Black Gravel

It's October 1960.  Germany is being rebuilt after its war-time devastation.  Construction sites abound.  A small-time hustler, Robert Neidhart, drives gravel trucks on contract to the U.S. Air Force.  At the military base at Sohnen, runways are being built for Raketen (missile-loaded) jets.  Neidhart, with his sleazy partner Krahne, steals black gravel allocated for air force runways,  working at night to deliver the material to construction sites around Sohnen.  The military base has its gate at the edge of Sohnen.  A title tells us that the town, once pop. 261, is booming -- it's population has doubled, although the newcomers are almost all whores, catering to the lonely soldiers.  The town's leading establishment is a bar and brothel called the Atlantic operated by an older Jewish man tattooed on his forearm with his KZ-lager ID.  An opening title tells viewers that the characters and events are all fictional, but the time and place is not.  Although directed in 1961 by Helmut Kaeutner, Black Gravel resembles Fassbinder in all respects (the movie is similar to Lola made about 20 years later) -- maybe, it is more fair to say that Fassbinder, perhaps, mimics Kaeutner, at least, with regard to the corruption on display in his famous BRD Trilogy.  Black Gravel, a relentlessly bleak and disturbing movie, was a minor sensation in Europe when it was rediscovered in 2017 after restoration by the F. W. Murnau Stiftung.  Shot in grim black and white, the movie looks backward to Italian neo-realism (it has big searing close-ups), channels American film noir, and seems to be a precursor for the more gritty aspects of the New German cinema, particularly, Fassbinder's studies of post-war corruption.  It's not clear how many people saw the movie when it was first released in 1961; the few remaining Jews in Germany launched a criminal prosecution of the film for alleged anti-Semitism, a completely misguided charge since the character who slanders the Jewish brothel-owner is obviously a deranged, Nazi-sympathizer, but the survivor-community was understandably sensitive after war-time atrocities and, perhaps, it wasn't a prudent time for Kaeutner (who wrote and directed the film) to make ironic points about atrocities committed 18 years earlier.  In any event, the criminal prosecution was dismissed but the damage was done -- the movie was re-edited and denounced and it dropped out of sight to the point that the movie was thought to be lost by the late nineties. Nonetheless, a camera negative existed, although without the offending passages (those had to be restored from badly damaged prints) and, finally, the film was carefully cleaned and reconstructed.  The Kino-Lorbeer DVD of Black Gravel presents both the premiere (original) and edited version along with an idiosyncratic and amusing commentary track by Olof Moeller.  (See as well the Kino Lorbeer version of Die Grosse Freiheit # 7 also with commentary by Moeller and previously reviewed here as Port of Freedom).

Kaeutner was a skilled scenarist and he designs his films, so far as I can determine, with rather unremitting and Teutonic attention to detail.  All elements of his movies (at least the ones I have watched) are constructed to cohere tightly both thematically and visually.  Black Gravel is structured around a fateful, if apparently, meaningless event:  a black and white dalmatian is barking at some construction workers queued up to unload dump-trucks full of black gravel.  One of the drivers throws a big rock and kills the dog.  There's a desultory fist-fight between an American civilian contractor and the German who murdered the dog.  People look on but don't intervene, a pattern in this film.  The dog is pitched in the gravel poured into a big ravine that the contractors seems to be filling up so that it can be covered in asphalt to make an airbase runway.  The dog's stiff paw sticks up like an accusing finger from the magma-like spill of gravel.  A hundred minutes later the film will end with dog's corpse exposed at this same construction site.  Robert Neidhart, a penny-ante grifter and black market entrepreneur, picks up the dog's collar and plans to extort some money from the animal's owner -- apparently, at this time there was a brisk trade in ransom for kidnapped pets.  On the way back from the pit full of gravel, Neidhart agrees to give a tow to a stranded American general, John Gaines and his attractive German wife -- the woman, Inge, was previously Neidhart's girlfriend when he was working the rackets in Heidelberg.  Neidhart senses that Inge has made a marriage of convenience with the American -- the Germans call the Americans "Amis" translated as "Yanks" in the subtitles.  He tries to seduce Inge who resists him, at first.  As it happens, the murdered dog, Tub, was Inge's pet.  Neidhart lives in a weird compound out in the country in which he has built a scale model of a local church -- his shack is full of American posters, an ad for Nat "King" Cole playing with Quincy Jones and a rodeo poster from Wyoming.  Ultimately, Neidhart succeeds in his aims on Inge.  However, after making love to her, Neidhart (with Inge in the truck) crashes into a couple of lovers, an American sergeant named Rodgers and his fiancee, an East German girl, Anni. Both are crushed to death under the wheels of Neidhart's dump-truck.  A criminal investigation is already underway with respect to the black gravel that Neidhart and Krahne (who plans to emigrate to Canada) have been stealing.  Neidhart buries the two bodies in the gravel pit, apparently near the dog.  A CIA operative who has been tracking Anni as a East German agent suspects Neidhart with regard to the disappearance of the betrothed couple.  Then, the American civil engineers undertake compression tests on the asphalt and gravel, tests so sensitive that they might uncover the corpses hidden in the road-bed.  Neidhart plans to flee with Inge, but, as it happens, the road-bed compression tests don't uncover the corpses.  It seems as if Neidhart's hit-and-run crime has evaded detection although Inge is appalled by the situation and, apparently, on the verge of confession.  Then, Gaines announces that something has been found buried in the gravel. Neidhart panics and Inge admits her adultery to her husband, General Gaines, who coldly tells her that it makes no difference and that they shall never speak of this again, although it is evident that the will never forgive her.  The film ends in catastrophe, after another ironic and disturbing plot twist.  

The movie is precisely detailed and disheartening in the sense that everyone is either cruel or corrupt or both.  The only positive character in the film is the naive Sergeant Rodgers and he's horribly dispatched after about 45 minutes (with his girlfriend who may be a spy).  People are afraid that the missile base will mean the end of the world and there's an eerie apocalyptic aspect to the movie -- in one scene Neidhart threatens to kill his partner Krahne in a wasteland of scrub-brush while American war games take place off-screen:  the rattle of machine guns and heavy artillery.  American fighter jets continually scream over the town and its miserable inhabitants.  In an early scene, Neidhart drives along a long line of parked cars -- "lovers' lane", he says, as we observe whores coming and going from the big, boxy vehicles:  "beds rent for 30 dollars an hour" and so the prostitutes and their customers are making due with the cars.   Neidhart has a blonde girlfriend whom he mistreats and, ultimately, tries to sell to Krahne.  This woman, Elli, is always drunk.  Neidhart's apartment in the brothel is a garret with a big poster of a naked woman on the slanting ceiling over his bed.  Inge and Gaines live in an antiseptic flat on the base that embodies everything that Germans despise about Americans -- it's full of kitsch with neat 1950's style sit-com twin beds.  (The Amis are depicted as arrogant simpletons, continuously reprising their adventures in Normandy and at D-Day, and, attending weird church services in which the preacher delivers a sermon about Christopher Columbus.)  In the brothel Atlantic there's always American jazz on the jukebox.  (Neidhart who keeps a banjo on his wall is a fan of Dixieland and says he'll take down the instrument  soon  because that style of music is "coming back" -- much of the soundtrack is atonal with aggressive bebop.)  The film is excellent in all respects, beautifully written, but unpleasant.  The characters are all, more or less, despicable and the price for doing the right thing is either death or doom.  In a big bar fight between Krahne and Neidhart, Elli gets flung to the floor and one of her breasts is exposed -- none of the drunk GIs intervene in the brawl, fought with knives and broken bottles, but they all hoot and applaud for Elli's bare bosom.  The song "Hey Joe" is a popular favorite and interpreted as accusatory by Neidhart -- he throws a bottle and ruins the juke box, probably to the relief of the bar's Jewish owner, because the selection of music offered includes German military marching songs and there's an elderly man who hobbles back and forth with a mop over his shoulder like a gun. dancing to the music.  In the film's last shot, we see a pile of black asphalt, fateful as destiny, the battered dead dog, and an American jet screaming low over the dismal landscape.