Only four films this week. We saw the third season of Charité in the ARD Mediathek. Spoiler: The East German (DDR) government locks in all their citizens, claiming it’s for their own protection. Gott sei dank, we’ve moved past all that nonsense!
A Night to Remember (1958)
Arte, Original with French subtitles
Post-war British film about the RMS Titanic, black and white, very good. It had a very documentary feel; the silhouettes of the women’s costumes and the attitudes toward class and religion were not updated to appeal to the contemporary audience. There is no fake love story to distract from the horror; all of the characters are modeled on real passengers and crew (I recognized the Italian baker who got drunk and survived from a William Shatner show I saw last year). The pacing was very good, as was the music.
I didn’t feel connected to any of the characters outside of the crew; I don’t know if that is on me or on the director. Some of the passengers were so awful I didn’t really care that they died (some were even awful after they survived; I’d love to see the writers’ source material).
But poor Mr. Andrews, sitting alone in his great hall, with no WiFi to pass the time with TikTok videos…
TL;DR: If you can see only one film in the Titanic genre, see this one.
Die Söhne der großen Bärin (1966)
RBB, original Deutsch with Deutsch subtitles
East German westerns. I end up watching them when I see them come up in the TV listing because…East German westerns. Crazy world!
If you can look past Serbs and Hungarians in makeup playing Dakotas, a poorly-costumed human playing the titular Great Bear, and some racist product-of-the-times dialogue… Gojko Mitic does all his own stunts in a Yugoslavian landscape that looks a little bit like the Black Hills, in an interesting story about a tribal leader searching for safety for his people, and revenge for the murder of his father.
I probably won’t watch it again, but I’ll look for more Gojko Mitic.
The Sting (1972)
3Sat, Deutsch with Deutsch subtitles
I assume the slang–except that N word, of course there’s a German version of that–and most of the jokes didn’t translate properly, but they got the story told. It seems a lot of people love this movie, and I think it holds up fifty years later, but I feel kind of neutral. I laughed and gasped where it was expected, but I didn’t really care if Gondorff and Hooker succeeded.
I didn’t understand the ending until Mr Radish explained it. I blame the translators.
The Eagle (2011)
Cable, original English
As the credits rolled, Mr Radish said, “I thought that would be more interesting than it was.” Interesting makeup on the barbarians and some nice landscape shots, but the time would have been better spent checking for new tweets about Roman Britain by historians.
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