While recuperating in the hospital Hoffi (Berndt Renné) meets Urban (Manfred Karge). Urban has worked as an engineer on projects all over the world, and Hoffi sees him as a source of meaningful employment. Hoffi just spent 1½ years in prison on an assault charge, and nobody wants to hire an ex-con. Hoffi hopes to …
Category: Crime
Pension Boulanka
A few years back, I was talking to the “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller. Eddie is the man behind Noir City, a film noir festival held every year at the Castro Theatre here in San Francisco.1 Always on the lookout for new and undiscovered examples of this genre, he asked me if I could recommend …
Interrogating the Witnesses
At first, Interrogating the Witnesses (Vernehmung der Zeugen) looks like it’s going to be a murder mystery or a police procedural. A boy named Rainer (Mario Gericke) has been stabbed to death, and the doctor investigating the scene believes her son Max (René Steinke) is the killer. It turns out she’s right, and the rest …
Herzsprung
When the Berlin Wall finally came down, East Germans danced for joy in the streets. No more Stasi, no more food shortages, no more travel restrictions, and no more fiddling with their Trabis to get the damned things started. At the time, most people in East Germany were glad to see the backside of the …
Radio Killer
It’s no secret that the East Germans and the West Germans spied on each other. Like the characters in Antonio Prohías’ Spy vs. Spy cartoon strip, each side continually sought new ways to find out what the other side was up to. The listening post on the Teufelsberg in Berlin is an example of this. …
The Persons Involved
The Persons Involved (Die Beteiligten) was released in June 1989. It was the last Kriminalfilm (Krimi) released by DEFA before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's based on an actual crime that occurred back in the early sixties. The film follows the story of two police inspectors investigating the drowning death of a young …
Track in the Night
In America, we tend to parse out films about crime into specific categories, such as heist films, detective films, film noir, mysteries, and so on. In both East and West Germany, these films are lumped into one big group: Kriminalfilme, or “crime films,” usually referred to as “Krimis.” Many West German Krimis center around a …
No Proof for Murder
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 films noir, mysteries, and thrillers. No Proof for Murder is a good example of the East German style of …
Bellboy Ed Martin
Although Bellboy Ed Martin (Hotelboy Ed Martin) is considered a minor film in the DEFA catalog, it has an interesting backstory that stretches from the Great Depression to the McCarthy era, with all sorts of intrigue and tragedy along the way. Its script helped plant the seeds of film noir, and it's an excellent chronicle …
Rendezvous Aimée
In the mid-fifties, things were getting awfully messy in Berlin. With a border that porous, and two politico-economic structures completely out of sync with each other, it was inevitable that all sorts of shenanigans would occur, usually to the detriment of East Germany. Goods purchased in East Germany, where the state was subsidizing some of …
East German Cinema Blog 