Clarissa Lichtblau, a cellist whose celling goes awry.  The 26 hours of this second Heimat take us from 1960 to 1970 - a fascinating decade in Germany, and everywhere.  Watching it was the only time I’d ever really believed that the sixties were a real era from the world I live in, rather than being a weird fantasy genre like Sci-Fi or Western.  ‘Heimat 3’ is a more concise, at eleven hours, and tells the story of Hermann and Clarissa’s return to Schabbach, and fills in the gap from the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, up to the year 2000.  It brings in a lot of characters who were present in the first first but absent from the second, and most of them die, so much time having passed.

Brazil: a popular part of the Americas, if you're a 19th Century Prussian

For a long time, that seemed to be it.  A strong trilogy, spanning 81 years in what felt like real-time, but actually only lasting as long as the James Bond canon (including the first CR and NSNA).  In 2011, writer-director Edgar Reitz made a surprising announcement - there was going to be one more instalment, ‘Die Andere Heimat’, or ‘The Other Heimat/Home’ (though it was actually released over here as ‘Home from Home’, a reasonable title, but one that annoyingly breaks the pattern of the series).  This new film is a prequel, regarding ancestors of the Simon family in 1840s Schabbach, and deciding whether or not to leave frosty Prussia for the verdant warmth of South America.

How does it differ from the earlier films?  What makes this a film for the 2010s?  Well, we're in very wide widescreen, at last - I realise that's a 1953 innovation, but it's clear that this is a wholly-cinematic piece, not a TV-cinema hybrid like those earlier works.  Its much shorter duration (225 minutes) might represent modern tastes and attention-spans, or might just tell us that the director is near retirement, and the funding for sober dramas is hard to come by.  There's a rather more active camera, at one point following a full-pelt run through the village, and showing off the full run of 19th century building facades.

There's also a rather different use of colour to the earlier films.  The original 'Heimat' was made in black and white and colour (and on a variety of film-stocks, but this fact is slightly less obvious on the small-screen).  It starts off almost entirely monochrome, with colour shots used very rarely to highlight emotions, ideas or temperatures.  As the years go on, there's more and more colour (with the big switch to almost-all-in-colour coming at the the switch-on of West German colour TV in 1967), and this carries on until the end of 'Heimat 3', which is almost entirely colour.  'Die Zweite Heimat', coming in-between, uses it differently, giving us Munich's daytime in monochrome, and night-life in colour, to show the difference between the two worlds.  'Die Andere Heimat', set in history, is overwhelmingly monochrome, but very occasionally introduces a colour element into an otherwise black-and-white scene - a searing-hot horse-shoe, a green skirt during a discussion of colour language, or the great comet of 1844, for example.  It's something that was tried very briefly in the earlier films -a shot of colour sausages in a monochrome window in 1963, for example.  It fits in nicely, and makes good use of modern technology, but to anyone unschooled in Heimat it must seem an odd novelty.

Johann Simon (Rüdiger Kriese) and a splash of colour.

After all my feverish anticipation I’m afraid I’m a little disappointed with 'Die Andere Heimat'.  It’s good, but ‘Heimat’ was great.  If you've heard any publicity for it, you'll know it's about Jakob Simon deciding whether he wants to emigrate - but he seems to spend ages on the decision, getting into various scrapes along the way, and in the end we haven't learned a lot that couldn't be picked up from the trailer.  I wanted more.  I wanted bigger.  There’s a lot to recommend it - it’s engrossing, it's attractive to look at, it's educational, giving a convincing picture of a place, an era, and the people who lived there; the funeral for babies is as memorable as the original Heimat's funeral for Maria in the storm, so there are still some striking images.  It all just feels so short.  I realise three-and-three-quarter hours doesn't sound short, but compared to the earlier Heimats, this feels like a flash in the pan, like a first episode of something longer.  

Since starting this blog, I've watched a whole lot of films to represent the past hundred years of cinema, and while there's been a lot to delight in, it's made me weary of movie-shaped movies, films with the clear, familiar structure.  You can do a lot in 90 or 120 minutes - just look at 'Man With a Movie Camera' (1929) or 'Thirty Two Short Films about Glen Gould' (1993), for instance, but most films feel like pretty short, pretty limited stories, and I've probably found the most pleasure in the films that have done something outside the usual pattern of the movie-shaped movie, or entertained and engaged me so intensely that I forgot to watch analytically.  Now, 'Heimat' has always been a triumph of long-form story-telling, but 'Die Andere Heimat' feels more like a movie movie, a normal movie, than a Heimat movie.  At the end, it all felt a little insubstantial.  What happens next week?  Heck, what happened in Schabbach between 1844 and 1919?  It's a big old gap, and (alas) I'm not sure Heimat fan-fiction exists - at least, not in English.

(Perhaps I'm being a little harsh on films in the above paragraph, but compared to the great long-form storytelling of the modern TV serial - 'Orange is the New Black', 'The Killing' or 'Daredevil', for instance, which do so much with their characters and scenarios, movies seem very light sketches of their subjects.  A season of OitNB isn't a bad comparison to 1993's 'Die Zweite Heimat', as both are divided into 13 'episodes', each of which gives a good chunk of time to the main character - Piper and Hermann, respectively - while explicitly giving focus to a character-of-the-week, really mining into their character, situation and story.  They're both pretty intense in the drama stakes, though OitNB is more inclined to resolve to happy endings, while Heimat is bleaker, or more like real life, or more German, depending on your perspective.  They both suit binge-watching).

Margarethe (Marita Breuer) and Jakob (Jan Dieter Schneider)

Despite my complaints, I'm delighted by the existence of this new slice of time.  The whole of Heimat-dom is bigger and better for it, and when I'd finished it I really wanted to move on to the first episode of 'Heimat' proper (but I held back, as I know that's a slippery slope requiring a lot of hours and tears).  Marita Breuer, one of Germany's best method-actors, is the real star of both films - Maria in the 1984 original, and Margarethe here.  She's a great performer, and it's a real pity she's not known in the UK, and I'd happily go out of my way to watch her in anything you care to recommend.  The village, the family, and even the technology at the forge (which I thought of as crude in 1919, but can now see as rather ingenious) are all enriched by the extra context.  Go back another hundred years, and you'll notice all the things that aren't there, and that you took for granted.  It's this richness and detail and depth -- Heimat isn't like movies, it's like life.

P.S. If the 'Heimat' formula of something that's kind-of a movie and kind-of in episodes sounds odd, compare it to 'Die Nibelungen' (1924), a 5-hour movie designed to be watched in two parts on consecutive days, or 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945), a movie and its sequel, designed to be shown as a double-bill because it was briefly illegal to make films longer than 90 minutes, and this was the only way to tell the whole story.  Or 'Das Boot' (1981), which was made for German TV as a six-parter, and simultaneously prepared for abridged international cinema release, and is now mainly thought of as a movie.  Did I watch those films just so I could compare them to 'Heimat'?  Maybe, but they were astonishing in all the good ways.

P.P.S. I’ve been waiting very excitedly for this film to be released, and then be released with English subtitles, for as long as this blog has existed (which is to say, since the end of 2012).  This was always meant to be the 2013 movie, but it’s taken until now for it to come out on DVD and blu-ray.  Finally, the Penciltonian’s original intentions have been met.  It’s been a lively ride.  Good work, readers!

DVDs of Heimat, Die Zweite Heimat (and soundtrack),
Heimat 3, Heimat: Die Fragmente, Home from Home.

A few fannish, spoilery thoughts, of interest to Heimat devotees:

I think the Simon family tree now goes something like this (with a lot of guesswork on dates, and things I'll need to check on rewatch):

Großmutter Mathilde begat Johann Simon (or possible Margarethe?)

Johann and Margarethe Simon (born 1785-1790ish) begat three children who didn't live to adulthood, plus Gustav (in 1824) and Jakob (in 1826)

Gustav Simon married Henriette (whose name I may have noted down incorrectly, as I can't find her in the cast-list) and they begat Mathilde (in 1843) and Jacobine (1844), the latter of whom may be the ancestor of the South American Simons who come to celebrate Paul's big birthday in part ten or eleven of the original 'Heimat'.

Jakob married Florinchen Niem, and must have begotten some children, probably starting around 1845-1850.  Original film grand-patriarch Matthias Simon was born in 1872, so the dates work out well for him to be their grandson.  It's hard to imagine a time when he wasn't ancient.  I've always rather ignored him as a character, assuming the laters Simons inherited their merits from Maria and Katharina, admirable women both - but knowing he's a descendant of wide-eyed Jakob makes me want to reconsider him.  It's a pity we never get to see him in his prime.

In short, the male line runs Johann, Jakob, mystery person, Matthias, Paul, and the trio of Anton/Ernst/Hermann (kind-of).  Looking at those who became Simons by marriage, and so took charge of the Simon house, it runs Mathilde, Margarethe, Florinchen Niem, ???, Katharina Schirmer, Maria Weigand, and then it was boarded up, and for the life of me, I can't think what becomes of the house after Paul puts his commemorative plaque on it at the start of the 1980s.

I will need to re-watch the film to be clear about a few characters.  There's one who might be Jakob's sister, though I was a bit confused on that point.  I assume (based on casting) that she or Jakob begat a daughter who married a son of the Pastor we see in this film, Dorfpfarrer Wiegand, as he is presumably the grandfather of Maria's dad Alois Weigand (1870-1965).

Anyway, I'd be very glad of any advice or corrections on sorting all this out.

2013 Dies!

Well, that was the year of The Penciltonian.  What an exciting time!  What a world of adventures!  What!  Why?

I had hoped never to watch another film again, but the bright lights and colours have drawn me back.  Since the official end of the project and the blog, I've found myself compelled to watch the following motion pictures, which I report here in order to wrap up the year:

Iron Sky (2012)

This is actually a far more appropriate end to The Penciltonian than whatever the actual end was: an exciting Finnish/German/Australian/kinda-American film, riffing on a lot of the German movies I've been watching (even 1943's 'Münchausen', which I'd thought pretty obscure) and slathered in modern-style Wagner.  An action comedy about space-Nazis, an enjoyable and necessarily broad satire, which didn't end as I expected.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

On St Christmas Eve's Day, I actually saw a movie on the BIG SCREEN, something I had failed to achieve through the body of the year.  It's an excellent telling of the story, and is pretty close to being a perfect film.  Attractive, exciting, amusing and moving, and the muppets work surprisingly well alongside human actors, without seeming unduly ridiculous.  I'm sure I had more to say about it, but Christmas.

Witchfinder General (1968)

What a jerk!  I've always liked the Puritan style, and have seen photos from the film and admired Matthew Hopkins' hat and fine array, but he was a horrid fellow.  This film sits neatly alongside 'Häxan' (1922) and 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) as a tale of misidentified witches being beaten up by unchristian Christians - and it joins my beloved 'Winstanley' in being an inspiration for 2013's surprise hit 'A Field in England'.  This is a film of really horrible, hard-to-watch violence (which seems entirely appropriate, given the subject matter), and Pertwee-era-style crash zooms (which seem less appropriate).  Vincent Price IS the Witchfinder General.

War and Peace (1956)

I watched the first hour of this, but became immensely irritated.  It wasn't terrible, but it was slow and unexciting, and I'm no longer obliged to watch slow, unexciting films.  I have the liberty to escape such things.  I also grew aware that the film was not at all the best way to take this particular story.  As much as a massive, massive book is daunting, a film that boils a massive, massive story down to a few hours and makes it feel like any other romance, is a less appealing and less helpful prospect.

A borrowed and wearying cat on me, and upon you all.

So, what does 2014 bring?  I tried to make a list of my predictions, but the list started out frighteningly bleak and full of catastrophe (which celebrities will die, this year?), before becoming a sequence of portents of doom and stars of ill-omen, so I stopped making the list and wondered whatever was wrong with me.  2014 will be very lovely.  Amen.

Unreported films

There have been a number of films I've watched during the period of the blog which for one reason or another I haven't written up for you.  They all duplicate (and in some cases triplicate) years I've covered with other films, but for reasons of completism, here's a brief run-down.

Vertigo (1958)

A third James-Stewart-starring Hitchcock movie, after my posts on 'Rope' (1948) and 'Rear Window' (1954).  Of the three, only this one isn't confined to a single room, meaning it can roam up and down the steep San Francisco hills, mainly down.  I was very taken by this film when I first watched it, as there's a point when it rather alarmingly reveals that it isn't in the genre you expected.  Rewatching, I was surprised, and not pleasantly, at what a sinister jerk the hero becomes toward the end.  And Kim Novak's eyebrows are strange and confusing throughout.

Bucket of Blood (1959)

I watched this and wrote it up for you, but then I watched it again.  It's good, it's short, and much of it is imitable.  I made a page of notes the second time, but apparently I've lost it.

The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977)

This is an absurd comedy written and directed by Marty Feldman, and it's a real pity it isn't better known.  It feels like a British Mel Brooks film, or a sillier and wider-ranging 'The Bed Sitting Room' (1969).  It's either an adaptation of a classic novel, or (as the title suggests) a remake of the 1926, 1939 and 1966 films, which ignores the original's lack of laughs and somehow comes out with a more interesting and satisfying resolution than any of those versions managed.  It stars Marty Feldman, Michael York and Peter Ustinov, and features (among many others) a memorable performance from James Earl Jones, who plays an Arab in the style of Terry Thomas.

Chariots of Fire (1981)

I picked up a copy of this film during the 2012 olympics.  I didn't watch any of the sport, but the opening ceremony had impressed me, and a rendition of the theme from Chariots of Fire stirred something within me.  It's music I've always associated with running in slow-motion, so I'd long held at least a little interest in watching the film.  Besides, it got the oscar for Best Screenplay, which tends to mean a film is worth a look in.  It's a fine thing, and well worth the attention given to it at the time, and isn't at all the film I'd expected.

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988)

My cousin Alice recommended me this film, and I sought out a copy the following day.  I had meant to write it up for 1988, but somehow 'The Last Temptation of Christ', 'Akira' and 'A Short Film About Killing' all got in the way.  The occasion of my viewing is now eleven months ago, so I can't recall a great deal, except that the film struck me as extremely Italian, and felt much more like the stereotype I had in mind of European films than any of the German, French or Scandinavian films I'd seen.  It has a Summery, somewhat Catholic feel to it, like 'Cavalleria Rusticana'.  I meant at the time to watch the Director's Cut version, which came in the same set, that I might have a fuller idea of the film before writing it up.  Still not gotten around to that, but I imagine it'll happen eventually.

Ghostbusters II (1989)

After watching 'Ghostbusters' (1984) this was inevitable.  It's a mite less sweary than the original, but otherwise very similar in style, humour and production, and amply enjoyable.  It's a mystery to me why this sequel isn't held in the same regard as the original.

The Baby of Mâcon (1993)

Long-term readers will know I have a love of Peter Greenaway films.  Like so many of his movies, this fascinated me with its ideas and dazzled me with its beautiful cinematography by Sacha Vierny.  Its events show a play within a play - a vast audience, all dressed splendidly in what I'd count as an 18th century style, watching, and joining in with, a play about an ostensibly virgin birth and a tiny, all-powerful baby.  There's a lot of colour and blood and nudity, and it's quite astounding to behold.  The ending, though, was too unpleasant, and represented the first and only time I watched a film for The Penciltonian and resolved not to write it up for reasons of censorship.  If Peter Greenaway has ever gone too far, it was with the resolution to this film, which made for extremely uncomfortable viewing.

Hackers (1995)

1995 was an exciting year for movies, with 'Tank Girl', 'Toy Story', 'Goldeneye', 'Nixon' and 'Jumanji' (the latter of which is a film everybody saw, but nobody now speaks about) all in cinemas.  Saskia is a great advocate for the dream of nineties, so I turned to her for a recommendation, and was shown both 'Empire Records', which got a post of its own, and 'Hackers', an exciting story about the 1337 h@xX0r5, 7H05e co0l kiD$ wH0 C0UlD 7Urn c0mpu73r$ t0 tH3Ir pURp0$35, CH@Ng3 7H3Ir GR@des 0N $Ch00l coMpU73r5, $73@l m0n3y FR0m 8@nK5 (0n @ WhIM) @Nd dR355 iN 0U7l@NDI5h 0u7fI7s, HaPPy n07 70 C0nF0rM.

A Night at the Roxbury (1998)

An enjoyable, though often-scorned bromance, regarding two jiving brothers (Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan) who yearn to escape their jobs at their father's fake-flower shop and make it big in the dance club scene.  I'm not surprised it's less popular and less well-known than other Saturday Night Live movies as it lacks much of a hook to draw audiences in and keep 'em, but it seemed quite enjoyable enough, and an antidote to some of the heavier films I'd been watching.

Shaft (2000)

Having watched 'Shaft' (1971) and its two sequels, it was inevitable I'd get to this year 2000 remake, starring Samuel L Jackson.  It's a fair action movie - and is as explosive and slick as you might hope for, but it's not as incisive as the original, which seemed edgier and more dangerous.  I liked the soundtrack, which is by David Arnold who composed the music for the nineties and noughties Bond movies, and who revisits the original 'Shaft''s funky sound in his own glossy style.  I'm not so sure I can get behind the film's apparent glorification of police brutality, in which John Shaft, a cop, achieves what he needs to be beating people up and pistol-whipping unarmed suspects into respecting him.  We're meant to like the cops who turn a blind eye to these antics.  I guess it gets the job done, but not every violent police officer is so good at heart as John Shaft.  Noughties Shaft seems to have much less sex than the seventies Shaft did, too; perhaps it fell out of fashion.

Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

An inevitable watch, after 'A Night at the Roxbury' (1998).  A bizarre and pleasing picture of the newsrooms of the 1970s.  Ron Burgundy's jazz-flute recital is a fantastic thing to witness.  The film goes for the old, slightly annoying convention of making all the male characters extremely amusing, but all female characters serious straight-man types who make no attempt to amuse.  Are there any films that reverse this trope?

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

It turned out I had absolutely the wrong idea about the Fast and the Furious movies.  I'd expected tales of car-theft, homicide, drive-by shootings and gritty America.  What I find instead, in this, the third in the series, is an extremely clean film about young racers, challenging one another to drive better and faster to win women.  Saskia described the films as chav-magnets, which might be a fair stab at the core audience.  Like 'The Transporter' (), the film reads like a story-board, each shot clinically chosen, rather than looking like a record of real events caught on camera.  It's an artificial style, but very efficient, very economical.  The script is tight and well-structured (as are, I understand, the others in the series), meaning that the story is well-paced and the protagonist's story engaging and satisfying.  Alas, the core of the film is that old, uncomfortable idea that the white man can go out to a foreign country and in a few short weeks become better than any native at whatever it is the foreign culture supposedly excels in.  See also 'Avatar' (2009) and, I suspect, 'The Last Samurai' (2003).

Das Weiße Band (2009)

I have as many Toms in my entourage as Mary Queen of Scots had Marys (which is to say, about four of them), and one such Tom urged me to seek out films by director Michael Haneke.  The very next day, 'Das Weiße Band' popped up the BBC iPlayer.  It's set in Germany in the early 1910s, and so neatly plugs the gap in my knowledge of 20th Century Germany that's so well filled by 'Heimat' 1-3, Fritz Lang's Weimar Berlin crime films (1922, 1931, 1933), 'Das Boot' (1981), 'Downfall' (2004), 'Der Baader Meinhof Komplex' (2008) and 'Goodbye Lenin!' (2003).  It's a rather unpleasant crime film, subtitled 'A German Children's Story', in which the children are known by name but the adults only by occupation.  Despite being set slightly before the First World War, the film has its mind on the second war, when these children will be running the country based on the lessons learnt in infancy.  Despite a pretty poor special effect of a horse falling over, this is a good film, if rather grim.  It's in black-and-white, too, meaning I have a wholly or largely monochrome film in every decade but the nineties.

Cosmopolis (2012)

Having watched 'Metropolis' (1927) and 'Persepolis' (2008), 'Cosmopolis' had to follow.  This is a story about a businessman in a car going to get his hair cut.  It looks like a blockbuster but is actually an art film, or something of the kind.  There's a wonderful artificiality to his limo's interior, and a daunting and real dirtiness to everything that happens outside it.  I really liked the vast majority of 'Cosmopolis', but wanted it to have a blunter ending.  The final confrontation felt too much like a final confrontation, and the film seemed to lose some of its fascinating individuality.  I'm told the book is deeper and more interesting.

Ted (2012)

I'd almost forgotten that I'd seen this during the course of the project, so long ago was it.  I'd initially meant to write this up, but, in a moment of belief that The Penciltonian was wholesome family reading, I censored this and 'The Baby of Mâcon' out of having their own posts.  Anyway, 'Ted' seemed just the thing to watch while visiting Big Dave in London, where we had been to a fine crêperie/crémerie combo for good pancakes.  The film is plainly from the mind of Seth MacFarlane, creator of 'Family Guy' and its ilk, and I know their comedy is fairly divisive, but it's a style I can enjoy, and which is used well here.  The film put me in mind of one I'd made and then destroyed, 'The Death of Pencilton' about an owl puppet which is obviously a puppet but which is nonetheless treated as being alive.  This did it better.

The Hunger Games (2012)

I enjoyed this, but wondered whether I would have liked the book more - not because the film was deficient, but because I thought prose might have afforded more intimacy to the actual Game part of the story.  A book could give an insight to Katniss's thoughts that was lacking here.  Her predicament might have been more genuinely daunting from her point of view.  As it was, I knew she'd be out of danger inside two hours and back for a sequel or two.  Nonetheless, I look forward to the next film, which I understand to be in cinemas now, but I can't think when I'll get to see it.

Run Lola Run! (1998)

Since my Penciltonian project is nearing its completion, I've been looking over the list of films I've watched this year, and I realised that the 1990s was almost the only decade to be made up entirely of English-language films.  (The other decade lacking foreign-language cinema was the 2010s, but I have another 6 years to rectify that particular omission).  I knew immediately what I'd like to watch: 'Lola Rennt', or 'Run Lola Run', a sassy German film which pleased and excited me when I saw it half a decade ago, and which I'd very happily recommend to anybody who hasn't tried foreign cinema before.

As you might expect, it regards Lola, running.

Lola (Franka Potente) has exactly twenty minutes to rustle up 100,000 German marks to save the life of her jerk boyfriend Manni, played by Moritz Bleibtreu, who went on to play, with a more competent criminality, Andreas Baader in 'Der Baader Meinhof Komplex' (2008).  Lola has an excellent rage, a shock of red hair of the most enviable character, and a capacity to scream with such determination that glass and other weak things must shatter.

Lola Rennt!

The events of the film last just over twenty minutes, but the film is almost an hour and a half in length.  We see multiple attempts by Lola to find and deliver the money, and when she fails she goes back to the beginning and starts again, like a video-game character trying new ways to beat a level.  Which way she goes, and what happens to each of the characters, depends entirely upon her timing: it isn't that she makes different decisions in the same situations, but rather that the situations are different when she gets there.  It all hinges on how quickly she makes it down some (animated) steps at the start.  A difference of a single second is all it takes to change many lives.

I'll certainly keep an eye out for more films from writer/director Tom Tykwer, who works with an attractive energy and flair, and casts even the smallest parts memorably.  I don't know why I haven't watched this film more often.  It's a cool, stylish movie, and a good drama.  It's colourful, it's attractive, has good characters, a pleasing techno soundtrack, and a lot of fun.  If it was in English, you'd all have seen it by now.

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Das Herz der Königin (1940)

Zarah Leander IS Mary Queen of Scots.

There are plenty of English-language films about foreign history - 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971), for instance, about the death of the Tsar of Russia, or almost any film about Jesus, so I've long been curious about foreign films about English history.  Are there Indian films about Cromwell, or Russian biopics of Queen Victoria?

'Das Herz der Königin' is exactly what I'd been looking for - a film made in Nazi Germany about Mary Queen of Scots' imprisonment and (spoiler) execution by Queen Elizabeth of England.  It's a bit of history I don't really know, as it wasn't on the syllabus in my youth.  I read the first half of Antonia Fraser's biography of Mary last year, so have a vague understanding of the queen and her times, but since I didn't ever finish the (good and thorough) book, the end of Mary's life is something I first learned about from this film.

I think this may be Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who I've much enjoyed in Fritz Lang's
'Metropolis' (1927), 'Die Nibelungen' (1924), and the Dr Mabuse films (1922, 1933)

The history is something like this: England and 'Schottland' were completely separate nations back then, and their queens, Elizabeth and Mary, were cousins who always wanted to meet.  Catholic Scotland believed Mary was the real heir to England's throne, as, refusing to recognise Henry VIII's divorce, they considered Elizabeth illegitimate and thus an ineligible heir.  Mary went to France for a bit (which in those days was next-door to Scotland) to marry a prince, who died.  When she came back to Scotland it was no longer as Catholic as she was (for, having had Catherine de Medici as a mother-in-law, she was Catholic indeed).  Everything went pretty badly for her until she was locked up by the English for some reason (in the middle of Sheffield, though you wouldn't recognise it in those pre-tram days), and was beheaded for something like treason.  She and Elizabeth never met, except perhaps a little bit in this movie.  The fruit of her loins became king of both England and Scotland, uniting the island of Great Britain, so that's a sort-of happy ending for you.

Zarah Leander, Nazi Germany's great diva, plays Mary, and gets a number of sad-sounding songs, though their contents could be intensely jolly for all I know, as I was watching the film in German without subtitles, so had no idea what anybody was saying.  Nonetheless, Leander gives a pleasant performance, though some count it as her worst.  I've long been curious to see her in action as Maria and Pauline Simon in my beloved 'Heimat' (1984) go to see her in the 1938 film of the same name, and admire her greatly.

Sorry, German language, I've no idea what you're trying to tell me.

The whole film looks very fine, giving us a splendid, very clean picture of history.  Big Tudor costumes: doublets, kilts, ball-gowns and jerkins.  Plenty to envy, and want to wear.  We can tell it's set in England and Scotland, as there's Norman architecture and lots of capotains, a hat I very much enjoy.

I think I would have found the movie more enjoyable, not to mention more intelligible, had some subtitles been available to me.  It would probably make the film's anti-British bias more evident, which in pictures is only apparent in the chilly horridness of Königin Elizabeth's performance.  Who knows what allegations lie within the dialogue?

P.S. Because I only realised a year ago, I shall clarify: Mary Queen of Scots isn't the same person as 'Bloody' Mary, Queen of England, they merely shared a forename, a century and a lineage.  This all happened about 450 fears ago, shortly before Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Guy Fawkes, the revolution and the interregnum (in that order).

P.P.S. While watching the film, my chair broke and I fell over backwards.  It was hilarious.

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Look, it's not out on video, but you can find the film on Youtube.  Or better, why not read Antonia Fraser's biography of Mary?  It's really good.  I only didn't finish it because I'm lazy.

Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)

A disguise of Dr Mabuse

Many months ago, I wrote about this film's sequel, 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' (1933), which pitted Inspector Lohmann from 'M' (1931) against the villainous Dr Mabuse from this silent picture, 'Dr Mabuse, the Gambler'.  At the time I was faintly curious to know what Mabuse had been up to before his insanity and institutionalisation, but at the time I was wary of silent films, so passed the opportunity by.  However, my trusty CRT television broke down and died a few weeks ago, so I upgraded to HD at last, and ordered myself a copy of this movie to test it out.  I learnt early in The Penciltonian that director Fritz Lang created pictures worth looking at.  As in 'Metropolis' (1927), he casts Rudolf Klein-Rogge as a charismatic villain, and as in 'Die Nibelungen' (1925) he tells his story over almost five hours, with the audience watching the first half of the film one day, returning to the cinema a day later to find out what happened in the second half.

Nice hat and pattern there, Aud Egede-Nissen.

This film breaks the division I'd imagined in Lang's directorial career.  In my mind, he spent the 20s making epic sci-fi and fantasy silent films, before moving into (slightly) more grounded Berlin-based crime thrillers with the advent of sound in the 30s.  But this is a silent crime film of gargantuan character, and feels like it belongs in both portions.  It's the age of monocles, of cocain and of intertitles.  Dr Mabuse is a psychoanalyst, a gambler and a hypnotist.  An evil hypnotist, mind.  As in the sequel, there's something of a mystery over whether his powers are granted by a knowledge of human psychology, by a triumph of patented German will-power, or by some force yet more malign and magical.  Mabuse is a brilliant and terrible individual, a stylish and intense fellow and a master of disguise.  He dresses up a lot, coaxes people into losing vast sums at cards, and uses his pawns to engage in the more practical criminal fare of theft, un-theft, stock-market cunning and (eventually) murder.  In short, he's The Master, 48 years early.

Chief Inspector Norbert von Wenk regards the artworks of high society.

Within ten minutes of the start, I was excited about some day rewatching the film.  It had an energy, a flair and a visual style that I found very alluring.  I used to have a rather dim opinion of silent films (an opinion you can share if you watch 'Birth of a Nation', 1915, first), but films like this are so rich and exciting, and tell their stories with a directness and drama that you wonder why spoken dialogue ever seemed like a necessary invention.  I love the scene of hypnosis that we see from the point-of-view of the hypnotee, as everything except Mabuse's face grows blurry and the playing cards change their faces.  I love the scenes of miss Cara Carozza dancing - she's an amazing dancer, but not necessarily a good one, but her unembarrassable flailing and jiving is something I one immediately wished to imitate - a strangely attractive, undisciplined style, with plenty of gusto.  I dig the amazing and scary expressionist art that stocks the houses of the city's upper crust; Mabuse says expressionism is just 'spilerei', 'playing about' - but he sees nothing wrong with playing about.  He's a Spieler!

The film very briefly passes the Bechdel test when Cara and Gräfin Dusy Told talk to
each other in prison, but in no time they're on about Dr Mabuse this and Dr Mabuse that...

It's a fine thriller, with a timeless flavour, if not a modern one.  Scenes that I take to be innovative (though they may already have been old hat) are things which later became clichés, but remain ever exciting: a taxi-driver surreptitiously pulls a lever releasing knockout gas in his passenger compartment, for instance.  It feels as if James Bond could break out at any moment.  This is so far advanced, so far advanced in terms of ambition, style and depth from that other tale of silent criminality, 'Dr Nicholson and the Blue Diamond' (1913, and yes, all doctors in cinema were evil until 1965) that it's hard to believe only a decade has gone by.  This is a sinister and exciting story, and is comfortably up to the standards of Fritz Lang's more famous crime-films.  And it's impressive indeed to remain exciting for so many hours.


P.S. This was the same year as 'Nosferatu' and the amazing 'Häxan'.  What a year for European cinema!  Over in the states 'King of Kings' was happening, so the year's merits may have been international.  Of the lot, I believe this is my favourite.  I may need to re-watch 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' again now, to remind myself what happened next.

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It may surprise you to learn that ancient cinema looks beautiful on blu-ray.  It isn't a format I advocate often, but it brings out every crinkle, every wall-paper, and is a fine way to take these thrilling stories.

Münchausen (1943)

I've seen films made during wartime from Britain, America and France, so I was very keen to find one from Germany.  I'm aware there were other countries involved in World War II, but these are the four we see in 'The Longest Day' (1962), which seems a fair criterion for The Penciltonian.  'Münchausen' is a lavish comedy made by order of Joseph Goebbels, to prove that Nazi Germany could rival anything Hollywood could produce.

The film tells the story of Baron Hieronymous von Münchausen, the famous teller of tall tales (or as he's presented here, man of bizarre adventures).  He rides on a cannonball, wins the love of the Empress of Russia, and travels to the moon, where he learns that time works quite differently to how it does on Earth.  It's a story that suits the colour and ambition on display here, and the inventive film-craft available in the country that produced 'Metropolis' (1927).  It's a lavish tale, intended to rival 'The Wizard of Oz' and 'Gone With the Wind' (both 1939) for splendour, so accordingly the movie is full of the most astounding hats, costumes and model shots.

The Baron meets the fastest man in the world

At first it seems we're watching the Baron in the 18th Century, but we soon learn that an apparent descendant of his is holding a costume ball, so the old-fashioned costume and music give way to automobiles and electricity, and what seems to be a black character played by a white actor turns out to be a white character whose make-up comes off easily.  There's a pleasing artificiality to the film, right from the start, which excuses some of the fantastical stylisation of the rest of the film.  The modern day Münchausen tells the story of the famous Baron, and we flash back to all manner of unlikely adventures.

The body of the film is full of the bizarre antics and prop comedy I'd expect from 'The Goodies': a wardrobe of clothes get rabies and attack our hero, a bugle is too cold to sound a note but once it warms up indoors it plays incessantly until stamped to pieces, and a giant pastry is opened to reveal a dwarf playing a tiny harpsicord.  It's a very silly film, but it's more fun than funny.

Münchausen, in a fez, meets a eunuch in I-don't-know-what-that-hat-is-but-oh-my.

Hans Albers plays Baron Münchausen, and gives his best performances in quiet close-ups rather than the wild action sequences.  I'm inclined to think he's a bit too old for the role: this is a character who wishes for, and gets, the gift of ageless immortality for as long as he wants it.  He looks about sixty, so seemingly has eternal youth without the youth.  It's like watching the latter half of the Roger Moore era of James Bond, with a hero running around and seducing women a fraction of his age.  Münchausen even meets an aged Giacomo Casanova, the implication being that Casanova has grown too old to be chasing women, while the Baron has retained his mojo.  The women grow older while Münchausen stays the same, and one is forced by her family to join a convent, a fate from which the heroic Baron notably doesn't save her.

It's an lively and watchable film, but doesn't quite live up to the movies it seeks to trump.  It gets more interesting as it goes on, with a memorable trip to the moon where a babies grow on trees, and people's heads galavant without bodies, and fashions are just amazing.  There, Münchausen's trusty servant ages to death over the course of a few days, and the film suddenly seems less ridiculous, and really rather sad.  "The moon is a rather exhausting star," as the Baron notes.  It this film, death (in males, at least) seems to be something that should be chosen.  Dying suddenly in the heat of battle seems acceptable, but choosing mortality seems to be the ideal.  Since the film was ordered into existence by the minister for propaganda, I wonder how close that was to the dominant philosophies of forties Germany.

On the moon, a friendly disembodied head with amazing hair sits on a flower.

I'm glad to have sought this film out, as, though I've watched a great many German films for this Penciltonian project, there was a large gap between the early films of the twenties and thirties, and the later ones from the eighties onwards.  My knowledge of the nation's output seemed to disappear with the rise of Nazism, and wasn't restored until decades of apparently awkward post-war Heimatfilm had gone by.  Perhaps that was for the best, in terms of quality: I've been watching films from the best eras of German cinema.

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Nosferatu (1922)

I'd been quite tempted not to watch 'Nosferatu' - after all, I'd already covered 1922 with 'Häxan', an exciting Swedish/Danish documentary on witchcraft which relieved me by being less alarming than I anticipated - and it wasn't as if The Penciltonian lacked for silent German classics.  Indeed, adding together the silent and the noisy, 'Nosferatu' is the eleventh German film I've watched for the project.  The twelfth, if you count 'Das Weisse Band' (2009) which I've entirely neglected to write up, but which I was very glad to watch.

Nonetheless, when my friend JillBob mentioned that she had a copy of this, the first vampire movie, I felt I resolved to go ahead.  After all, Werner Herzog considered it the greatest German movie, and the few clips I'd seen made it look extremely stylish and not a little horrific.  Besides, it shared a director with 'Faust' (1926) which I enjoyed so much in February.  Both are adaptations of existing tales, but while 'Faust' was an ancient legend, 'Dracula', which is here ripped off but not paid for, had only been in publication for 25 years.  This is a less ridiculous film than 'Faust', having less room for comedy interludes.  Its ending isn't quite such a cheat as that earlier film, and is told with pictures, rather than that film's odd tactic of wrapping matters up with a page full of text.

Why would I screen-capture the other characters when we could see another picture of Count Orlok?

Count Orlok, the film's copyright-busting name for Dracula, is a magnificent physical specimen, with his huge hands, mouse-like mouth, his sharp ears, gigantic nose and look of constant surprise, all this on the implausibly slender body of Max Schrek.  He throws his shadow before him, and looms over our heroes, before doing the rudest and most horrid thing an obvious vampire can, buying a house just over the road from theirs.  He isn't the sexy Dracula we all know and love, but a creaking corpse, incredibly still and angular, which is style I much enjoy.  An embodiment of death.

As in 'Faust', director F. W. Murnau envisages The Black Death as the ultimate danger to society: demonic in origin, and killing indiscriminately on a vast scale.  In his earlier film a giant devil stood over the town and billowed the plague as smoke.  Here Orlok walks among us, on our streets and up our staircases, bringing his plague in soil and rats.  Doors are marked with crosses to keep out the evil, as if fending off the Angel of Death at the Passover.  It's hysterically xenophobic stuff, but rather disconcerting.

A venus fly-trap in action.
Cinema audiences hadn't seen such things.

By this stage, cinema has everything it really needs, except perhaps audible dialogue.  Rich use of tinting makes up for a lack of colour photography, and Murnau realises he can use the film to show the audience, not just action and plot, but novelties they might only have read about, hence the venus fly-trap above, which does its thing and eats a fly before our watching eyes.  This sequence is even given context, as we have a brief scene with a teacher explaining the plant to his students, and for a moment we're in the same documentary territory as the aforementioned 'Häxan'.  Such diversions are permissible as Murnau cuts all the slack, removing anything that would be a waste of our time to watch.  He knows we're familiar with the clichés, so while an earlier film, or a modern amateur, might have lingered on a hero tearing up a bed-sheet, then tying each strand together to make a rope, here we cut from the first brief rip to the descending hero.

And a fine hero he is too.  Gustav von Wangenheim plays Thomas Hutter (Jonathan Harker in all but name) in a manner very similar to Gustav Fröhlich's Freder in 'Metropolis' (1927) - indeed, it's a certain type of silent hero who crops up in several of these films: simple, energetic, good humoured sorts who find delight in the simple things of life, who are then plunged into dark realms, their happy lives marred by catastrophe.  Uncomplicated characters, but very well played, coming across as immediately likeable, rather than simpering or irritating.

Alas, I believe I've now watched all the silent German films that I've heard of, and may need to fill the remaining gaps in the 20s (21, 23 and 29) with Westerns or some-such.  Up until World War II, Europe seems to have been producing far more attractive, cool and exciting cinema than America, so if you've any suggestions from one continent or the other (indeed, any continent at all) for these early years I'd be glad to hear it.

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Heimat (1984)

Heimat!  This Chronicle of Germany is a firm favourite of mine, and not just because of its fabulous duration.  Heimat and I both entered the world 29 years ago, in 1984, and it was watching this intimate overview of the century that first set me on my current course of watching a hundred films from a hundred years, making some sense of the twentieth century as a single story.  As you may note above, there is a video edition of this entry for those happier with dozens of clips than hundreds of written words.

Normally when you watch a film you sit down, you watch, things happen to characters, and you get your resolution and the film stops.  Heimat, though, just keeps going.  It is, in fact, very long, taking around sixteen hours to tell the story of a small village in rural Germany, and a family who live there.  It starts in 1919 and just keeps on rolling until its 1982, by which time our central characters have grown up, grown old and begotten from their loins the new generation of central characters.  In a film of such expanse I think it's no spoiler to say that almost everybody alive at the start of the story has died by the end.  There's something fascinatingly unusual, something Old-Testament-like, about a story in which the main characters at the end aren't present at all at the start, and the only characters we meet in the first hour aren't there at all at the end.  Heimat isn't like other films.  It's like life.

1938: Otto Wohlleben, who begat Hermann Simon

When I first saw it I made a mistake that's easy in real life too - I concentrated on the older generation, on Maria Simon, the film's main character, on Paul and Pauline and Eduard, and I ignored the children, forgetting that they would soon turn into real people, and I'd have no idea where they'd come from.  By the fifties the film has slowly switched its emphasis and become the story of Maria's children Anton, Ernst and Hermann, the last of whom went on to star in the 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1993) and 'Heimat 3' (2004), where he became the cinema character I know best and care about the most - but that's another story.  Characters who'd been the centre of their own lives, and at the heart of the community, become parents, become grandparents, they die of age or accident or war, or equally often we leap forward a few years and they're just gone, just dead.  Quite disconcertingly, the film raises the strange prospect that our grandparents may once have been children and people with lives as fun and interesting as our own.

The film is made up of a number of films - see the postscript for quite how that works - and is shot variously in colour, sepia and monochrome, and on a variety of film-stocks.  It starts almost entirely black and white,' because, y'know, things just were in those days, but is almost entirely in colour after colour television is introduced in West Germany in 1967 (August 25th, if you like to celebrate anniversaries).  It takes a little getting used to, but seems utterly appropriate given how the century's story is one of technological advancement.  Integral to the human stories playing out in the village are the introduction of the radio, the motorcycle, aircraft, and especially the development of advanced camera lenses, as a rural community in the middle of nowhere becomes part of the modern, industrial world.  In the first half the town's core seems to be Matthias's forge - and I'm delighted to see that the prequel 'Die Andere Heimat' -  set in the 1840s and coming to cinemas near you later this year - sees some prominent use of it.  By the end, new industries have risen and fallen, and the village is quite radically different, but remains utterly recognisable.

1944: Anton Simon adjusts a lens.  He later founds Simon Optik

The final telling in particular is perfectly filmed, timed and edited, and despite its optimistic tone and happy ending of sorts, I'd forgotten how upsetting I found it.  There are a lot of images there that linger in the mind, Hermann Simon arriving late to a funeral to find a thunderstorm has scattered the mourners, leaving the casket alone in the sopping street - and the strangely terrifying flyover of the Hunsrück landscape that follows.  This last part uses some strange and unusual techniques, things we don't see anywhere else in Heimat, but uses them to tell a story properly, a story I really care about.  And I don't think this teil's impact comes from its position at the end of an epic - I think anybody who hadn't seen a frame of Heimat could watch 'The Feast of the Living and the Dead', or even just its opening quarter hour, and find something fascinating, tense, engaging, sad and real, which is surely a good set of things for a film to be.

'Heimat', and its follow-ups 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1993) and 'Heimat 3' (2004) are high on my list of favourite things in the world, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if future generations value them highly for their quality as drama as well as their value as historical chronicles.  It's just a pity that, being extremely long German films, most of my fellow Britons haven't found the time or urge to watch them.

1982: Glasisch, who sees the whole story

Finally, and by way of a postscript: is this really a movie, as Wikipedia tells us, or a TV miniseries as IMDB claims?  Well, it's kind of both.  It's a film made of films.  Eine Chronik in elf Teilen.  Its threequel 'Heimat 3' is clearer, 'Film in 6 Teilen'.  I'm a dilettantish speaker of German , but that's surely one film in six tellings, or eleven tellings of extremely irregular duration as the case is here.  But wait, how can something in more than one discrete portion be a single film?  Well, earlier in The Penciltonian I talked about 1924's 'Die Nibelungen', one film in two portions which at five hours was so long viewers went to see part one, Siegfried, then came out to the cinema again the following day to see part two, Kriemhild's Rache.  Then there was 1945's 'Les Enfants du Paradis', which was made in Paris when the occupying forces didn't permit films longer than 90 minutes, so the three-hour story was told as a double bill of a film and its sequel, always meant to be watched together.  And then there was 'Das Boot' (1981), made for cinemas, but also shown in expanded form on telly as a mini-series.  Did I spend eleven hours watching those particular films entirely so I could use them as examples when talking about Heimat?  Maybe!  But they were excellent!  So anyway, Heimat was shown in cinemas, and people would go to watch a few instalments, then go back the next week for the next few films of film.  Rather wonderfully, I understand people started to recognise the regular viewers at the cinemas, and started meeting up with them before and after the screenings, having Heimat parties.  Why don't you have a Heimat party, dear viewer?

P.P.S. I first discovered Heimat by accident, when an erstwhile housemate of mine mentioned seeing it in a local shop, accidentally reduced from £39 to £3.99, and suggested that I go out and buy two copies, one for him and one for myself, before the shopkeepers realised their error.  It was an inauspicious start to a love affair.

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The Heimat trilogy. Is there anything more alluring? No siree!

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Dr Caligari!

This is one of the great classics of German expressionist cinema, a genre which, in my crude understanding, manifests itself in highly stylised sets of strange angles, with performances to match.  It's a technique used on a much larger scale and budget in 'Metropolis' (1927), but which here manages to be far more original, and so far less impressive.

There's an extent to which circumstances have contrived against 'Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari' winning more of my approval.  For one thing, I'd already seen several monochrome German horror and crime films more to my tastes: the aforementioned 'Metropolis', 'Faust' (1926), 'M' (1931) and 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' (1933), all of which were slicker, faster and more unsettling.  For another, I had a choice between watching it on second-hand VHS and watching it on Youtube, neither of which is great for an 83-year old film.  I plumped for the latter which may have been a mistake; it turned out this silent film was silent indeed, and I had to provide my own soundtrack, either through humming or (more practically) through playing what incidental music I had on my phone - the works of Michael Nyman, Roger Limb, and the Radiophonic Workshop.  Watching a slow film in silence is almost unbearable, and thankfully this music wasn't too jarring in tone.

The eponymous cabinet.  I expected something more substantial.

I ought to extend this film some due acknowledgement.  It was made in the 1910s, yet it actually has some facial close-ups, a novelty in those early times, and tells its story clearly enough to follow but only slightly too clearly.  It has cinema's first twist ending, which I initially failed to grasp, but which seems to throw a new light on the rest of the film, and it has a striking central idea, the somnambulist who sleeps in a coffin waking only to predict the future and commit crimes, somewhat in the vein of the Hashshashins of ancient Araby.

Alas, the wonky buildings and the idiosyncratically-painted backdrops work better in film when they're rendered more dynamically, and when the picture quality is better.  It's a style I like, but in recent years it's an aesthetic that's been co-opted by pantomimes, and the low-budget woodwork that makes up this film's tiny sets leaves them with the feeling of a provincial theatre production.  The film is so early that its great innovations have all been repeated and bettered through the decades, and especially so in the remainder of the twenties, making it hard to appreciate how striking the movie must have been when it was new.

In short, I'm pretty sure this is better than any of the films I've seen from earlier years, but it's very much eclipsed by everything that came after.  I feel rather rude dismissing this seminal piece of art as insufficient or comparatively disappointing, but there it is.  It's good, but I'd recommend any of the aforementioned films as better.

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Well, here it is on DVD if you're curious.

The Longest Day (1962)

The British invasion

This is a film about D-Day.  In fact, this is the film about D-Day, and covers the day itself in great detail, and from all angles.  British and American stars (Sean Connery and Richard Burton and Roddy McDowall and Rod Steiger and John Wayne and many more) play the British and American forces, German notables (all famous, though Bond villain Gert Fröbe is the only one I knew) play the Germans, and French celebutantes (including Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault From 1945's 'Les Enfants du Paradis') play the resistance.  It's like a war version of 'Love Actually' (2003), as myriad plot-lines are played out discretely; concise stories told economically, each with its international superstars, building into the larger story of the movie.

Watching this film, it became suddenly apparent to me that I didn't really know anything about D-Day at all. Indeed, I'd confused it in my mind with the Dunkirk evacuation, and couldn't have told you where or when it was, except that it involved British boats and continental Europe, and was a big deal for the second world war.  The film, then, was a revelation.

He got up so quickly that he put his boots on the wrong feet

I don't generally care for war-films, as too often they tend to be about our goodies against inherently evil foreigners, and play on the audience's xenophobia.  Now, I won't claim that the forces of Nazi Germany weren't the aggressors here, but the individuals in the German army probably didn't think of themselves as fighting for the cause of evil.  Indeed, one German officer, seeing the British progress rhetorically exclaims 'you know, sometimes I wonder which side God is on'.  Here, as in 'Das Boot' (1981) and 'Downfall' (2004), we get to see the German forces played as real characters, not as insane pantomime villains.

It helps, I think, that the four nationalities' stories - the French, British, German and American parts of the film - were all made separately, with each part assigned a director from the relevant country.  This, then, is four films, weaved into one.  Such a thing could be an appalling mess, but the style and flavour, the drama and humour, is consistent enough that it all comes together properly.  Among the film's advisors were the generals who plotted the invasion and those who masterminded the defence, meaning that the film has historical merit, and takes all the sides seriously.

John Wayne, who I usually can't abide, is actually very good in this.

The whole thing looks and sounds like a forties war-movie, albeit a very expensive one - in monochrome with dialogue spoken very clearly, and a big war song at the end - but is framed in the super-widescreen of the late fifties, the Cinemascope usually reserved for productions in extremely full colour.

It's an exciting and interesting film, as the large number of small storylines means we get all of the highlights and skip past the padding.  The ridiculous cast of the famous and the soon-to-be-famous is one that's rarely been matched, and all do what they do best.  There's a lot of fun had, with soldiers on all sides seen as plucky, good humoured and occasionally very eccentric.  It's all the more alarming, then, when they come to fight against one another, and we see vast numbers mown down with machine guns in almost every location.

Hey, it's that mime from 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945).  That was a great movie.

I'm very glad to have seen it, since it gave gave me a much clearer idea what D-Day was about, and what happened.  Frustratingly, despite a hefty duration, it seemed to end just as things were getting going.  Things had clearly swung in the allies' favour, but I'll need to do some further research to find out quite what happened next, and how we got from this great surge, with all its unlikely good fortune, to the ultimate victory in Europe and end of the war.  We won, or so I'm told, but I don't yet know how.  Thinking about it, that's a fairly substantial gap in my general knowledge.


P.S. Tune in next time for 'Stalker' (1979), a Russian film that I still don't really understand.

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...and here it is, if you'd care to watch it.  You might well find it as excitingly educational as I did.