Montgomery Clift is an Air Force enlisted man, an engineer aboard a four-engined C-54 that supplies the Western sector of Berlin with needed supplies during the Soviet blockade.
Now, kids, once upon a time, back in the bad old 1940s, a bunch of good guys, including the United States, won a war against a bunch of bad guys, including Nazi Germany. (PS: Berlin is a city in Germany.) After the war, some of the good guys turned into bad guys and made a nuisance of themselves for us. We, the good guys, that is, owned part of Berlin, which was surrounded by Indian territory. Are you following this? But, get this, the bad guys wouldn't let us good guys take any supplies into Berlin on the ground. So the good Berliners would have starved and gotten sick with real bad colds and the black pox and who knows what all, if it hadn't been for the US Air Force, the Navy, and a lot of British and French good guys flying in that food and those supplies. The thing to remember is that the Americans are good and the Russians are bad.
However, that's not what the movie is about. That's what the sociologist Harold Garfinkel called a "taken-for-granted." Why make a movie about something everyone already knows? It would be like making a feature film in which the big reveal is that the earth is round.
Instead, this film is like a training camp movie for civilians of the period, which is 1950, five years after the war ended. What should we think about our former enemies? Germany was in ruins, the citizens on the verge of starvation, they had no Starbucks. But how should we treat a society that may have been complicit in the deliberate extermination of more than twelve million people that they didn't like? Are they humans or animals? Well, the movie explains it all for you. Montgomery Clift is an earnest, naive young man who falls for a beautiful and manipulative German woman who plays him for a sucker. Sadder but wiser, Clift learns that you can't trust some of them.
Paul Douglas is his friend who has a grudge against all things German, including the people, left over from his wartime experiences. He hates and insults them. Like Clift, he gets a girl friend too and bats her around until one day she revolts and starts throwing the Bill of Rights at him. At this point, Douglas realizes that, hey, they can learn to be Jeffersonian democrats just like us! So both men learn that you really shouldn't generalize about a whole nation or, by implication, a whole race or religion or social movement. But the main point of the movie is that, regardless of the nature of the folks whose lives are being saved, the US and Allied military do a pretty good job of saving them. They can land those big airplanes on days when visibility is so low that even the pigeons are walking.
Cripes, I can hardly bring myself to watch this. Many years ago I was president of the German club in college and one of my heavy responsibilities was to choose a movie to be shown at one of the meetings. I chose this one. The audience consisted of about twelve students and two elderly Germans, a very nice old lady and a retiring and shy man with glasses. I hadn't seen the movie before. Now I can only imagine what these two German-born citizens must have thought as they sat through the comic-book movie about duplicitous Germans scamming our boys and spying for the Russians, even while we were saving their bacon for them. The clichés bounce around like superballs from wall to wall. I will mention only one. A young German kid gives a speech of gratitude to one of the Air Force officers. The kid has been taught English by a Southerner, so the speech comes out in a Georgia drawl, full of y'alls. What an embarrassment.
Yet, it's an informative film for those who don't know what was up during the Berlin blockade, if you can just squeeze past the stereotypes. Montgomery Clift is an arresting actor and almost as handsome as I am. Paul Douglas is reliably blustery and blue collar. And Cornell Borchers brings an appealing individualized beauty to the role, and she turns in a fine performance.
Now, kids, once upon a time, back in the bad old 1940s, a bunch of good guys, including the United States, won a war against a bunch of bad guys, including Nazi Germany. (PS: Berlin is a city in Germany.) After the war, some of the good guys turned into bad guys and made a nuisance of themselves for us. We, the good guys, that is, owned part of Berlin, which was surrounded by Indian territory. Are you following this? But, get this, the bad guys wouldn't let us good guys take any supplies into Berlin on the ground. So the good Berliners would have starved and gotten sick with real bad colds and the black pox and who knows what all, if it hadn't been for the US Air Force, the Navy, and a lot of British and French good guys flying in that food and those supplies. The thing to remember is that the Americans are good and the Russians are bad.
However, that's not what the movie is about. That's what the sociologist Harold Garfinkel called a "taken-for-granted." Why make a movie about something everyone already knows? It would be like making a feature film in which the big reveal is that the earth is round.
Instead, this film is like a training camp movie for civilians of the period, which is 1950, five years after the war ended. What should we think about our former enemies? Germany was in ruins, the citizens on the verge of starvation, they had no Starbucks. But how should we treat a society that may have been complicit in the deliberate extermination of more than twelve million people that they didn't like? Are they humans or animals? Well, the movie explains it all for you. Montgomery Clift is an earnest, naive young man who falls for a beautiful and manipulative German woman who plays him for a sucker. Sadder but wiser, Clift learns that you can't trust some of them.
Paul Douglas is his friend who has a grudge against all things German, including the people, left over from his wartime experiences. He hates and insults them. Like Clift, he gets a girl friend too and bats her around until one day she revolts and starts throwing the Bill of Rights at him. At this point, Douglas realizes that, hey, they can learn to be Jeffersonian democrats just like us! So both men learn that you really shouldn't generalize about a whole nation or, by implication, a whole race or religion or social movement. But the main point of the movie is that, regardless of the nature of the folks whose lives are being saved, the US and Allied military do a pretty good job of saving them. They can land those big airplanes on days when visibility is so low that even the pigeons are walking.
Cripes, I can hardly bring myself to watch this. Many years ago I was president of the German club in college and one of my heavy responsibilities was to choose a movie to be shown at one of the meetings. I chose this one. The audience consisted of about twelve students and two elderly Germans, a very nice old lady and a retiring and shy man with glasses. I hadn't seen the movie before. Now I can only imagine what these two German-born citizens must have thought as they sat through the comic-book movie about duplicitous Germans scamming our boys and spying for the Russians, even while we were saving their bacon for them. The clichés bounce around like superballs from wall to wall. I will mention only one. A young German kid gives a speech of gratitude to one of the Air Force officers. The kid has been taught English by a Southerner, so the speech comes out in a Georgia drawl, full of y'alls. What an embarrassment.
Yet, it's an informative film for those who don't know what was up during the Berlin blockade, if you can just squeeze past the stereotypes. Montgomery Clift is an arresting actor and almost as handsome as I am. Paul Douglas is reliably blustery and blue collar. And Cornell Borchers brings an appealing individualized beauty to the role, and she turns in a fine performance.