In the Fade

All happy families are alike; but happy mixed families make some people unhappy. 

In Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s remarkable film about a hate crime and its aftermath, a survivor responds to a practically impersonal crime in way which demonstrates how deeply personal all crime can be.

Most notable is Diane Kruger’s lead role, played with an understated intensity that is breath-taking. The story is unusual for a movie because although there are obvious bad guys, there is no pat resolution or bright-line ideological "takeaway" for anyone. A certain “self-affirmation” and “empowerment” may occur, but the protagonist does not glow as a feel-good beacon and no “ass” is “kicked” Hollywood-style in the making of this film.

The narrative unwinds matter-of-factly as though a lawyer were telling it, in three acts: “The Family”, “Justice”, and “The Sea”. Flashbacks of the family’s happy past come from clips on a smartphone; the protagonist’s shaky present—the law views this tattooed, unconventional woman and her former family life skeptically; her mother and in-laws treat her like a wayward daughter—is shot by handheld camera; and the court scenes look like what we are used to seeing in on the screen. This review contains no spoilers.

The story opens with Nuri Şekerci (Numan Acar), a prison inmate, marrying Katja (Kruger) in a ceremony in prison to The Temptations’ “My Girl”. Nuri is a German-born Turkish Kurd doing a four year stretch for dealing hashish; Katja at first was one of his customers. Nuri spent his time inside getting an education. When he got out, he settled down with Katja, opened a storefront business as a tax consultant and interpreter, and the couple had a son, Rocco (Rafael Santana). 

A daytime bomb blast at Nuri’s shop kills him and six-year-old Rocco. The shop is in a quiet Turkish quarter of Hamburg where there had been no problems with white supremacists. Chief Inspector Gerrit (Henning Peker) who leads the investigation starts from the assumption that if Nuri was the target, it is most likely that he was involved in criminal activities which fell afoul of Islamists or an ethnic crime group. But Danilo Fava (Denis Moschitto), Nuri’s former attorney, assures Katja that Nuri was clean.

Most of the action between the bombing and the trial take place in the rain. It is Katja’s chance encounter with a young German woman in front of the business prior to the blast which eventually leads the police to the neo-Nazis suspects.     

The second act is a tense courtroom drama. Under German criminal procedure, the state prosecutes defendants but an inquisitorial presiding judge does most of the direct questioning and pronounces the sentence. In serious felony matters like this the court is a panel of three professional and two lay judges. The defendants each have counsel and, unlike in US courts, German courts give equal weight to victims’ survivors who may appear with counsel and participate as co-plaintiffs.

Edda Möller (Hanna Hilsdorf), the woman Katja believed she saw in front of Nuri’s office before the blast, and her husband André Möller (Ulrich Friedrich Brandhoff), are the defendants in what gives every appearance of a slam-dunk prosecution. There is no doubt that they are neo-Nazis supported by a rogues’ gallery of beefy, humorless thugs. However, the outcome becomes less certain because Edda is ably defended by a defense attorney named Haberbeck (Johannes Krisch). The trial becomes a “play within a play” of the main story.

Our synopsis stops here because the outcome of the trial and the third act make for gripping drama. The actual ending is satisfying because it is the best of as many as five possible endings that this story considers and explores, beginning in act one. The film also is notable for having no sex scenes and female nudity: it is a woman’s story about her struggle to see justice done.

The narrative reminded MP of the contemporary writings of German defense lawyer Ferdinand von Schirach whose plain, direct stories of his unusual cases are naturally cinematic. These stories have been serialized in two German television series (Shades of Guilt [Schuld, starring Moritz Bleibtreu] and Crime Stories [Verbrechen]) and several films, most recently Der Fall Collini [The Collini Case] (2019) about a retired Italian autoworker who murdered a German industrialist.

Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade) 2017 Germany (106 minutes) directed by Fatih Akin, screenplay by Fatih Akin and Hark Bohm; director of photography, Rainer Klausmann; edited by Andrew Bird; casting by Monique Akin; music by Joshua Homme.

Strangers When We Meet

Strangers When We Meet is a love story with elements of Casablanca, if one can imagine the noble American romantic as a thinking ex-GI of the new middle class in midcentury suburban Los Angeles.

Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) is an independent-minded architect who broke away from a conventional career path. His dilemma is whether to break away from a conventional marriage. This write-up includes no plot spoilers.

Sixty years on, this film gives a natural portrayal of how the world looked to the rising middle class in the postwar period. The consumer middle class was a new thing. It was the backbone of the so-called Greatest Generation, a product of the Depression, the war, and the postwar economic boom. Nearly everyone we see except for maids and nannies is "white" and from a variety of elsewheres. Many in the new socioeconomic mainstream did not lead the lives their parents lived; they felt that their new status put them within reach of an elite which at the time was white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. People formerly excluded, now college-educated by the G.I. Bill and prosperous, could fit in and advance. Their success made this pattern a model.

But to fit into what? The elephant in the room was artificial social conventions that made for a one-size-fits-all, vanilla standard that suited no one. In this story we see middle-class people enjoy society’s relishes and privileges in the context of conformity to this standard which looks more like mutually-assured misery. It may explain why the Greatest Generation drank so much; it leaves little doubt that the artificial standard fostered the rainbow of social liberation movements just over the horizon.

The film's title is referenced in a comment by Coe’s principal client near the end: “We meet as strangers and then half the time we part that way. Yeah, and if we ever really get to know another human being, it’s a miracle.” That said, it is interesting to watch how people without smartphones are better listeners and attuned to reading each other’s body language and gestures.

Coe is a “wonder boy” architect who quit the firm rat race with an ambitious vision for his life and his work. Roger Altar (Ernie Kovacs), a writer flush with the success of a novel, sees one of Coe’s houses in a magazine and wants to hire Coe to build this house on an undeveloped hill in Bel Air. Coe convinces Altar he can do better than that; Altar gives him a big budget to do it. Douglas and Kovacs have great chemistry. Their characters are fun to watch and their back-and-forth about their work is authentic and helpful to each. Altar’s offhand social attitudes may put off viewers in 2020 but they were unremarkable at the time.

Coe met his wife Eve (Barbara Rush) on furlough during the war. The actors’ good chemistry here shows that Larry and Eve have a loving relationship in a comfortable home with two sons. Eve is a supportive housewife ambitious for her husband’s career as an elevator to status. Larry knows that she is disappointed that he left the firm, and that she also knows when the firm keeps after him to take prestigious, high-paying commissions, that he would prefer to do his own work, like the Altar house

Margaret Gault (Kim Novak) is one of the Coes’ Brentwood neighbors. Since Coe began to work from home he drives his school-age son to the bus stop. This is where he first sees Mrs. Gault, stunning in a plain Republican cloth coat as she brings her own son to the bus stop. Coe gets used to seeing Mrs. Gault at the bus stop. He crosses paths with her several times but makes no headway with small talk. At last one morning he gets her to ride with him to the Altar building site. They spend the morning taking measurements, at the end of which Coe tells Mrs. Gault he can see his building; perhaps in the same spirit, calling this beautiful but reserved Margaret “Maggie” is his parti for their affair.

A detail that lends authenticity to the story and Coe’s character is that the Altar building site is where we watch a house become part of the hill as this story develops. The house construction keeps pace with the affair. This was Ernie Kovacs’s home at 930 Chantilly Road in Bel Air, a beautifully refined structure with an almost Japanese sensibility that a later remodel rendered into a heavy post-modern Western pile.

See this movie on a large screen. It is shot in color in CinemaScope and many scenes unfold in long takes within the frame, seamed together with clean contrast cuts, such as from a housewife in one kitchen to a neighbor in a similar kitchen.

Margaret’s mother Mrs. Wagner (Virginia Bruce) adds a generational context and a plot point. An affair apparently ended her marriage with Margaret’s father and since strained her relationship with her daughter. Mrs. Wagner sees herself in her daughter: Margaret married Ken Gault (John Bryant), “the first nice boy that came along” and may repeat her history. Mrs. Wagner knows her daughter is not in love with Ken. He displays a fraternal fondness for his wife; he bristles awkwardly in private as she smolders for his attention.

The odd man out is the cynical, ironic moralist Felix Anders (Walter Matthau), a self-described “observer of the human scene”.

In the end, a plane leaves Casablanca with people on it headed for a new life. Prior to that, Larry, a romantic like Rick Blaine, must decide whether the “problems of three little people” amount to more than “a hill of beans” in life’s larger contexts. 

Strangers When We Meet 1960 US; Columbia Pictures (117 minutes) directed by Richard Quine; screenplay by Evan Hunter based on Hunter’s novel of the same title; cinematography by Charles Lang; editing by Charles Nelson; music by George Duning.

Anti-hate circa 1949

Jigsaw delivers a fair 1940s crime drama involving a hate group, with cameo appearances by stars who give it the effect of a public service announcement at the beginning of the Hollywood political blacklist period.

Actor Fletcher Markle’s 72-minute début as writer-director does not flesh out the shadowy right-wing “Crusade” at the heart of the story, more than to highlight a fraternity of double-breasted miscreants who assert their “inalienable right” to hate aliens in their “Fight for America”. Nor does Markle identify the aliens. But the rascals and the brain behind them will be no surprise to viewers in the Trump era. Reporter Charles Riggs (Myron McCormick) tells Manhattan prosecutor Howard Malloy (Franchot Tone): “Now we got people around who want to make people hate each other, be afraid of each other, just so they can make money out of it. I don’t like that.”

Our synopsis contains no plot-spoilers. The story opens with the murder of a small printing press owner on an ominously empty block of West 31st Street. Malloy is the man-about-Manhattan assistant district attorney assigned to the case. He is engaged to Caroline Riggs (Doe Avedon), sister of the intrepid independent reporter hot on the Crusade’s trail.

Malloy meets Charlie Riggs in a midtown bar for his lowdown on the organization. Riggs declines to share specifics; he assures Malloy he is close to breaking a story. He leaves ordering a last round and tells Malloy to pick up the tab. Malloy tells Jack the bartender that he never drinks alone. “That can be fixed,” says Jack (Burgess Meredith in cameo), raising and downing Riggs’s abandoned drink.

The plot leads Malloy to a singer in a fancy midtown supper club, The Blue Angel. This was an actual club on West 55th Street. Soon after Malloy and Caroline Riggs arrive, the singer takes a break and an actual blue angel leaves the club—Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich sang in a German dive of the same name in her 1930 breakout film, Der blaue Engel, from which the supper club took its name. A waiter comes to take their order—Henry Fonda, like Steve Buscemi at Jackrabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction, though Fonda was a much bigger star. When Malloy asks the waiter when the show starts, we hear Fonda’s distinct voice condescend to reply: “That was the supper act”.

The singer Barbara Whitfield is Jean Wallace, Tone’s wife at the time, with whom his character has better chemistry than with his fiancée in the story. Modern viewers probably will not recognize celebrities of that period such as the actors John Garfield, Everett Sloane, and Marsha Hunt in their brief walk-ons. Markle himself, New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons, and socialite Brenda Frazier also appear in cameo roles.

The aliens do not include Angelo Agostini (Marc Lawrence), a hardscrabble ethnic Italian fixer with mob connections. We learn that the Crusade issues uniforms and insignia, see it try to intimidate the weak and use a gunsel named “Knuckles” Miller (George Breen in his sole movie appearance) to do its wet work.

It is no coincidence that the film came out at the beginning of the blacklist era which gained momentum in October 1947 when the US House Un-American Activities Committee began to subpoena people working in the Hollywood film industry to testify at hearings about alleged communist sympathies. Many actors in Jigsaw were left-leaning; Meredith, under suspicion at the time, subsequently was among those blacklisted. Dietrich voted with her feet twenty years earlier against this kind of behavior in other circumstances. 

Otto Preminger bookended the Hollywood blacklist era in his 1962 classic Advise & Consent when he brought Tone and Fonda together as a left-leaning president and his Secretary of State appointee opposed by zealous right-wingers, and cast the blacklisted Meredith as an evidence-giving Red.

Jigsaw (1949) US (72 minutes). Directed by Fletcher Markle; screenplay by Markle and Vincent O’Connor, based on a story by Joe Roeburt; cinematography by Don Malkames; edited by Robert Matthews; music by Robert W. Stringer; produced by Edward J. and Harry Lee Danziger.