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371: German Genre Films II

Archival Spaces 371

Berlinale Retrospective II

Uploaded 18 April 2025

**Inga Seyric, Regina Jorn in *The Girls from Atlantis* (1970**)

Six weeks ago I posted my blog about the Berlinale Retrospective “Wild, Weird, Bloody. German Genre Films of the 70’s,” which included films from both East and West Germany: crime, horror, musicals, melodramas, not New German Cinema. I also noted that I missed a number of West German films, including Spare Parts (1979, Rainer Erler), The Tenderness of Wolves (1973, Ulli Lommel), and The Girls from Atlantis (1970, Eckhardt Schmidt), ostensibly a German crime drama, horror film, and a sci-fi, respectively. With many thanks to my former Munich Filmmuseum colleague and long-time friend, Robert Fischer-Ettel, I was able to now see these films on Vimeo. From my Berlin colleague, Philipp Stiasny, I also learned a bit more about the Austrian director Rolf Olsen who directed Bloody Friday (1972). While I had attributed the German film’s extreme violence and lurid aesthetics to Italian Giallo formulas, Stiasny in a DVD review of Olsen’s Playgirls of Frankfurt (1966) and The Devil’s Girls (1967) noted that the director cultivated a yellow journalism style, “creating a dynamic, explosive headline oriented cinema,” which certainly also applies to Bloody Friday.

*Fleisch* (1979, Rainer Erler) with Jutta Speidel

**Fleisch (1979) with Wolf Roth, Jutta Speidel**

Rainer Erler, a director who produced mostly films for German television, shot the crime drama, Spare Parts/Fleisch, in New Mexico and New York for ZDF (2^nd German Television). After the wedding of a German-American couple, the husband is abducted when they spend a night in a seedy Las Cruces, N.M. motel. Monika (Speidel), the bride, escapes and enlists Paul (Roth), a Polish-born cross-country trucker delivering meat to New York wholesalers, to help find her husband and they are soon on the trail of an ambulance service that delivers bodies to a Roswell hospital, where the bodies, whether dead or not, are harvested for organ transplants. The scenes with truckers using CB radio to track the ambulance and communicate with each other are a direct homage to Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978), made a year earlier and a big hit in Germany. After meeting the female doctor in charge of the hospital, Monika allows herself to be transported to New York, with both husband Mike (Herbert Herrmann)and Paul both comatose on the same flight. The film works quite well as a thriller, but unlike American genre films that usually end with the perpetrators brought to justice, there is no such satisfaction here for the audience. Indeed, although Dr. Jackson (Charlotte Kerr) regrets her actions and is killed by the bad guys, the film criticizes the American police for not following through to investigate the crime syndicate behind the organ dealing scheme.

**Kurt Raab in Tenderness of Wolves (1972)**

***Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe*** **(1973) with Ingrid Caven**, **Kurt Raab**

Produced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder who is featured in a supporting role, The Tenderness of Wolves/Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe is, like so much of Fassbinder’s early cinema, beholden to genre, in this case, horror and crime, but more akin to art cinema and melodrama. The director, Ulli Lommel, a Fassbinder collaborator who played in no less than twelve of the master’s films, casts Fassbinder regular Kurt Raab (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, 1970) in the title role of the Fritz Harrmann, the notorious Hannover serial killer who in the 1920s cut up his 27 young male victims and was rumored to have sold their human flesh to local restaurants as beef and pork. While Fritz Lang’s M (1931) transformed Haarmann into a child murderer who can’t help himself, Raab’s pederast is a lonely gay man, abandoned by his male lover and looking for love; he kills when he is disappointed. He lures vagrant young teens to his flat with the promise of food and work, then murders them by strangulation or biting into their adam’s apple, earning him the title of “Vampire of Hannover.” However, all but one of the murders are committed off screen, the major focus of the film being on Haarman’s relations with his non-biological family of pimps, prostitutes, and bar owners, and his attempts with his former lover to earn money through begging, police informing and other shady activities. Not surprisingly, the extended family consisted of Fassbinder regulars seen as supporting roles in numerous other films, including Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Brigitta Mira, Wolfgang Schenk, and Fassbinder himself as an unsavory pimp.

Ulli Lommel would move to New York shortly after the production of The Tenderness of Wolves, his directorial efforts moving continuously between exploitation and art with such films as Adolf and Marlene (1977), Cocaine Cowboys (1979), and Blank Generation (1983), the latter two shot for Warhol’s Factory. He was still directing direct-to-video films as late as 2018.

***Männer sind zum lieben da*** **(1970)**

Isi ter Jung, Barbara Capell in *Männer sind zum lieben da*

Eckhart Schmidt’s The Girls From Atlantis/Männer sind zum lieben da is a sci-fi film without any scenes in outer space, nor any special effects. Indeed, it is more a satire on the German softcore porn wave that dominated low-end, commercial filmmaking in Germany from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s. A group of pretty women in their 20s arise out of a forest lake near Munich, like Venus de Milo, except that they are clothed in Carnaby Street fashions, complete with tiny suitcase purses as fashion accessories. Their mission is to seduce as many young studs as possible, shrink them in the act of sex to 5 inches, and pack them in their handbags for transport back to an almost male-less planet in a far-off galaxy. All the women work hard to fulfill their quota by exposing their breasts at least once to the audience, except Atlantis (Isi ter Jung), who just can’t seem to get it right and even falls in love with one of her prospects. Raoul (Horst Letten) also loves her, too, so he volunteers to return to the stars with her. In the end, it is all a dream. Despite the superficial nudity, this is a sweet, almost innocent comedy, Schmidt poking fun at the German bourgeoisie and attitudes about sex – we see a traveling gay porn salesman, a thief disguised as a priest, a crooked village mayor, and his shrewish wife, a wife who begs Atlantis to seduce her gluttonous husband, and a voyeuristic professor of sexology who is afraid of physical contact, while the boys are all too willing to have casual sex.

Marianna Sock in *Männer sind zum lieben da* **(1970, Eckhart Schmidt)**

Watching Männer sind zum lieben da, I suffered a moment of melancholy and mourning because I had become friends in Munich with both Eckhart Schmidt and his wife of forty-plus years, Isi ter Jung. Back in 1997, as director of the Munich Filmmuseum, I had organized with Robert Fischer the first retrospective and monograph of Schmidt’s film work. He, like other more genre-orientated and less leftist Munich-based directors, e.g. Rudolf Thome, Klaus Lemke, had been snubbed by Enno Patalas and the critics around Filmkritik, and as a result, was excluded from the New German Cinema canon. When the Schmidts moved to L.A. in the early 2000s, we became good friends, lunching at least once a month at Petit Four on Sunset. Isi died tragically of cancer at 64 in 2007 – she was the most gracious person ever, both my wife and my mother-in-law Janet were mightily impressed with her – and Ecki passed away in October last year at 85, having moved back to Munich just before the pandemic. I still miss them both.

**Rainer Werner Fassbindeer, Barbara Bertram in *The Tenderness of Wolves* (1973, Ulli Lommel)**

370: Hobart Bosworth

Archival Spaces 370:

Hobart Bosworth Films on Blu-Ray

Uploaded 4 April 2025

Unless you are a silent film aficionado, you probably may not have heard of Hobart Bosworth. He was already in his 40s when he started his film career at Selig-Polyscope, starring in The Count of Monte Cristo (1908), after battling tuberculosis for almost a decade. He was a big man, playing men of action in westerns, war stories, and sea tales. He directed his first film for Selig in 1911. After acting in 150 shorts, his breakout film was The Sea Wolf (1913), an adaptation of Jack London’s novel, which featured London in a small role. Unfortunately, the film is lost, as are almost all of Bosworth’s shorts, except an early version of The Wizard of Oz (1910). Also lost, his several other Jack London films, except for half of Martin Eden (1914), and most of his later starring features. He quit directing in 1915 but continued to star in more than fifty features at Universal, Goldwyn, and Paramount until 1921, then slipped into supporting roles. After the coming of sound, Bosworth’s roles shrunk even further, usually playing in poverty row westerns. His last role was in 1942, and he died a year later.

**Hobart Bosworth, Jane Novak in *Behind the Door* (1919)**

Given Bosworth’s monster career in the 1910s, we are indeed fortunate to have two of his feature films now on blu-ray, released by Flicker Alley, and lovingly restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival: Behind the Door (1919) and Below the Surface (1920), both directed by Irvin V. Willat for the Thomas Ince Co. While the first film had initially been reconstructed in 1994 from an incomplete print and outtakes at the Library of Congress, Rob Byrne and his team at the SFSFF accessed a 35mm Russian print from Gosfilmofond in 2015 to produce a virtually complete version, merely augmented in a very few places by stills to maintain continuity, as documented in Willat’s original script. Tinting is based on notations on the leaders of the LOC print. Likewise, Below the Surface was reconstructed in 2021 by the SFSFF from a 35mm nitrate negative and a 35mm safety dupe negative, both at the Library of Congress with financial support from the National Film Preservation Fund. The tinting is based on a surviving nitrate at the Eye Institute, Amsterdam. Both films are essentially sea stories, while Kevin Brownlow has called Behind the Door “the most outspoken of all the [World War I] vengeance films.”

Novvak, James Gordon, Bosworth in *Behind the Door*

Wallace Beery, Bosworth in *Behind the Door*

Indeed, while Behind the Door does not visually reveal the final act of vengeance “behind the door,” it leaves little else to the imagination in its depiction of violence, especially the early blood-drenched brawls and later gang rapes. The film opens in a small town in coastal Maine, where Captain Oscar Krug returns seven years after the end of WWI; His story is presented in a series of flashbacks going back to 1917, when America entered World War I against the Germans. The early scenes create sympathy for the German-American whom the townspeople unjustly attempt to drive out, although he is an American-born patriot. In these scenes, I kept thinking of film theorist Hugo Munsterberg, who was completely ostracized around the same time at Harvard by anti-Germans and most probably died as a result. Krug enlisted in the Navy, having previously served under Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War, as he tells the crowd. He is appointed Captain of the SS Perth, which is sunk by a German U-Boat. Krug survives, as does his wife (Jane Novak), who had – unbeknownst to him – stowed away on the vessel, and they are rescued by the same U-98, better said, she is taken aboard, and he is left to die, swearing vengeance. Given that Bosworth was 52 years old, he looks a little too old to play the part, but Willat’s staging of the action scenes covers up that deficit, and the flashback scenes narrated by Krug and the German U-Boat Captain are extremely effective, as is the film’s restored tinting.

Lloyd Hughes as Paul, Bosworth in diving suit in *Below the Surface*

Apparently, women complained about Behind the Door’s violence, so Bosworth’s next film offered some compensation to female audiences. While Below the Surface also opens on the Maine Coast with an exciting rescue of a sunken U.S. Navy submarine, the film for much of its length is a melodrama, pitting father against son. Martin Flint and son Paul are deep sea divers leading a quiet country life, until a pair of grifters from the city try to convince the divers to retrieve gold coins from a sunken vessel, so they can bilk investors into financing a non-existent expedition. The vamp pretends to fall in love with Paul, so he will go down when his father refuses, which he does successfully. But the son collapses mentally when he finds his wife has disappeared, leaving their torn-up marriage license, and blames his father. To save the son, dad looks for the errant bride; before the climax another shipwreck ensues. Scenes of deep sea diving thus bracket a film melodrama, which pits traditional moral values against the supposed immorality of modernity. However, the print is so utterly gorgeous, and the action sequences thrilling, so one can forgive the melodrama.

Extras include the original Russian release version of Behind the Door, a doc on the restoration, and Patrick Stanbury’s interview with Kevin Brownlow about Irvin Willat. Flicker Alley is thus to be commended for giving us two films with Hobart Bosworth in his prime, when we have previously only seen him, e.g. as a supporting actor in The Big Parade (1925) or a bit part in The Crusades (1932).

**Publicity Photo at California Theater, Los Angeles, 1920**

369: Chełmno Holocaust Film

Archival Spaces 369:

The World Will Tremble (2024)

Uploaded 21 March 2025

**Roll call in Chełmno**, *The World Will Tremble* (2025)

A Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival screening of The World Will Tremble (2025) preceded its L.A. run this week at the Laemmle Theatres in Beverly Hills and Encino. The title is a quote from a village Rabbi in Rzuchow, Poland who has just heard the testimony of two prisoners, escapees from the Nazi death center at Chełmno (Kulmhof) in early January 1942, where Jewish populations from the surrounding villages are being systematically gassed in mobile vans. The title bears a degree of irony because we now know that while the BBC and the New York Times reported on the mass killings as early as June and July 1942, few wished to hear of it. It is known, for example, that U.S. State Department officials actively blocked reports about the mass murder of Jews from reaching the United States. The British Foreign Office, known to be filled with anti-Semites, was no better: when Polish diplomat and eye-witness Jan Karski met with Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, his report fell on deaf ears.

**Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Jeremy Neumark, *The World Will Tremble* (2025)**

**David Kross, *The World Will Tremble* (2025)**

Directed by Israeli-American, Lior Geller, The World Will Tremble, opens with a group of Jewish prisoners digging a large pit under the watchful eyes of armed Nazi guards. Three are chosen to go back to the camp – actually an abandoned manorial estate – where they are told to sort clothing and thereby witness the murder of Jewish villagers. Transported by truck, the arrivals, men, women, and children, are told they will be sent to Leipzig to work, but first need to write a letter home and be de-loused. Leaving their clothes and suitcases behind, they are herded into a truck, whose exhaust is connected to the van’s enclosed interior. The victims are killed by carbon monoxide poison before the gas vans reach the field where the dead are buried in mass graves by the prisoners who had dug the pits. Miraculously, two of the men assigned to the work detail manage to escape, helped by a Polish farm woman who gives them railroad uniforms, and a stolen motorcycle. They make it to the home of a village rabbi (Anton Lesser), where they report what they have seen. That account eventually made its way through the Polish Underground to London, where it is reported on the BBC on 26 June 1942, the earliest evidence of the Shoah to reach the Allies.

Divided essentially into two halves, Geller’s film visualizes for the first time, this earliest phase of the Shoah, before the Nazis perfected an industrialized form of death in Auschwitz, only months later. We hear the Camp Commandant Herbert Lange (David Kross) saying Berlin wants more “productivity,” 700 dead a day, are far too few. In reality, no less than 152,000 humans were eventually killed in Chełmno. We also see the unbelievable cruelty of the Nazi guards, whose target practice consists of forcing inmates who hold glass milk bottles over their heads, which are then shattered by bullets, or who have the inmates dance to the tune of flying bullets. When a young Jewish woman who has been serving as Lange’s sexual relief is accidentally killed, the Commandant screams at the guard to get him another. But while we see the faces of inmates carrying bodies, the corpses in the van and mass graves remain discreetly out of camera range, thus avoiding exploiting the memory of the dead.

**Original Grojanowski Report** **in Polish (1942)**

**Chełmno** **Memorial at site of mass graves**

Although accurate in spirit, The World Will Tremble does condense some of the admittedly confusing historical facts. One of the film’s escapees, Mordechaï Podchlebnik (Jeremy Neumark Jones), did escape from Chełmno, later testifying at trials in Poland (1945), at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961), and appearing in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1984), but he was not one of the authors of the first report. During the Winter of 1942, five prisoners escaped: Mordechaï Podchlebnik, Milnak Meyer, Abraham Tauber, Abram Roj, and Szlama Ber Winer (alias Yakov Grojanowski). Grojanowski (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) fled Chełmno to the Warsaw Ghetto, where his “Grojanowski Report” to the Ghetto’s Oneg Shabbat resistance group formed the basis for the BBC broadcast and later media reports. The New York Times wrote on July 2^nd: “In the early Winter the Germans were methodically proceeding to exterminate all Jews. They sent special gas chambers on wheels… In the village of Chełmo near Kolo ninety persons at a time were put into the gas chambers.”(p. 6) According to other published sources, two further Chełmno survivors, Yitzhak Justman, and Yerachmiel Yisrael Widawski, deposited their testimonies at the Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto in March 1942 with Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau and later spoke with Rabbi Chanoch Gad Justman in the the Częstochowa Ghetto. Widawski’s description of finding his fiancé among the corpses forms one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the film.

**Gas Wagon produced by Deutz (Coloigne) used in Chełmo** **(1945)**

I first read about the Chełmo gas wagons when I was a graduate student, writing a seminar paper about Holocaust news in the German exile newspaper, Freies Deutschland/Alemania Libre, published during World War II in Mexico City by exiled German Communists. Not surprisingly, the horror of Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Sobibor has overshadowed the crimes committed in Chełmno. Thanks to Lior Gelller, we now have a film about this often under-reported site of the Shoah, and its handful of survivors.

368: 75th Berlinale (Retrospective)

Archival Spaces 368

Retro: German Genre Films from the 1970s

7 March 2025

*Nicht schummeln, Liebling* (1971, Joachim Hasler)

Hard to believe that it was 51 years ago that I attended my first Berlinale film screening. I actually wasn’t in town that Summer of 1974 for the Festival but rather to research my master’s thesis (Ernst Lubitsch) at the Deutsche Kinemathek, which was then still located on the Theodor-Heuss-Platz. Thanks to the Kinemathek’s Walter Seidler, I got to see R.W. Fassbinder’s Effie Briest and also experienced a press conference with Fassbinder. Since then, I have attended about half of all subsequent Festivals, including 2025, where my focus – though not exclusively – was on the Retrospective curated the last 19 years by Kinemathek Director, Dr. Rainer Rother. Given his retirement, the Berlinale honored him during the Festival with the prestigious Berlin Camera Award.

This year’s retro, “Wild, Weird, Bloody. German Genre Films of the 70’s,” included films from both East and West Germany: crime, horror, musicals, melodramas, not New German (art) Cinema. Unfortunately, I missed some films I was dying to see, including The Tenderness of Wolves (1973, Ulli Lommel), The Girls from Atlantis (1970, Eckhardt Schmidt), and Spare Parts (1979, Rainer Erler). The first two films I caught up with were musicals from the German Democratic Republic; indeed the East Germans were represented exclusively by musicals and a comedy, since horror and crime were considered decadent, exploitive capitalist genres, – sci-fi and westerns were made, but as anti-capitalist Lehrstücke – while musicals were a concession to popular tastes, fuelled by the almost universal availability of West German television.

***Hut ab wenn du*** **küsst** **(1971, Rolf Losansky)**

The DEFA musical, Hat Off When You Kiss (1971, Rolf Losansky), features a war between the sexes fought on the relationship level between lovers: He is a boring petit bourgeois engineer who can’t stand the fact that she is an auto mechanic and loves her work. In revolt, she pretends to be interested in a swarmy Argentine industrialist while both visit the Leipzig Trade Fair, allowing the producers to show off wares from the East Block Comecon. The film ends with a truce of sorts, but Hat Off reveals the extent to which East German men were unhappy about their spouses working, even though the State propagated gender equality and actually needed women to work.

*Nicht schummeln, Liebling* (1973, Joachim Hasler)

Don’t Cheat, Darling (1973, Joachim Hasler) starts out visually like a West German musical in a small Bavarian town, but when Young Pioneers join the parade, it’s clear this is East of the Elbe. The town is crazy about Fussball, engendering a town-wide war between the sexes, led by a new girl’s technical college director and the town mayor. Hardly a Communist in sight, only certain termini technici reveal the film’s location, as male footballers and nubile female students face off in energetically choreographed dance numbers.

*Orpheus in der Unterwelt (*1973, Horst Bonnet)

An exceedingly weird operetta adaption of Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld (1973, Horst Bonnet) constituted the third GDR contribution. It opens with Offenbach setting off from 19^th century Paris to Greece in a hot air balloon, where he witnesses Euridice being seduced by Pluto and taken to Hades, while husband Orpheus is glad to be rid of her so he can sleep around. Offenbach (and public opinion) force Orpheus to the underworld to rescue Euridice; meanwhile, Juno is on Jupiter’s case because she thinks he seduced Euridice. While the gods are stand-ins for the capitalist ruling classes, both Olympus– all in white – and Hades in black seem to be hotbeds of libertinism, with naked breasts front and center, the film ending in chaos and cancans, like the operetta.

**Armin Mueller-Stahl in *Nelken in Aspik* (1976, Günther Reisch)**

Finally, the screwball comedy Carnations in Aspic (1976, Günther Reisch) is a pretty wild critique of the East German economy’s total dysfunctionality, although the film sates that the events depicted could only happen in film and have NOTHING to do with contemporary GDR reality. A commercial designer in the State advertising agency loses some front teeth through his own stupidity, forcing him to remain silent during office meetings, whereupon he is promoted up the food chain because his bosses think he always agrees with them. He actually just wants to get the girl, not the work responsibility, so he tries to screw- up, but that only brings him more promotions. Meanwhile, we get slogans like: “If you buy a Wartburg, it will be delivered in time for your son to drive,” a bitter comment on the 10-15 year delivery times for East German cars.

Cynicism characterizes the three West German films I viewed. Strange City (1970, Rudolf Thome) opens like a film noir in b & w with a well-dressed 30-something – 70s German heartthrob Roger Fritz – arriving in Munich at night with a suitcase full of cash. He finds his estranged wife and wants her to launder the money he has stolen from the Düsseldorf bank, but a dogged Munich cop and another couple are on his tail. A crime, but no violence, just lots of maneuvering to possess the booty. In the end, two crooked cops and the two couples split the loot, all happily riding off into the sunset, proving crime does pay.

Bloody Friday (1972, Rolf Olsen), a German-Italian co-production, takes violence and blood-letting to the extreme, in keeping with Giallo genre aesthetics. A violent criminal escapes from custody, organizing a bank robbery with two accomplices in a suburban Munich bank that includes taking hostages to guarantee their getaway, after stealing weapons from a U.S. Army transport. The bearded gang leader kills indiscriminately, drinks on the job and rapes a hostage he accuses of being a lesbian. Meanwhile, the police are under massive pressure because one of the hostages is the daughter of a rich industrialist. In the end, the robbers either shoot each other or are gunned down by the police when they hole up in a deserted Bavarian tavern.

Deadlock (1970, Roland Klick) opens with a wounded man carrying a suitcase full of cash through the desert, while Can’s avant-garde Krautrock blares on the soundtrack, mocking Ennio Morricone; the hero faints just before an old pickup rumbles into the scene, its decrepent occupant taking the bank robber to an abandoned mining town. When the robber’s accomplice shows up, an extended and deadly cat-and-mouse game ensues between the three men to make off with the cash, ending with the death of two (innocent) women and two men. An anti-Western of stasis rather than action, however, without a carefully set-up final duel.

This year’s Berlinale retrospective proved once again that European genre films are still mostly terra incognita for American film scholars, despite the many pleasures to be found here.