User Reviews

"Schwarzer Kies" is an extremely bleak movie that makes me wonder it ever found enough supporters to get made at all. The dark, disturbing story is portrays a German village living off an American Air Force Base (around 1960) mostly by cheating and prostituting. It is not surprising that the film didn't do much money at the box office. And the film was hurt by an accusation of antisemitism, which led to being recut to avoid a bad press. The accusation was a clear misinterpretation. What the film really did, was to show that antisemitism was still around and some people had not changed.

The Americans (all played by German actors) do not appear much better than the Germans. Their plan to build a rocket launch base does not sound very promising for peace. The soldiers are shown mainly frequenting a local bar/bordello and the officers checking bills and hoping to leave soon for a better post. Director Helmut Käutner did not spare many, most people in his film are in some way cunning, every one seems to be involved or at least in the know of the black market around the base. From the very first scene to the very last, the film is most uncompromising in his portrait of greed, lust and bondage.

The actors are all unknown today although they did a good job. It is a Germany we have never seen on film before or even after. It took guts to get this film made. The Friedrich Wilhem Murnau Stiftung did a great job restoring the film to its original lenght and optical quality.

In post-war Germany, in a dreary small town near a US air force base, some of the local truckers hired by the Americans to supply the base with gravel and other construction supplies have a side job in the black market. Trucker Robert, underplayed to anti-hero perfection by Helmut Wildt, lives in a room above a brothel-bar in town and has an emotionless relationship with one of the B-girls (Anita Hofer) who has a yen for him. One day he spots an old flame(Ingmar Zeisberg), now married to an American officer running the base, and attempts to relight their fire in secret, a decision that leads to a tragic accident. It's all downhill after that.

It's downbeat, but one of the most compelling dramas about post-war Europe I've ever seen. It was cut to remove an anti-Semitic outburst by a bar drunk but restored in 2009. The tech credits and all of the performers, from the main actors to the extras, are excellent. It hasn't been shown on Noir Alley--it should-- but Eddie has programmed it at several festivals. Directed and co-written by Helmut Kautner, it was not the kind of commercial film the West German studios were producing in the late 1950s and 1960s.