“Germany Year Zero” (1948)
Shot on location in Germany only two years after World War II ended, Roberto Rossellini’s post-war drama “Germany Year Zero,” the final chapter of his War Trilogy, is not only a devastating neo-realist masterwork, it is perhaps the greatest post-war film ever told. In a bombed-out, practically post-apocalyptic Berlin, all families struggle to survive. The Italian director’s picture, which features all non-professional actors, centers on one family caught in the bleakest of conditions: the Kohler family, mired in drama on top of limited rations, waning electricity, heat and lack of other fundamentals. The malnourished father is an ailing, bedridden burden, the sister has turned to prostitution and the eldest son, a former soldier turned coward, fears he’ll be jailed for fighting to the bitter end and is unwilling to register for his ration card to help feed the suffering family. The housing authority forces them to live in the apartment of another, more affluent family that resents their presence. The burden thus falls on the family’s youngest, Edmund (Edmund Meschke), a twelve-year-old boy forced to dig graves and scrape up any menial work for extra money. As Edmund wanders the streets in search of work, he falls in with young thieving teenagers and his vile, vaguely pedophiliac ex-teacher who exploits the child to sell off fascist propaganda to occupying soldiers and fills his head with mendacities built on Hitler’s twisted philosophies about the weak. “Germany Year Zero” not only follows the slow demise of the Kohler family, but the disintegration of Edmund’s moral values and his poignant loss of innocence, as, under the influence of the loathsome Nazi sympathizer, he is led down a most heartbreaking path. A wrenching tragedy and a chilling reminder of the damage wrought on many subsequent generations by fascism, as agonizing as it is, its tacit compassion for the German people living in the aftermath also makes it an unforgettable work of towering humanism.
READ MORE: War Is Hell: 20-Minute Video Essay Explores The Cinematic Landscape Of War Movies
“Ten Seconds To Hell” (1959)
“The Hurt Locker” for the post-war generation, Robert Aldrich‘s grim, grimy “Ten Seconds to Hell” is a weirdly downbeat picture, yet it contains stretches that are as tense and involving as any thriller. Combining many elements of the underrated director’s particular style, it even foreshadows his most famous title “The Dirty Dozen” in construction, detailing the reluctantly heroic exploits of a group of outcasts, a misfit bomb squad tasked with making safe the unexploded devices that litter the streets of Berlin immediately after the war. Here, though, they are outcasts from the German army, trusted by the Allied occupation forces at least partially because they were so disliked by their German army superiors as to be given the thankless, probable-suicide detail of bomb disposal. And they are anything but unified, held loosely together by common interest, but each having very different motivations for taking on such a perilous job. Their natural leader (played by Jack Palance, as stoic as an Easter Island Moai throughout) is a brilliant bomb expert, but clashes with his suave second-in-command, in both love and war, when they both fall for the same woman. As often with Aldrich, the film skates close to B-movie status, and is far more impressive in the micro than the macro of its plot: the love story never engages, too many of the supporting characters are undifferentiated cannon-fodder, and the higher stakes of the world outside and the politics are sometimes lost amid the clashing male egos of the troupe. But individual scenes really sing, especially the pared-back, almost Bressonian precision of the bomb disposal sequences, shot on location in Berlin for added authenticity, in which the business of firing pins and detonators and the need for a steady surgeon’s hand are rendered with procedural fascination and keep you utterly locked in your seat.
“The Third Man” (1949)
Bringing a rather British sensibility and a European flair to the very American film noir genre, “The Third Man” stands as one of the very greats (the BFI named it the greatest British film ever in 1999), but must have been even more stunning at the time, as one of the first movies to poke at the dark underbelly of the reality of Allied-run Europe. Written directly for the screen by “Brighton Rock” author Graham Greene (who turned it into a novella soon after), it stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, an American writer of pulp Westerns who comes to post-war Vienna in search of old pal, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to learn that his friend is dead. Of course, that’s just the start of one of the great film thriller plots, building to a twist that’s still surprising, even given the presence of the biggest-name actor on the posters, revealed in an indelible screen entrance for Welles as Lime. It’s damn close to a perfect film on every level, thanks to Carol Reed’s fat-free, precise direction, the gorgeous photography by Robert Krasker (virtually inventing the Dutch angle), and the iconic score by Anton Karas, which became a major popular hit. But as unforgettable as Welles is, as one of the most iconic and complex villains ever, he’s nearly dwarfed by Vienna itself, the way that Reed captures a very particular time in the city’s history, as it’s divided up between the Allies and becomes a hotbed and magnet for any sociopathic opportunist like Lime. Hauntingly captured, the film only loosely deals with the impact of the war in the text, but with the action taking place against both the astonishing architecture of ancient history and the rubble of the recent, it’s a masterclass in making your movie even richer with the exact right setting.
