It was just a lighthearted fairytale, but it hit a little too close to home for the East German authorities. It’s said that timing is everything. This is certainly true when it comes to movies. Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole was one of his best films, and had it been released in the early …
Category: Konrad Petzold
Osceola
The shocking history of actions by the United States against Native Americans and blacks was a source of great delight to East Germany's leaders. Here was a country that boasted about its freedom and opportunities, yet continued to shut out anyone whose skin tone drifted too far from Pantone 473. With Osceola, DEFA managed to …
Fatal Error
With the protests at Standing Rock, and recent plans to privatize Indian lands for their oil deposits, this is an excellent time to take a look at Fatal Error (Tödlicher Irrtum), a 1970 western from DEFA. It’s a shame this film isn’t available with English subtitles, because this is a movie for the times, if …
White Wolves
As discussed in previous posts, the Western genre, so popular in America, provided the folks at DEFA an excellent opportunity to explore the dangers of capitalism without having to shoehorn its politics into an ill-fitting boot. If you've ever wanted to see the evils of capitalism at work, you need look no further than the …
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 …
East German Cinema Blog 