Dir: Wolfgang Schleif
Star: Klaus Kinski, Brigitte Grothum, Marina Petrova, Sieghardt Rupp
a.k.a. The Red Pastures

Oh, look. Klaus Kinski is playing a serial killer. But before you roll your eyes and move on, this is actually considerably more subtle than it might appear from that sentence. This is the earliest film I’ve reviewed so far, in which Kinski is the genuine lead, rather than a supporting actor, and he is really good. It helps that the script is also solid, and the supporting performances back up Kinski’s surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of a man, who already has the murder of four women under his belt, when the film starts. But that’s getting well ahead of ourselves, for we don’t learn that until almost an hour into the movie.

That said, ot is clear from the start that something is up with him, because the movie opens with his character, Martin, escaping from a criminal psychiatric asylum. You don’t get put in one of those unless you have serious problems, and done some bad things. A subsequent conversation between Professor Lindner (Dieter Borsche) and an employee, puts a slightly different spin on the matter. “He has no idea of what he did. He forgot everything, and we have made every effort so he would forget.” But the discussion finishes with an ominous warning. “If he ever crosses the path of an inviting woman…” Sounds applicable for most of Klaus’s life, actually!

The next time we see Martin, he is making his way out of the reeds surrounding a lake on the border between East and West Germany. Interestingly, it’s never stated, but I presume we are on the West. The border feels curiously unguarded, considering this was released in May 1962, nine months after the Berlin Wall went up. There’s really little to separate the two countries in this rural area save a few guards, and the farm workers he encounters just assume Martin is a refugee from the other side. One of them is Katrin (Grothum), whose father owns the farm, and initially mistakes Martin for her missing husband, also called Martin, who had previously vanished at the border. She now lives with her daughter Hanni (Christine Ratej), though another employee, Kurt (Rupp), has eyes on Katrin – whether for her or her eventual inheritance, is hard to say.

Taken under Katrin’s wing, Martin ends up staying on the farm, putting his skills (learned in the asylum) as a mechanic to good use. He has to register with the local police, who are a bit suspicious of his amnesia, But he settles in, and his child-like innocence and soft-spoken nature help him to bond with Hanni. Martim seems scared of his own shadow – “Every word he hears, every stranger he faces, I always have the feeling that he wants to run away, that he wants to hide” – with a particular fear of confinement, even in something as simple as a locked door. But Katrin and the others put that up to previous trauma across the border, and for a while, things settle down into a routine, though Karl grows suspicious Martin is not the refugee he says.

The fragile calm is shattered when Martin heads into the city, looking to buy the doll and flashlight that Hanni wants more than anything for Christmas. It’s a strange, scary place for him, since all he knows is the farm and the asylum. However, the real disaster happens when he sees a ‘Wanted’ poster pasted up, for escaped murderer Josef Stief, who had been convicted of murdering four women. Because the poster has Martin’s face on it, shattering his innocent belief system. The police are alerted to his presence, and even though he makes his way back to the sanctuary of the farm, the driver who gave him a lift points authorities in his direction, and they show up there, for a final confrontation which, in many ways, resembles the end of many a Frankenstein film, with a mob hunting down someone who deserves sympathy as much as hate.

That’s the key moral dilemma at the center of the film. How much does a man deserve punishment, for a crime he doesn’t remember committing? It’s very smart of the film to keep the details of “Martin’s” crimes under wraps until; 54 minutes in, as by that point, we have bought into the gentle, caring nature of his character. This is shown particularly well in in his interactions with Hanni, such as telling her the story of the Selfish Giant. But, as we see later on, he is not cured of his urges, with the sight of a particular piece of jewelry capable of triggering a return to the psychotic rages which got him committed to the asylum. There’s also a very interesting discussion in which Prof. Lindner argues against the police “shoot to kill” policy.

“For me, he’s ill. I am a doctor and my duty is to heal him, just like others with a bad kidney or a gall-bladder illness. There’s no big difference. What happened was only possible because one of his organs wasn’t working, it was sick. I can’t hold him accountable for that.”

But, make no mistake, this is Klaus’s movie. He ends up hiding out on the farm, in the hay-loft where Hanni tries to protect him. Katrin finds him there, and tries to convince Martin the only solution is to go back to the asylum. His fear makes him refuse, and we get another wonderful example of Kinski in full, powerhouse flow: “They’ll lock me in. They’ll break me down. Only bars, only bars all over the place…” Unfortunately, it turns out that Katrin is wearing the coral necklace which reverts Martin into Josef, and he throws her from the hay-loft. Hanni thinks he has killed her mother, and tells the rest of the farmers, who have gathered to celebrate a wedding, leading to the mob mentioned earlier. The film-makers do appear to have set fire to an impressive amount of farmland, as the hunting party seek to drive Martin/Josef out.

I’m not 100% certain about the ending, which seems to come a bit out of nowhere. There’s also another subplot, involving Martin and the local barmaid, who is a genuine refugee from across the border – this doesn’t appear to go anywhere much. But whenever Kinski is on screen, the results are absolutely hypnotic. Particularly after his “true self” is revealed, Klaus is increasingly incandescent, playing a man tormented beyond the scope of what normal flesh should be expected to bear [it’s never revealed what they did in the asylum to wipe his memories, but it’s unlikely to have been tea and a chat] I suspect for this role, Kinski may have tapped into his enforced stay in a real asylum in the fifties. Whatever the source, this is perhaps the first great performance of his film career. Here are a couple of scenes, illustrating what I mean.