Reader, you have been lied to! Film history is littered with unfairly maligned classics, whether critics were too eager to review the making of rather than the finished product, or they suffered from underwhelming ad campaigns or general disinterest. Let’s revise our takes on some of these films from wrongheaded to the correct opinion.
In a recent interview, Steven Soderbergh referred to “The Good German” as the “most reviled” film he’s ever made, claiming no one has ever brought it up to him in a positive manner. Soderbergh remains baffled by the response, and justifiably so. While the World War II drama was poorly reviewed and failed to find an audience in 2006, it’s one of the director’s most fascinating, original, and, for viewers able to get on its wavelength, emotionally devastating films.
Adapted by screenwriter Paul Attanasio from a novel by Joseph Kanon, “The Good German” tells the story of Jake (George Clooney), an American war correspondent in Berlin during the final days of World War II who stumbles onto a murder mystery connected to his ex-lover Lena (Cate Blanchett). In a manner closer to the Nixon-era neo-noirs of the 1970s like “Night Moves” and “The Long Goodbye” than the 1940s war movies from which it borrows its style, “The Good German” depicts its hero’s inexorable descent into disillusionment and despair — the closer he gets to solving the mystery, the more horrible the world and the people in it look to him.
What makes “The Good German” so powerful is the complex relationship between the movie’s story and style. Soderbergh chose to direct “The Good German” not only as though it takes place in the 1940s but as though it was made in the 1940s, an idea the film adheres to rigorously with one key exception — an exception that’s ultimately the key to the film’s greatness. This is not merely an instance of shooting period-accurate clothes and props in black-and-white: “The Good German” dissects the entire visual grammar of the classical Hollywood studio system, replicating and subverting it flawlessly.
Certain aspects of Soderbergh’s approach are readily apparent from the outset, most notably the black-and-white photography and the choice to shoot in the narrow 1.37:1 aspect ratio of pre-1950s Hollywood. (Not all the home video and streaming transfers respect Soderbergh’s dimensions, but the new 4K and Blu-ray editions of “The Good German” hitting the street this month preserve the original frame.) Less obvious are the more subtle — and more difficult from a filmmaking perspective — ways in which he applies 1940s principles of lensing, blocking, lighting, and sound recording.
“The Good German” is extremely sparing in its use of close-ups, for example, in keeping with the style of a film like Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca.” Soderbergh restricts himself to a handful of prime lenses in the film, avoiding zooms and shooting at the wider focal lengths typical of the era; the result is that most scenes are carefully staged in relatively long master shots with multiple actors interacting in the frame. Soderbergh has never been one to shy away from editing as an expressive tool — “The Limey” and “Out of Sight” are two of his best films that gain much of their impact from their self-aware cutting style — but here, the meaning is generated within shots rather than between them.
Just as he restricts himself to lenses and shot sizes typical of the era, Soderbergh (acting as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, as usual) also restricts himself in terms of lighting, using only incandescent sources and no modern fixtures like LEDs or fluorescents. There’s a heavy reliance on period-faithful wipes and dissolves as transitions, and the sound is all recorded with a boom mike.
The absence of wireless microphones on the actors’ bodies not only gives the dialogue a technical quality closer to that of 1940s films but also requires the performers to project in a more dramatic, clearly defined register—yet another way “The Good German” resembles the work of Curtiz or Billy Wilder, whose “A Foreign Affair” provides backgrounds for some of the film’s driving sequences.
Most of Soderbergh’s choices aren’t consciously registered by the viewer, but their cumulative effect is impressive in its flawless evocation of classic Hollywood style. None of this in and of itself makes “The Good German” a great movie, of course, and if all Soderbergh was doing was imitating Curtiz or Raoul Walsh then perhaps “The Good German” would be the well made but hollow exercise described by many of its critics. But Soderbergh is up to something deeper and more profound here; he’s using a familiar style to unsettle us via the carefully chosen areas in which he departs from that style to generate new emotions and new contexts for the subject matter.
While Soderbergh largely forces himself to make “The Good German” with the tools and under the conditions under which Warners contract directors would have toiled, there is one major restriction he does not place upon himself: adhering to the censorship limitations of the Production Code. “The Good German” is filled with the kind of language, violence, and sexual content that the Hays Office expressly forbade, especially in war pictures expected to be patriotic and life-affirming.
There’s something jarring about this kind of R-rated content being delivered in a package that looks and sounds like the squeaky-clean movies of Hollywood’s past, and the incongruity is in keeping with the tensions that exist on a thematic level throughout the story. “The Good German” is one of Soderbergh’s most pessimistic movies (which is really saying something), a film in which most of the characters are operating from positions of extreme self-interest, even when — in some cases especially when — those positions get innocent others killed.
Yet it’s a story set during the so-called “good war.” We’re used to cynical visions of Vietnam, or even, as in the case of Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H,” Korea, but virtually all the studio movies from the era in which “The Good German” is set and whose style it emulates are, with very few exceptions, heroic. “Casablanca” doesn’t have a happy ending, but it does have a heroic one, and its romanticism is all the more apparent when contrasted with the final scene of “The Good German.”
As Jake puts Lena on a plane just like the one Humphrey Bogart put Ingrid Bergman on at the end of “Casablanca,” there’s no sense of bittersweet romance or selfless sacrifice — only a sense of lives shattered and an awareness of the depths of human evil. When Clooney walks away from the plane, he walks away alone — there’s no “beginning of a beautiful friendship” like at the end of Curtiz’s film. Lena has been proven to be, as Soderbergh put it in an interview compiled in the book “Steven Soderbergh: Interviews,” both a victim and a monster. This haunting realization lingers not only with Jake but the audience in a way that would have been unthinkable in a Hollywood movie of 1945.
The sense that not only Lena but all the movie’s characters are compromised at best and duplicitous or evil at worst is probably, as much as the bold stylistic experimentation, why “The Good German” rubbed so many people the wrong way in 2006 — and maybe why it has never been reappraised in the way that it deserves. It’s also what makes “The Good German” so singular among star-driven, Hollywood studio treatments of World War II.
As a dissection of the ethical pitfalls that emerge in a post-war society, “The Good German” is incisive — Attanasio and Soderbergh’s deft incorporation of unfortunate real-life malefactions like the immunity given to Nazi scientists gives the film real moral weight and authority. It’s also affecting, precisely because Soderbergh’s utilization of classical Hollywood tools exposes the contradictions they were meant to conceal. “The Good German” is, like Lena herself, both beautiful and rotten, a superficially elegant portrayal of internal decay.
When the movie came out, the general consensus was that Soderbergh hadn’t done himself any favors by inviting comparison to “Casablanca” and other films of its ilk, but its depth and pleasures can only be fully appreciated in dialogue with those movies. This is what makes Soderbergh one of the greatest directors of his generation: his persistent demand that the style of his films says something beyond merely illustrating the points of the script. The fact is that “The Good German” not only invites comparison with “Casablanca,” it earns it — on its own terms it’s every bit as perfect as Curtiz’s classic.
“The Good German” 4K UHD and Blu-ray editions will be released by Warner Home Video on April 15.
