Guilt And Rubble: 15 Essential Post-War Films

“Judgment At Nuremberg” (1961)
A remarkably serious-minded, even gruelling, 3-hour-plus fictionalized account of one of the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg in 1948, Stanley Kramer‘s star-laden film is a stately, talky and, if you are interested, wholly gripping investigation into the demarcation between full-blown Nazism and the “just following orders”/patriotism defense that so many lower-ranking party members and ordinary Germans presented in the years following the war. With Spencer Tracy on peerless form as the presiding American judge, and Burt Lancaster as one of the four German defendants, himself a judge, the film has a massive (and hugely impressive) ensemble also including Oscar-winning Maximilian Schell, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, William Shatner and Montgomery Clift. But by its verbose yet fascinating climax (Abby Mann‘s script also won an Oscar), it almost emerges as a two-hander, where the subtler points of law boil down to a surprisingly clear-cut ideal. As Lancaster’s “good German” says to Tracy’s Judge at the end, “The deaths of all those millions — you have to believe I never thought it would come to that,” to which Tracy replies “It came to that the first time you sentenced an innocent man to death.” Despite a good job via Schell’s brilliant defense lawyer, of contextualizing Nazi atrocities with Hiroshima and other Allied operations, the film feels shot through with cold fury, leading to its unequivocal conclusion: “just following orders” cannot exculpate anyone from complicity in grotesque moral failure. Compared to more recent documentaries and narrative films about the war, it might feel a little glib, but as the first major picture to deal with this issue (and the first time the documentary footage of concentration camps was seen by many), and taking into account the movie’s own time period, with the Cold War in full swing (one of the defendants pleads for clemency on the grounds that the US will need Germany’s support against the Russians), it’s a strikingly uncompromising film.

“The Search” (1948)
The first film from an American director to shoot in Berlin after the war, Fred Zinneman‘s “The Search,” starring Montgomery Clift, experienced a resurgence blip recently when it was remade by Michel Hazanavicius, transposed to the 1999 Chechen War and sent to Cannes starring Berenice Bejo. That remake, however, was a total dud, serving only to highlight again the strengths of the original — itself not quite a classic, still the 1948 film boasts some terrifically authentic, lived-in locations amid the army bases and rubble strewn sites of post-war Germany, and a wonderfully relaxed star-making turn from Clift. He plays a young American GI, a little feckless and green perhaps, who finds and befriends a traumatized, hungry boy wandering amid the ruins, who’d been separated from his mother in the fog of war. The film is oddly paced, sometimes feeling slack and almost knockabout as the pair reluctantly, and then defiantly, bond, but the earnest offhandedness of Clift’s performance (reportedly Clint Eastwood cites this role of Clift’s as the single greatest inspiration for his own acting style) lends even the dullest of scenes an unforced naturalism that is in itself remarkable, in such a potentially melodramatic story. And the impressive details aren’t just in his performance and the crumbled, blasted buildings; there are clever notes of psychological insight, too, that range from the humorous, like the bit of interaction over the sandwich that initiates their friendship, to the gently heartbreaking, like how the kid, nicknamed Jim, first ran away from the orphanage when he saw them loading children into ambulance transports and remembered that that was how the Nazis had taken people to the camps. Understated, unassuming and delicately played, “The Search” is one of the few films dealing with this period to have a little uptick of hope and optimism at its heart, which makes it a minor treasure amid so much rubble and destruction.

“Lore” (2013)
A precise, poetic and powerful dissection of post-war German spiritual brokenness as seen through the eyes of a young German woman (excellent newcomer Saskia Rosendahl), Cate Shortland‘s “Lore” is one of the more recent entries here, but also one of the best. Unfolding with quiet restraint and a lyrical eye for the landscapes and imagery of ravaged, demoralized, defeated rural Germany (shot by “True Detective“‘s Adam Arkapaw), it follows the story of Lore (Rosendahl), whose Nazi parents flee the oncoming liberation forces, leaving her to look after her siblings, one a baby. Her neighbors soon ostracize the children and Lore is forced to journey the trainless 900km to her Grandmother’s house. En route on foot, she meets a Jewish boy of her own age who becomes a kind of father figure to the kids, and her protector, for a time. But mostly it’s about the scales progressively falling from Lore’s eyes as regards to her parents, and her own indoctrination. Shortland’s film is a thorough investigation of an aspect of Germany’s Nazi past that we don’t see too often represented: the story of the children who grew up wholly under Nazism and for whom the end of the war was the end of the world they had known, and it’s quietly terrifying in its evocation of the soullessness, the kind of humanity vacuum that Lore encounters on her cross-country odyssey. Ending with a scathing rejection of the kind of complacent wilful ignorance and selective forgetfulness of her grandmother’s generation, “Lore” reminds us that numbered among the many victims of the Nazi regime were the party faithful’s own children, raised in a toxic ideology that left them, when it failed, with nothing but a legacy of unspeakable guilt.

“Bicycle Thieves” (1948)
The foundational document of the defining cinematic movement of the immediate post-war era, Vittorio De Sica‘s “Bicycle Thieves” is perhaps also the pinnacle of Italian neo-realism. The street-level story of poverty-line husband and father Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) who semi-miraculously finds work as a bill poster but needs a bicycle in order to remain employed, the simplicity of the narrative scarcely speaks to the oceanic humanity the film evokes. His bike is, of course, stolen, forcing Ricci, trailed by his son, Bruno (Enzo Staiola, in one of the all-time great child performances), into increasingly desperate situations to regain it. The quick, clean lines of the plot mean the film can luxuriate in a sense of time and place, and it brings us to the streets of post-war Rome with an immediacy rarely ever achieved. But mostly, the urgency comes from a complete identification with Ricci’s plight, and an awareness of the metaphorical level on which it can be read: Ricci is a perfect symbol of a man, a class, or a whole nation straying from the right path when desperation meets the corrupting influence of an unjust society. Tracing Ricci’s moods from boredom, to elation, to despair, to desperation, to heartbreaking shame, the film encompasses all shades of light and dark, even absurdity — like the moment when the entire world seems to own a bicycle when Ricci does not. Made in 1948, there’s a sense that shellshocked Italy has not even started to collect itself after the traumas of war and Fascism, summed up in that magnificent, ambivalent ending: Ricci escapes direct punishment due to Bruno’s tears, but as they’re swallowed up by the uncaring crowd once more, their future is bleak, their problems unsolved, and worse, Ricci is tainted — there’s heart-swelling power here, whether you read Ricci as an allegory for crushed Italy, or simply as a man who can no longer look his son in the eye.

Honorable Mention: There are some truly stunning titles here, and if they have whetted your appetite for more, here are some suggestions for further watching: the other Kurosawa movies in that excellent Criterion Box Set are “One Wonderful Sunday” and “No Regrets For Our Youth,” and fellow Japanese director Kon Ichikawa‘s “The Burmese Harp” is also a powerful end-of-war film detailing the fraught surrender and capitulation process in a Japanese village. “I Was A Male War Bride” details in more humorous fashion the tribulations and bureaucracy among the occupying forces in post-war Berlin; Jacques Tourneur‘s “Berlin Express” uses location photography to great effect in a noir thriller; as does the more straightforward drama “The Big Lift” about the Berlin Airlift, which along with two other titles mentioned in the main list, stars Montgomery Clift.

If “The Third Man” has you hungering for more Vienna-based intrigue, George Sidney‘s “The Red Danube” with Walter Pidgeon and Ethel Barrymore or “Four in a Jeep” starring Ralph Meeker might fit the bill. And “Night People,” with Gregory Peck was the directorial debut of famous screenwriter Nunnally Johnson that is better than its largely overlooked status would suggest. If you want something more in the “extended allegory” category, Luschino Visconti‘s tremendous docufiction “La Terra Trema” works through many of the themes and issues touched on throughout this feature through the prism of a small fishing village and the fishermen’s struggle against exploitation.

And if you’d prefer to take a look at how the victorious nations coped with the immediate aftermath of the war, there are a whole flock of films about that. Probably the best known from the U.S. side is “The Best Years Of Our Lives,” while in the U.K. a very peculiarly British response was comedy, with classics like “Passport to Pimlico” and “I’m All Right Jack,” and even more recent films like “A Private Function” making gentle fun of the privations and hardships of rationing and post-war belt-tightening.

These are all merely the tip of the iceberg, but this feature has been a joy to research, so do please call out other titles you’d like us to consider if we return to the topic in future.

— with Rodrigo Perez