Friday, June 13, 2008
Wet Asphalt in Fifties Berlin
Wet Asphalt (Nasser Asphalt) is basically one of those time capsule curiosities that would have likely ended up on the late late show or a movie matinee on a pre-cable era independent television station. It is a dubbed 1958 German film featuring Horst Buchholz that maintains a lovely nuanced atmosphere and some star presence from its lead, but then it falls in the far background of your experience of viewing it.
Its plot revolves around yellow journalism. A successful independent international reporter, a kind of one man news syndicate, named Ceasar Boyd, played by Martin Held, arranges for the early prison release of an ambitious reporter Greg Bachman (Buchholz) to aid him in his business and activities. The main action begins when Boyd's niece comes to stay. She is all late fifties style (pointy bras and all). While suffering the old man's creepy over protectiveness, she falls in love with Bachman. The best scenes in the film are when he drives her around Berlin and takes her to the bombed wreckage of his childhood home with plaintive fifties jazz providing mood for this tour.
The major plot develops, however, when Ceasar makes up a sensational story about German soldiers being caught in a Polish bunker that is inspired by a wartime reminiscence of his valet, played by a very pre-Goldfinger Gert Frobe. The story becomes an international sensation and Ceasar tries to pin the whole thing on Bachman.
There is a kind of strange "six degrees of separation" machination going on here surrounding this film. The plot of this movie is close in many ways to the 1951 Billy Wilder film Ace In the Hole, where Kirk Douglas manufactured a story about buried miners. In 1961, Wilder filmed One Two Three, in Berlin and it starred Buchholz. Could he have seen Nasser Asphalt prior? There does seem to be a kind of connective tissue in these circumstances that go a bit beyond pure coincidence.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:57 PM
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