La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)

Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni in La Notte

Lidia Pontano: Jeanne Moreau

Giovanni Pontano: Marcello Mastroianni 

Valentina Gherardini: Monica Vitti 

Tommaso Garani: Bernhard Wicki 

Gherardini: Vincenzo Corbella 

Signora Gherardini: Gritt Magrini 

Roberto: Giorgio Negro 

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni 

Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra 

Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo 

Production design: Piero Zuffi 

Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 

Music: Giorgio Gaslini 

Movie stars often provide a shortcut to establishing the backstories of the characters they play. Once we see the bruised intelligence of Jeanne Moreau and the weary elegance of Marcello Mastroianni, familiar to us from their previous films, we know something about their characters, Lidia and Giovanni Pontano, that the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte doesn't need to tell us. We know there will be tension in their marriage, that Lidia will go for long solitary walks and that Giovanni will yield to almost any temptation that crosses his path. Giovanni is a successful writer, but the money that affords them a handsome apartment in Milan mostly comes from her, which gives her one reason to feel resentful when she's shunted aside by his celebrity. So La Notte is mostly about her lonely search for a raison d'etre while he indulges himself with the pleasures of the moment: the come-on of a sex-crazed woman in a hospital, a celebratory book-signing, a night club floor show, a flirtation with the beautiful daughter of an industrialist, a lucrative job offer from that industrialist. Lidia even seems to be trying to find ways of indulging herself the way her husband does: On her long walk through Milan, she plays at being a prostitute, throwing backward glances at men she passes on the street, though never making the essential connection. She tries to break up a fight between two young men from what seem to be rival street gangs, but when the shirtless victor of the fight pursues her, she flees. She gets a kind of erotic charge from watching a group set off skyrockets. And she escapes from the industrialist's elaborate all-night party, a kind of tepid orgy manqué, with a handsome young man, only to stop in mid-dalliance and ask him to return her to the party. And so at the end of the film we leave the Pontanos grappling in the dirt as the dawn appears, somehow destined to continue their perverse games. La Notte has more narrative coherence than the other two Antonioni films usually thought of as a trilogy, L'Avventura (1960) and L'Eclisse (1962), which makes it essential in understanding what the director is up to. I take the currently prevailing view that Antonioni is less interested in existential alienation than in the lives of women in a society that valorizes male aggression. Hence the pivotal scene in which Lidia meets Valentina, the industrialist's daughter who has been toying with her husband, and instead of fighting they reach a kind of understanding, an assertion of female moral superiority. 

The Bridge (Bernhard Wicki, 1959)

Hans Scholten: Folker Bohnet
Albert Mutz: Fritz Wepper
Walter Forst: Michael Hinz
Jurgen Borchert: Frank Glaubrecht
Karl Horber: Karl Michael Balzer
Klaus Hager: Volker Lechtenbrink
Sigi Bernhard: Günther Hoffmann
Franziska: Cordula Trantow
Stern: Wolfgang Stumpf
Unteroffizier Heilmann: Günter Pfitzmann
Hauptmann Fröhlich: Heinz Spitzner
Oberstleutnant Bütov: Siegfried Schürenberg
Sigi's Mother: Edith Schultze-Westrum
Albert's Mother: Ruth Hausmeister
Jürgen's Mother: Eva Waiti
Walter's Father: Hans Elwenspoek
Walter's Mother: Trude Breitschopf
Karl's Father: Hans Hellmold
Barbara: Edeltraut Elsner
Sigrun: Inge Benz

Director: Bernhard Wicki
Screenplay: Michael Mansfeld, Karl-Wilhelm Vivier, Bernhard Wicki
Based on a novel by Manfred Gregor
Cinematography: Gerd von Bonin
Production design: Heinrich Graf Brühl, Peter Scharff
Film editing: Carl Otto Bartning
Music: Hans-Martin Majewski

Something of a landmark in the revival of German filmmaking before the burst of creativity wrought by Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others in the 1960s and '70s, The Bridge is an appropriate title in that it not only looks back to what Germany was during the war, but also suggests some of the trauma that lingered into the increasingly affluent present. The decimation and psychic mutilation of the generation that came of age during the war is the film's central subject. It focuses on seven young men, still in their teens, in the final days of the Third Reich, inspired by the dream of military glory but undermined by the incompetence of the remnants of the Wehrmacht, facing a defeat it cannot admit is coming. The boys have grown up together in the same town, and they all receive their draft notices on the same day. But a well-meaning officer decides not to send these raw draftees into the heat of battle but to give them a nonsensical task: defending the bridge across the river near their town -- even though the bridge is slated to be blown up as a deterrent to the advancing Allies. It will keep them out of harm's way, the officer thinks. But communications wires get crossed and the boys on the bridge never get the message to retreat. Instead, they die "heroically," doing all the right things -- including blowing up an Allied tank -- as they make their futile stand. The story, from the novel by Gregor Dorfmeister, under his pseudonym Manfred Gregor, is based on a real event told to Dorfmeister by one of the survivors. The film is full of well-staged action and an effective re-creation of the real setting which had been completely transformed in the years since the war ended. The interaction between the boys and their families is touching without slopping over into mawkishness.