Dir: Douglas Sirk
Star: John Gavin, Liselotte Pulver, Jock Mahoney, Klaus Kinski

Of late, I’d been wondering if my attention span had been shot, perhaps as a result of too much social media. It seemed like I could hardly get through a film without being compelled to reach for my phone to check my email, surf Facebook or look up sports scores. On seeing that this movie had a 131-minute running-time, it felt like it was going to be a problem. However, on the evidence of this, the problem is more likely the movies I’ve been watching – which, to be honest, have largely been a bit crap. I’d kinda drifted away from “good” movies, to ones which were viewed simply because they fitted the criteria for one or other of my projects. This one had no trouble holding my interest for the full duration, despite it also being older than I am.

The story takes place in the later stage of World War II, with the German army being relentlessly pushed back on the Eastern Front by the advancing Russians. Ernst Graeber (Gavin) is an infantry soldier there, though as the film starts, his company has about three-quarters of its men killed or missing, Morale is understandably low, and some are quietly beginning to question the whole point of being there. Matters isn’t helped when the group are ordered to execute civilians who have been found guilty of being partisans, an incident which pushes one young colleague of Graeber into taking his own life. Good news does arrive, in Ernst’s long-delayed furlough, giving him three weeks away from the front, at home with his family.

On arrival, however, he finds the street has been flattened by Allied bombs, with no indication of whether his parents are alive or dead. Seeking information about them, he goes to see the family physician, and meets the doctor’s daughter, Elizabeth Kruse (Pulver). Her father has been placed in a concentration camp for telling the wrong person the war is lost, and she has been forced to board Nazi officials in her house. The two lost souls begin a relationship, frequently interrupted by air-raid warnings, but eventually get married after overcoming problems caused by the status of her father, as well as a summons for Elizabeth to visit the Gestapo. But nothing can be done about the impending end of Ernst’s furlough which will require his return to the frozen hell of the war against the Russians.

Coming out a scant thirteen years after the end of the war, the most impressive thing is how sympathetic the story is to the German people as a whole, although the actors’ accents are far from uniform. Germans are depicted as victims, even the likes of Graeber, who is portrayed as a genuinely decent person, pushed into actions from which there is no escape. It was based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who also appears in the film himself, in the role of fugitive teacher Professor Pohlmann. Remarque is best known for another war (more correctly, anti-war) novel, which also became a film in All Quiet on the Western Front, but had personal experience of the horrors of World War II as well. His sister was arrested, like Dr. Kruse, for saying the war was lost, and was beheaded while Remarque lived in exile in the US. The German-born Sirk did too: his teenage son died in the Ukraine while part of the army there.

If the violence is limited by the time (little is shown beyond bombing), there’s no pulling of punches in regard to the emotional impact, enhanced by shooting largely in war-damaged locations. And it’s something felt most intently by the everyday people. There’s a scene where Ernst and Elizabeth finagle an evening at an upper-class restaurant, somewhere that shouldn’t still exist, and it’s as if the war simply isn’t happening. After the air-raid siren goes off, the carousing continues in the hotel’s shelter… right up until a bomb hits. Turns out the rich are not invulnerable to the horrors of war, after all. But perhaps the most chilling scene sees Ernst seeking help with Elizabeth’s Gestapo issue, calling on a school friend, now a high-ranking official. He has a guest, commandant of the concentration camp, whose casual description of the atrocities therein, so revolts Ernst, he leaves with his original need for assistance forgotten.

Gavin and Pulver were both relative unknowns when cast here, though their career thereafter went in sharply diverging directions. Pulver was already well-known in German cinema at the time (she had previously appeared alongside Kinski in Hanussen), and that’s where she largely remained, not making much of her Hollywood opportunity. She’s still alive, having turned 92 just a couple of days ago. Gavin, however, went on to play key roles in both Spartacus and Psycho, and was almost cast as James Bond not once but twice, in Diamonds are Forever + Live and Let Die. He was President of the Screen Actors Guild after Spartacus colleague Charlton Heston, and became the US Ambassador to Mexico in the early eighties.

Kinski appears in just a single scene, towards the end of the movie. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since he’s well down the credits, not being known at the time. Klaus merits a position two slots above the guy credited as ‘Mad Air Raid Warden’, and that’s about right. He appears when Ernst ventures into Gestapo HQ, seeking more information about Elizabeth’s summons, playing the Lieutenant to whom he must speak. He’s officious and distant, especially given the purpose of the warrant, yet is not necessarily cruel. It’s simply business to him – something to be done, and he is more interested in making sure the proper documentation is filed than anything else. Again, this could be chilling, or it might simply be the inevitable, numbing impact of years of brutal conflict. The end of a human life has become a bureaucratic exercise.

Given his brief appearance (the IMDb used to refer to it, incorrectly, as “uncredited”), no wonder Kinski opted not to mention it in his autobiography. At this point in his career, he seemed more committed to his stage career. A Time to Love seems to have been the only film in which Klaus appeared for a three and a half year period, from Geliebte Corrina (released in West Germany in December 1956) and Der Rächer (August 1960). Despite this, it’s an effective piece of work, and one with which Kinski should be proud enough to be associated, even if only for a couple of minutes of screen time. Below you can find his appearance in its entirety: there was a version up already, but the aspect ratio was horribly borked, so I figured it deserved an upgrade. Sorry to those in Germany, etc. where it’s blocked.