A movie about sleazy overzealous reporters working in tandem with a government using "terrorism" to justify any methods? Sound like the America of Fox News and Karl Rove? Indeed it does, but I'm writing about "Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum" (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum," a 1975 movie of a 1972 novel by the Nobel Prize-winning writer and champion of civil liberties and moderation, Heinrch Böll that managed not to sink under the weight of the didactic subtitle "Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann" (How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead). It is an absorbing movie of considerable subtlety, though the subtlety is not immediately apparent or even suggested.

The movie begins with a man (Jürgen Prochnow, who later commanded "Das Boot") being covertly photographed on a (ferry?) boat and being tailed on land in Köln (Cologne), Böll's birthplace. There are undercover policeman (in Arab costume) at a Carnival party from which the man under surveillance leaves and goes to the apartment of a woman (Angela Winkler) called "the nun" by her friends because she is so stiffly proper. The next morning, she is having toast and coffee when a large SWAT team suddenly breaks down the door, tossing furniture around, and badgering her about the fugitive, named Ludwig Goetten. Police Komissar Beizmenne (Mario Adorf from "The Tin Drum") is quite nasty to her, in part because he is in charge of a very large operation that has managed to lose what the official line has labeled a "dangerous terrorist." (It gradually emerges that Ludwig is a deserter from the army who stole a payroll and has no connection to any group, terrorist or otherwise.)

The police treat Katharina as a terrorist and actively collaborate with the character assassination of her by a New York Post(/Bild Zeitung)-like reporter, Werner Toetges (Dieter Laser). Horny as he is slimy, Toetges goes to the town where Katharina grew up and concocts absurd statements he attributes to Katharina's ex-husband. A colleague similarly invents quotes from her employer (she is a housekeeper for an attorney), and Toetges charges into the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital in which Katharina's mother is in seclusion (that is, allowed no visits, even her daughter's). After the shock (and bewilderment) of his invasion, the mother dies and Toetges publishes totally false, totally scurrilous dying words attributed to her.

The movie and the book on which it is based are indictments of "yellow press" tactics and the cozy complicity of the state (police) with intimidation and character assassination. The stupendous scale of the manhunt is inordinate, but the police brutality is more psychological than physical.

Although I am not going to reveal what happens after the reporter triggers the death of Katharina's mother and then further sullies Katharina's reputation with lies about what the woman who could not speak said, I have to say that "the plot thickens" and that matters do not remain as black and white (mudslinging and pure) are they seem. Moreover, there has been a sympathetic policeman all along. And then there is an inspired epilogue the contents of which I am also not going even to hint at revealing.

Mario Adorf and Dieter Laser overplay and/or have parts verging on cartoonish meanies. Angela Winkler manages to project guilelessness and outrage and sufficient resiliency and devotion to survive the rough treatment by the police and the insinuations and lies of the scandal-sheet press. The proceedings are filmed by Jost Vacano (who would also go on to "Das Boot" and then to Hollywood for "RoboCop" and more) in a quasi-documentary style, without the supersaturated primary colors of some other 1970s New German cinema works. The screenplay and directing are credited to Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta (who explain in a joint interview included on the Criterion DVD that von Trotta was too knowing to play the part of Katharina, but worked intensively with Winkler). Original music (that is not intrusive in a movie that is almost Bressonian in orchestrating nonmusical sounds) was supplied by Hans Werner Henze.

Although I think that much of the greatness of The Tin Drum was lost in Schlöndorff's film of it, I think he improved on Böll's novel. As the interviews included on the disk (those Vacano and Schlöndorff more than of Böll himself) make clear, Böll was furious at having been slandered by the tabloid the Bild Zeitung... and none too happy about the invasion of his home by 40 policeman after he had written an article in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel urging calm in attributing a bank robbery to a gang of anarchists who were Public Enemy Number One and whose existence was a pretext for large-scale depredations of civil liberties in Germany (the forerunner of the huge extension of legitimation of police state methods that is the sinisterly Orwellian-named "Patriot Act"). Schlöndorff and von Trotta lower the temperature of Böll's fury at his mistreatment (while sympathizing with it and leaving in what seems to me a satisfying but out of character act by Katharina.)

I think that the first segment of the directors' interview is very useful for providing the context of the time and place portrayed (the German Federal Republic, ca. 1972), but that the rest of it should be viewed after the movie.

Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Jost Vacano, and Böll himself have much of interest to say in the interviews (which, together, run more than an hour and a quarter). The DVD (the transfer to which was supervised by Vacano) also includes a trailer and is another outstanding contribution by Criterion to preserving, making available, and enhancing the heritage of world cinema.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD