Kameradschaft (G.W. Pabst, 1931)

A Swedish poster for Kameradschaft

A film made in 1931 about a rapprochement between the French and the Germans seems naïve perhaps only with the benefit (if you can call it that) of hindsight. Pabst's Kameradschaft was also released with the French title La Tragédie de la mine, and the dialogue oscillates between German and French. It's less a plea for political unity than for a comradeship of workers, united against the forces that exploit them. A fire and explosion on the French side of a coal mine that extends beneath the border between France and Germany traps a number of French miners. Hearing of this, a German miner named Wittkopp (Ernst Busch), urges his fellow miners and his bosses to put together a rescue team to help the trapped Frenchmen. They wind up being hailed as heroes by the French, though the speeches at the end of the film are a bit heavy-handed. Like most successful mine-rescue movies, this one depends on well-drawn characters, exciting action and convincing sets. The characters were created by Ladislaus Vajda and Peter Martin Lampel from a story by Karl Otten, based on an actual disaster along the Franco-German border in 1906. Pabst's direction, aided by skillful editing by Jean Oser and Marc Sorkin, keeps things suspenseful and coherent. But perhaps the greatest contribution comes from production designers Ernö Metzner and Karl Vollbrecht, whose sets, constructed in the studio, have a claustrophobic reality. The cinematography of Fritz Arno Wagner and Robert Baberske adds to the illusion.

The Threepenny Opera (G.W. Pabst, 1931)

In 1928, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill transformed John Gay's 18th-century Beggar's Opera into Die Dreigroschenoper, one of the most celebrated works to come out of Weimar-era Germany, so when sound came to film it was inevitable that the musical should become a movie. But both Brecht and Weill were unhappy with what Pabst decided to do with both the plot and the songs, so they sued. Brecht lost, but Weill won, with the result that although songs were cut from the film, no new music by other composers was added. Brecht's objections seem to be more about a loss of control over the screenplay, which was written by Léo Lania, Ladislaus Vajda, and Béla Balász, than about any ideological shift: If anything, the ending of the film goes even further left than Brecht's did, with the crooks and corrupt officials of the play becoming bankers. Pabst's direction is sometimes a little slow and stiff: He had never done a musical film before, and the action between songs often seems to lag. But the musical numbers that remain -- which include the well-known "Moritat" or "Mack the Knife," Lotte Lenya's delivery of "The Ballad of the Ship With Fifty Cannons," and "The Song of the Heavy Cannon" -- are well-handled. The cast includes Rudolf Forster as Mackie Messer (i.e. Mack the Knife), Carola Neher as Polly Peachum, Fritz Rasp as Peachum, and Lenya as Jenny. It's striking to see that, as in Fritz Lang's M, made the same year, the underworld is presumed to consist of syndicates of thieves and beggars. The cinematography is by Pabst's frequent collaborator, Fritz Arno Wagner, and the splendid sets are by Andrej Andrejew.

M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Point of view is everything in a thriller. Let the viewer see events through the wrong eyes, and suspense goes out the window. The remarkable thing about Lang's great thriller is that the point of view changes so often. It starts with that of anxious parents, knowing that a child-killer is on the loose, then narrows to one particular parent, waiting for her daughter to come home from school for lunch. But then we see the object of her fears, her daughter, making contact with a strange man, and our suspense builds as we return to the worried mother. But as strongly as we sympathize with the mother, we also eventually learn to focus our anxieties elsewhere: on the beleaguered police, on innocent victims of people's suspicions, on the criminal underworld harassed by the police, and eventually even on the murderer himself. There are even moments when, as he becomes the object of the manhunt, trapped in the attic of a building swarming with the criminals in search of him, we find ourselves semi-consciously rooting for him to escape. Then we find ourselves rooting for the criminals to capture him and to escape being caught by the cops. And then, when he is put on trial by the criminals, we root for the police to arrive and rescue him. In short, the movie is a study in the ways in which sympathy can be manipulated. Lang and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Thea von Harbou wrote the screenplay, and the atmosphere of the film is superbly maintained by the cinematography of Fritz Arno Wagner and the sets of Emil Hasler and Karl Vollbrecht. But none of it would work without the presence of some extraordinary performers, starting with Peter Lorre as the sniveling, obsessed Hans Beckert: a career-defining performance in many ways, considering that Lorre had been known for comic roles on stage before Lang made him a movie star. Then there's Otto Wernicke as Inspector Lohmann, whose performance was so memorable that Lang brought him back as the same character in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), stereotyping Wernicke as a cop for much of his career. And Gustav Gründgens, the imperious leader of the criminal faction, who later became identified with the role of Mephistopheles in stage and screen versions of Goethe's Faust (Peter Gorski, 1960) -- not to mention in Klaus Mann's 1936 novel, Mephisto, based on Gründgens's embrace of the Nazis to advance his career.