Word: helmut
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Operating since 1947 on a modest budget of less than $100,000 of public funds yearly, the institute's staff of 35 specialists, headed by scholarly, bespectacled Historian Helmut Krausnick, 54, has assembled and is sifting a mountain of documents of the Nazi years. Its findings of Nazi iniquity are made public in regular quarterly reports sent to 2,000 subscribers throughout the world, and in hundreds of "expert opinions" supplied on request to West German courts trying crimes of the Nazi period...
Against the backdrop of Paris, where people seem more interesting anyway, the superb German film Mon Petit tells a love story--"sometimes funny, sometimes sad"--which is consistently wonderful to watch. From the moment director Helmut Kautner appears to introduce his audience to "out boy and girl" until he walks down the boulevard at the end, his masterful hand changes ordinary into unique, ennui into comedy, sex into lyricism, and Paris into the colors of Cezanne...
...Director Helmut Kautner's point is that loneliness and pride make communication well-nigh impossible between people. The seventeen-year-old girl feels she must invent rich relatives, fiancees, pipe dreams, in order to be loved, and these lies set up a terrible barrier between herself and the boy who would love her. He feels too proud to marry a rich girl when he is too poor to support even himself and a duck. Similarly, the married woman thinks she has to go on sleeping with her husband and her other lover so Jacques--soft, revolting Jacques--won't lose...
...Director Helmut Kautner has taken Karl Zuchmayer's biting leftist script and toned it down, both in political implication and in social description. As the movie proceeds one can see the effect which could have resulted from the blending of abject misery with bitter humor. There are flashes of what must have been really fine pathos on older, flickering, brownish black-and-white film. Blind street singers grind out a Weill-ish ballad, one playing a hand organ, the other tapping a drum with sticks taped to his elbows. A dying consumptive girl cries out in fear of the whiteness...
Outside of the latter rather sticky item, The Captain From Koepenick is highly entertaining, and in a few of the comic scenes, positively brilliant. Helmut Kautner's comic direction is perceptive and lightning fast. His sausage-filled officials are overdone perfectly, and his other minor characters dodge in and out of the story with potent effect. And of course, throughout, there is Heinz Ruhmann's performance, which alone makes The Captain From Koepenick eminently worth seeing...