No Proof for Murder (Für Mord kein Beweis) belongs to the film genre that Germans (East and West) call Krimis. We’d call them “crime films,” although we never do, preferring instead to parse things out as film noir, mysteries, and thrillers. No Proof for Murder is a good example of the East German style of Krimi. These are notably different from their West German counterparts, which, not surprisingly, owe a greater debt to Hollywood. East German Krimis rely less on action sequences, car chases, and gun battles, and more on police procedures. A case is usually resolved thanks to the lead detective’s dogged pursuit of the facts.
No Proof for Murder is about the investigation of a woman who turns up dead after leaving the hairdresser. It appears to have been murder, but, as the title suggests, there is no evidence to prove it. The only clues are a broken fingernail and a few cotton threads. Suspicion naturally falls on the husband, a research scientist who prefers the company of lab rats over that of people, but his alibi seems airtight. And there’s the stranger who watches the woman’s funeral from a distance, but runs away when the police approach. How does he fit into things?
The lead detective, Captain Lohm, is not willing to let the case go, and has an almost Hercule Poirot-like knack for tying disparate facts together to form a complete picture. Lohm manages to uncover motives extending all the way back to WWII. This is a remarkably sedate Krimi. No murders are shown (although their aftermaths are), and even the flashbacks, which held some potential for shocking scenes, are restricted to recent events. The actual murder is only ever glimpsed at as part of a strange dream montage, and even the most important argument in the film is only heard in muffled tones through the wall. There are reasons for all of this, but it makes for weirdly action-free thriller.
The film is based on the book Der Mann, der über Hügel steigt (The Man Who Climbs Over the Hill) by Rudolf Bartsch. Bartsch was a freelance writer in East Germany, who wrote several novels and television scripts. His scripts for the TV movie Die Sprengung (The Demolition) is one of the forgotten casualties of the 11th Plenum, banned for being politically “renitent,” a term that doesn’t translate easily here, but essentially means the authorities didn’t like it but couldn’t say exactly why. The film was shelved and remained in obscurity until 2012, when Die Sprengung was finally rediscovered at the German Broadcasting Archive, and screened at the Kino Babylon in Berlin.
If director Konrad Petzold were from the West, he would have been classified with people such as Terence Young, Budd Boetticher, Don Siegel, Mark Robson, and Jacques Tourneur—less interested in creating great art than turning in efficient genre films on time and on budget, but who, nonetheless, showed a special talent for filmmaking. He is best known for his westerns and fairytale films, such as White Wolves (Weiße Wölfe), Kit & Co, and The Story of the Goose Princess and Her Faithful Horse Falada (Die Geschichte von der Gänseprinzessin und ihrem treuen Pferd Falada).
Although he generally chose genres that were safely family friendly, he still managed to get into trouble with the authorities on a couple occasions. The first was The Dress (Das Kleid), which was banned outright due to the uneasy comparisons between the behavior of the SED and the walled city in the story, which accidentally coincided with the building of the Berlin Wall. The second was Alfons Wobblecheek (Alfons Zitterbacke), which wasn’t banned outright, but received enough edits to provoke Petzold into asking that his name be removed from the film. In spite of these incidences, Petzold had a long career in East Germany, and had no trouble finding work—at least until the Wall came down, which effectively ended his career. He died in 1999.
No Proof for Murder stars Winfried Glatzeder, who is best known as Paul in The Legend of Paul and Paula. He was sometimes referred as the Jean-Paul Belmondo of the East,” although that comparison requires more imagination than I have. Glatzeder was born in the tumultuous year of 1945 just a few weeks before it all ended. His mother, who was of Jewish descent, had managed to make it through the war alive; his father did not. At the end of the war, his mother was sent to a hospital. By that time she had developed a bad case of tuberculosis, and would not reunited with her son until he was ten years old.
In 1981, fed up with the constant surveillance and the deteriorating state of things in East Germany, Glatzeder decided to join his fellow actors in the West. He filed for exit visas several times, until he was finally awarded one in 1982. Like Manfred Krug, he hit the ground running in West Germany, starring almost immediately in a the TV-movie Der Kunstfehler (The Malpractice), and following with many more parts on TV and in the movies. From 1996 until 1998, he was a regular on the long-running TV series, Tatort. In 1999, he made an amusing cameo appearance in Sun Alley (Sonnenallee) as Miriam’s neighbor Paul, wearing the puffy shirt he wore in The Legend of Paula and Paula. He continues to perform on stage and appear in movies, most recently in Der letzte Sommer der Reichen (The Last Summer of the Rich).
Like Rolf Römer’s films, one of the things this movie excels at is showing the styles and fashions of life in East Germany. In fact, the film starts with what looks like home movies of people on the streets of East Berlin, shopping, talking, and going about their daily business. The film ends with the same shots, as if to say, “life goes on.” The music for these scenes is so generic and carefree that it almost makes you wonder if you are watching the right movie, then it suddenly turns ominous. The film’s composer, Karl-Ernst Sasse, was, by this time, no stranger to film music, having composed hundreds of scores for the movies of DEFA. Sasse was responsible for some of the best soundtracks for East German films, including Signals, Her Third, In the Dust of the Stars, and Ursula. After the Wall fell, he continued to work, primarily scoring silent classics from the UFA period, including The Golem, The Last Laugh, and Asphalt. He died in 2006 in Babelsberg.
It is also one of the few films I’ve seen that shows us the inside of a modern police interrogation facility. With its beige walls and rows of doors, the facility reminded me strongly of George and Daniel Fuchs’ Stasi Secret Rooms photo exhibit (currently at the Panoptikon in Stockholm). In one interrogation scene, a typist immediately taps out every word that is said. The effect is jarring and little creepy.
No Proof for Murder did well at the box office, and was well received by most critics Some felt it should have followed the book more closely, but Petzold’s avoidance of the usual crime film clichés was praised. It is currently available as part of a 3 DVD six-pack of East German crime films.
East German Cinema Blog 