Considering how unsubtle its title, "Die Morder sind unter uns" (The Murderers Are Among Us, 1946) is, the first movie made in post WWII-Germany remains surprisingly unpreachy and is not agit-prop until the last two of its 81-minute running time. The first and most famous of the German Trummerfilmen (rubble films) has the look of the great pre-Hitler German movies, in particular those of Fritz Lang, and even more particularly of "M" with the consultation with a psychic who has a large star globe that could have been in one of the Dr. Mabuse films. There are the menacing shadows, the low and high camera angles (very few shots are straight ahead at eye level), the artful stairwell shots, plus the photogenic ruins of bombed-out Berlin. (I don't know if anyone actually used x-rays to replace broken window pains, but it is something very much in the tradition of the macabre pre-Hitler German cinema.)

The art director was Otto Hunte, who had worked on most of Lang's pre-1933 movies (and Sternberg's "The Blue Angel")... but also on the infamous anti-Semitic movie "Jud Süß"... in which Wolfgang Staudte, the writer-director of "Die Morder," played a role. The film-makers, working in the Soviet Zone of occupied Berlin, had their own expiating to do. (Staudte continued with "Rotation" (1949), which is unavailable in North America, but moves on from Nazi war crimes to Nazi crimes against humanity.

"The Murderers Are Among Us" and Lang's one movie shot in (West) Germany after the war, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse are the only two German movies made during the 1940s and 50s that I'd heard of as recently as a year ago, and I had not seen any. That Lang refused to return for more than a visit to make one movie is quite understandable. One of the other makers of great pre-1933 German movies, G. W. Pabst made movies during the Third Reich and resumed making them in 1948, "Der Letzte Akt" (The Last Ten Days of Adolf Hitler), made in 1955, being praised by some (but unavailable here).*

Great movies came from the former Axis partners of the Third Reich, Italy and Japan, but German movies did not receive much international attention until the mid-1960s (the "new German cinema" of Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, and Rainer Fassbinder, some of whose movies I have been writing about here recently. "Die Morder sind unter uns" shows that there was some continuity, not least in look and personnel, with the pre-Nazi cinema, making the dearth of cinematic inventiveness for the following two decades more of a mystery (one for which I do not know the solution).

"Die Morder sind unter uns" pointed forward across the desert of German movies of the next two decades to the "new German cinema" in avoiding introducing characters. The opening scene involves a woman who has broken her glasses who is not seen again in the movie. While she is in the occulist's, a quite well-nourished-looking former resident of the apartment building, Susanne (Hildegarde Knef) enters. She has been in a concentration camp (seemingly with abundant access to makeup as well as food...). For what reason, we never learn (though it was not for being Jewish eventually becomes certain).

Her former apartment has been occupied by an antisocial drunkard who had been a surgeon. Susanne wants to reclaim her space (unlike much of the city, it is damaged rather than destroyed), but decides to split it with Dr. Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert). Their initial antagonism melts (as in a Hollywood romantic comedy like, particularly, "The More the Merrier"), but Dr. Mertens is deeply traumatized. Come to think of it, his return to medicine also has a very Hollywood (Capraesque) turn, and the dialectic between wanting to take on the role of avenger (vigilante) and the rule of law is also dominant in many a Hollywood western (and noirs such as Jules Dassin's "Thieves by Night").

It is decidedly un-Hollywood in showing an unmarried man and woman cohabiting (though I did not see a bed in the room of either of them). And the noir photography was German in origin anyway. There is none of the sententious voiceover narration of the American movies shot in the rubble of Germany, Fred Zinnemann's The Search or the focus on the occupiers in both that and Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair. The mood (post-traumatic stress on a homicidal/suicidal edge) is closer to that of Roberto Rosselini's Germany, Year Zero, except with a Hollywood happy ending in which love conquers trauma and the guilty are punished rather than one like Roseelini's very, very bleak one.

It's impossible (I think) to dislike Hildegarde Nef's Susanne, though she looks far too glamorous for the part of someone stumbling back from a concentration camp. The other performers look their parts and only overact a little. The great Trummerfilmen is unquestionably Carol Reed's "The Third Man," but it seems likely that its look might owe something to "Die Mörder sind unter uns." (And Sam Fuller's over-amphetamined 1959 "Verboten"?)

The DVD has an excellent video transfer. It has text extras of liner notes and a director biography. I could not get either to go to second pages, though the ext of the first page of each ended in mid-sentence.

---

* I have since learned that the great noir-maker Robert Siodmak returned to Germany and made (among others) "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam" in 1957, and that Peter Lorre returned to direct and star in "Der Verlorene" in 1951, both set during the Third Reich and neither available on DVD or VHS here. I'm curious about these, but even if they are masterpieces, they could not have restored Germany to being one of the places from which great movies were coming during the first two postwar decades.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD