Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Monday, July 26, 2010

DER UNTERTAN / THE KAISER’S LACKEY [aka MAN OF STRAW] (1951)

Heinrich Mann’s satirical novel from 1914 about German nationalism as seen in the politics & business practices of a small city in the 1890s is appalling, prescient & hilarious, something of a Teutonic BABBITT. Wolfgang Staudte, who made films in East & West Germany, made this for DEFA in the East, where its anti-bourgeois attitudes were no doubt appreciated, and he brought a lot of cinematic style to his task (though the effort often shows). Working from a clever script by his brother, Staudte deftly charts a businessman’s Bildungsroman as he blunders his way toward the German upper-middle-class, briefly touching on his difficult childhood & schooldays, the girl he wronged on the way up, a spell in the peacetime military (with a scar to prove it), and his inevitable homecoming where he reorganizes the family business for profit & social standing on the backs of his oppressed workers. Staudte overplays his themes with a final flourish of WWII devastation, but most of the film is dead-on. The FRF-DVD looks over-processed, but it’s watchable.

DOUBLE-BILL: Try this alongside THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP/’43 or THE WHITE RIBBON/’09 for a mini-tour of the German soul.

No comments: