Despair

Some movies are easy to admire and hard to like, particularly those of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The prolific German director had made 31 movies by the age of 31; next up was his first English-language work, Despair. Based on a Russian-langauge novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the screenplay was crafted by Tom Stoppard. The lead role was another cinematic gift from Europe for the super-expressive eyes of Dirk Bogarde.

Bogarde's character, Harmann Herman, is a Russian chocolate tycoon living in pre-Nazi Berlin with a wife (French actress Andrea Ferreol, still working now after 167 movie/TV credits) who's having an affair with her failed-artist cousin (Volker Spengler, a Fassbinder regular). They and most other characters speak English in naturally thick Germanic accents or, in Bogarde's case, with a wide-ranging European accent.

Herman, whose double name is a typical Nabokovian clue to his personality disorder, is going mad, observing himself critically, craving a new existence, then planning to create it by murdering a tramp (Klaus Lowitsch) he wrongly thinks is his doppelganger.

Superb photography and production designs play with an audience's mind through mirrors, reflections and illusions. Berlin-born cinematographer Michael Ballhaus won Oscar nominations for Broadcast News, The Fabulous Baker Boys and Gangs of New York, and also worked for Scorsese on Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence and The Departed. For this glittering work, he only collected a top award in Germany. Restored handsomely in Bavaria in 2011, the movie's DVD version glows with OTT colouring, especially for Herman's lilac-tinted chocolate factory. As usual, wherever Fassbinder looked, he found exquisite angles and heavy-handed symbolism in his recurrent visions of unbared German psyches and naked plump actresses.

The narrative is dotted with intellectual Stoppard lines. For a stage play, the director and cast would know how much time an audience would need to recognise, comprehend and appreciate a quote-worthy sentence's wisdom and wit. On film, no director wants to insert artificial pauses and disrupt a movie's pace, resulting in the screenplay's occasional brain-teasing thoughts slipping past, possibly improperly heard (the restoration warranted optional English subtitles).

Not that there's a steady narrative flow. Nabokov's formulaic characters perform symbolic scenes, the movie surging in fits and starts, relying heavily on Bogarde's face, and striking lighting of it, to hold an audience's attention. The stagey story might have worked better on screen if it had been filmed in German.

People on Sunday

People on Sunday, a silent B&W German docudrama from 1930, was restored by the Netherlands, splicing pieces from reels surviving in its and other countries' archives. Criterion's DVD package, using its secondary Janus label, marketed the film both as a precursor of neo-realism and a historic showcase of the talents of a film-making cooperative of Berlin-based youngsters. Most were Jewish, and soon left Nazi Germany.

Its losses were Hollywood's multiple gain:

* the movie's concept creator Kurt (aka Curt) Siodmak, a former newspaper reporter, became a Hollywood horror-writing specialist, as for the original (1941) Wolf Man.

* his younger brother and the movie's main co-director Robert (The Killers) Siodmak, a prolific maker of film noir movies in the USA, who returned to Germany in the 1950s, winning a Golden Bear for The Rats.

* The Siodmaks' cousin, Seymour Nebenzal, the film's key producer (borrowing funds from his movie-producer father Heinrich). He later made Fritz Lang's M and Testament of Dr Mabuse, then movies in Paris, before fleeing to the USA, where his independent production company's many titles included Douglas Sirk's Hitler's Madman and Summer Storm, and Joseph Losey's re-make of M.

* Czech-born co-producer Edgar G Ulmer, who'd returned from the States (and returned there too, to become the director of Black Cat, Detour and Ukrainian-language and Yiddish niche movies in the USA).

[He was blackballed from Hollywood work after he had an affair with Shirley Castle (he eventually married her and she became known as Shirley Ulmer), who at the time was the wife of B-picture producer Max Alexander, a nephew of powerful Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle. Ulmer spent the bulk of his remaining career languishing at PRC, the lowest rung on the ladder of Hollywood's poverty row studios.] [IMDb]

* co-writer Billy Wilder, multiple Oscar-winner for The Apartment (film, direction, co-writing), Sunset Blvd (co-writing), and The Lost Weekend (director, co-writer), with 14 other nominations. The former journalist's main chore for the film was holding the sun-reflector.

* cinematographer Eugen Schufftan, later aka Eugene Shufftan), who invented a self-named camera special effect and won an Oscar for The Hustler. The DVD package includes the charming Schufftan-directed 1929 B&W short comedy Ins Blaue Hinein (Into the Blue), with soundtrack added, telling another happy-go-lucky tale (of three men and a girl crashing a car and starting a dog-grooming business).

* assistant cameraman Fred Zinneman, Oscar-winning director of A Man for All Seasons, From Here to Eternity, and a documentary short (Benjy).

* assistant cameraman Ernst Kunstmann was invited to the USA with Schufftan, returning to work in Germany until the 1960s (including Triumph of the Will in 1935), dying at 97 in his home city of Potsdam.

The film's non-professional actors' fates were less illustrious. The four lead roles were played by:

* Erwin (Splettstoller), who only had two other acting credits, in Robert Siodmak movies in 1930-1. The wannabee comic actor died in a car accident (according to co-star Brigitte).

In the film, chubby, affable Erwin is a taxi-driver leaving his fashion model girl-friend oversleeping in bed, to go to the Wannsee lake beach on a pre-planned trip with his friend ...

* ... Wolf(gang von Waltershausen), who made one more film for Siodmak, and another with Siodmak and Wilder, returned to his family estate in southern Germany, per Brigitte.

En route to the beach, the two friends meet up with a girl Wolf had chatted up in the city on a weekday ...

* Christl (Ehlers), whose real-life Jewish family fled to Spain, then England and America, where she had one bit part before marrying an aircraft company owner; they died in a plane crash in 1960.

Joining her for the lake excursion is her blonde best friend, a salesgirl for the Electrola record-player and disc company ...

* Brigitte (Borchert) who only made this one film; in 2000 she and Curt Siodmak were interviewed for a 30-minute documentary commemorating the restoration, Weekend am Wannsee (part of the Criterion DVD); Siodmak, then 98, couldn't recall her name and didn't like the restoration. He looked and sounded mentally active but died that year. Brigitte died in 2011, aged 100.

At first sighting, the movie's most promising talent is clearly the cinematographer. Exciting angles, shadowed lighting, story-advancing close-ups, exceptional grid-work framing and high-speed photography from moving vehicles provide bewitching images of a happy-go-lucky laid-back Berlin on a Sunday, contrasted uncritically with the city's weekday bustle. In cinematographic albums with few signs of poverty and none of oppression, the Siodmaks' self-described "reportage" presents a self-content middle-class view of the pre-Depression capital city, in which the cameras nod somewhat jocularly in the direction of Soviet Russian expressionism and Eisenstein moments.

Nothing much happens, but it does so charmingly. Wolf, an experienced philanderer, fails to hit on Christl during the foursome's picnic, but succeeds in seducing Brigitte. The girls resume their friendship on a giant pedalo boat, wryly watching the men flirt with a couple of oarless female rowers. Wolf agrees to meeting Brigitte again the next Sunday, before Erwin reminds him they'd already planned to go to a soccer match.

The DVD company's judgment is valid: not a Criterion-calibre classic, the film's a preservation-worthy Janus product.

The American friend

Patricia Highsmith's mysterious, psychopathic and talented con artist Mr Tom Ripley has inspired varied film versions of her five novels featuring him (the "Ripliad"). With The American Friend, prolific German writer-director Wim Wenders presented Ripley as a cowboy American character played by Dennis Hopper in a Hamburg setting.

He's one part of a 1977 audience-maximising screenplay that also includes a French supporting actor, Gerard Blain. Conveniently, he can speak English, as can the lead character, a dying man Ripley recommends as a hired assassin. He's played well by the film's real star, Bruno Ganz.

Based on Highsmith's Ripley's Game (later remade by Lilianna Cavani as a vehicle for John Malkovich), the Wenders screenplay transforms amoral Ripley from an urbane and effete bon vivant into a petty criminal with a soft heart. Hopper makes him credible, but the quantum character leaps attributed to Ripley and the Ganz character (a picture framer with a terminal blood disease) are harder to believe.

Two famous film directors joined Wenders. Nicholas Ray played the supposedly dead painter whose "discovered" works are touted by Ripley, and Samuel Fuller is a Mafia boss whose operations are targeted by a suave French gangster (Blain, a star previously in Chabrol andTruffaut features).

Much of Wenders' two hours of mystery comprises eye-catching cinematography in which artful dabs of primary colours enrich dreary cityscapes and tawdry apartments. They're effectively alienation effects, deliberately drawing attention to specially-painted walls and carefully-positioned colourful props, clothing and autos.

When the screenplay's pace speeds up, as Ripley (an experienced killer) assists the picture-framer to kill and survive, Wenders lets the action and actors fill the screen without distractions, so masterfully that the plot's creaking illogicalities only strike the viewer at the end.

Pope Joan

As every moviegoer knows, the more outrageous a screenplay is the more likely it is to be based on historical data. Who could ever have dreamed up the idea of a 9th-Century woman cross-dressing in order to practise medicine, become Pope Joan (855-858) and die during childbirth?

The English-speaking 2009 German film has not attracted a single review from Rotten Tomatoes critics, and is not yet released in the USA. It's no worse than another recent bioepic about a high-placed woman (Agora), which starred Rachel Weisz, but Pope Joan was played by a German actress, Johanna Wokalek, known only in Europe (most recently for The Baader Meinhof Complex).

However, it did have John Goodman, happily hamming it up as Joan's predecessor and mentor, Pope Sergius. Portrayed as a cheerfully down-to-earth and divine character, he thought his medical miracle worker was "Johannes Anglicus", a child of a rigidly righteous English missionary (Iain Glen) saving pagan souls and disparaging women's rights in ninth-century Saxony.

When her older brother died, precocious quick-learning Joan took her younger brother's place at a Catholic school, and was boarded with a nobleman who became her lover (David Wenham). Meanwhile, the Holy Roman Empire was in turmoil, Joan almost died during a battle, and decided to bind up her breasts and find better safety as a male monk.

The whole semi-mythical tale (which the RC church does not endorse) was novelised by an American non-fiction writer, Donna Woolfolk Cross, in 1996. Soon after, German director Volker (Tin Drum) Schlondorff tried to set up a film project for it. It would have starred Franka Potente, a better-known actress outside Germany (for Run Lola Run and the Bourne trilogy), but the producers dropped Schlondorff and brought in Sonke Wortmann, a director with many awards in his native Germany (many for The Miracle in Bern, 2003), another little-known on the international scene.

He turned in a handsome sequence of medieval set-pieces with eye-catching costumes and battle scenes, but they can only be viewed as tableaux for a scarcely credible tale of an unconvincing transvestite. This Joan's body movements, demeanour and physique give away her game too often, undermining a viewer's willingness to suspend disbelief.