From Morn to Midnight (1920)

Time for a silent German expressionist film, I think, and one that's a hundred years old this year. This has all the crooked, alienating, crooked set design that one would expect from the movement that gave us Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Quite rightly, neither the look nor the acting are having any of that realism nonsense.

This is based on a play by Georg Kaiser of which I know nothing except what I've just Googled. Apparently Kaiser eschewed such bourgeois affectations as characterisation and his plays all apply Nietzcgean philosophy. Here, then, we have a middle aged bank cashier who one day, on a whim, nicks a load of money because he wrongly thinks some Italian lady fancies him, abandons his wife and daughter, and aimlessly looks for meaning. It's quite the mid-life crisis, sort of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin in the Weimar Republic but with added God being dead, supermen, will to power and whatever Nietzchean subtext there may be.

Whatever its philosophical underpinnings, the last scene is devilishly clever. Just as the cashier seems to find religion, and it all seems to be a morality play, this expectation is subverted as the Salvation Army lot turn out to be just as greedy and corruptible as everyone else. The only person standing by him is the girl (the same actress plays many parts, including hid daughter and the prostitute she pervs over... who promptly ships him to the police, whereupon he gets shot dead. Lovely.

This is an enjoyable, neglected gem, freely available on YouTube. Unfortunately though, there's a very dodgily stereotyped Jewish character early on, and we can hardly excuse this in Weimar Germany of all times and places.

The Third Man (1949)

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Yes, it had to be that quote. Predictable but necessary.

This film is, essentially, superb. It tends to suffer somewhat from the overly high expectations one tends to have for films as critically acclaimed as this, but I won't discriminate against it for that. The film didn't choose to be so hyped. In truth, this film may not be quite amongst the best ever made but it is, nonetheless, utterly superb.

I won't recount the intriguing plot with its twists and turns and the gradual reveal of the story of Harry Lime, played with splendid charisma by the great Orson Welles. But the script paints as dark a picture of human nature as one would expect from the typewriter of Graham Greene. Vienna is made to look awesome by Carol Reed in its monochrome splendour, and the cast is superb. This is a Vienna still under occupation by the four powers, where even minor aristocrats resort to the black market to survive. This once-great imperial city has fallen very far indeed, with its grandiose Habsburg architecture seeming to mock it. 

Above all this film has atmosphere, pervaded as it is by a sense of doom and pessimism. And above it all floats that zither tune. This is a film that everyone should see.