Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 66

60 Popular Culture Review tions imposed on Germany after the war, reparations that had the effect of crushing the economy. The same issues — poverty, prostitution and the callous individual ism that comes from the constant struggle to survive — can be seen in Rossellini’s film as in Wilder’s. Admittedly Wilder takes a tragic situation and turns it into a black comedy. Yet both films are effective in their portrayals of post-war Berlin and German society. In some respects, Wilder’s and Rossellini’s portraits of post-war German society are in stark contrast to the portrait of the good American soldier (Mont gomery Clift) offered by Fred Zinnemann in The Search (1948, US/Switzerland, MGM/Praesens). The film is clearly sympathetic to ordinary Germans who have suffered much material and moral deprivation, yet there is a sense that the Ameri can army is here to help, rather than punish, the German people. The Search focuses a great deal of attention on the efforts made by the Allied occupying forces and the International Red Cross, to reunite German families tom apart by war. This emphasis on the reunification of the natural family means that Clift must let go of the boy (whom he had wished to adopt) when the boy is reunited with his mother. Clearly, Zinnemann is drawing an analogy between Clift’s responsibility towards the (weak) boy, and the United States and UN’s responsibility towards the people of the defeated (weak) nation. It is significant that the film was produced at the same time as the United States was instituting the Marshall Plan. Although The Search may seem more optimistic than Wilder’s A Foreign Affair or Sam Fuller’s Verboten! (1959, US) (dealing with a doomed romance between an Ameri can GI and a German woman), this optimism is undercut by the realism of the mise en scene. Influenced by the Italian neorealist school of location shooting, Zinnemann shoots on location, using the bombed-scarred landscape to comment on the condition of the German people, ruined by a military and ideological defeat. The ruins are clearly used for symbolic purpose: they serve to remind the German people, and the world, of the “heart of darkness”(Nazism) that both built these cities and sowed the seeds for their destruction. Tourneur’s Berlin Express predates all the above films and can be seen as one of the first, and best, examples of Hollywood’s attempts to embrace both a European subject, and a style of shooting. Based on a story by European exile Curt Siodmak and produced under the auspices of Dore Schary’s RKO unit, (which also produced liberal films like Crossfire [1947,US, RKO, dir: Edward Dmytryk] and The Boy with Green Hair [ 1948,US, RKO, dir: Joseph Losey]), Berlin Express is a film about the death of idealism in the post-war years. Clearly influenced by the downbeat style and subject matter of Italian neorealist cinema, the film was shot on location in Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin. In an interview, the cinematogra pher Lucien Ballard, then married to the film’s female star Merle Oberon, ex plained how he had tried to make the best use of the locations and the new handheld