Aka Alemania zona este. It’s a short step from East Berlin to West Berlin but it’s also a very long step. Berlin, 1960. Karin von Seefeldt (Eva Bartok), a refugee from East Germany working as an air stewardess for an American airline where she works with her fiance Jack Kyle (Richard Greene), finds herself trapped in her home city of Dresden when a plane she is travelling on between Berlin and West Germany is forced down after straying off course in bad weather away from the agreed travel corridor and into Russian airspace. They are escorted by MiG fighters to land and Karin is kept along with three black marketeer passengers but her colleagues are freed and fored to immediately fly out. You should be here working with us to build the New Germany. She is used by the Stasi, who want her to help them to find her dissident brother Pieter (George Mikell) and soon realises that old friend Herr Doktor Hans Koertner (Marius Goring) is not to be trusted when she returns to her old home in Dresden. She finds her mother (Mutti) (Lucie Mannheim) has been reduced to living in the attic while another eight families live in the requisitioned property. Hans persuades her that Mutti is hallucinating Pieter’s regular visits since he assures her Pieter is dead. When Jim appears as ‘Jim Wilson’ on business in Dresden, under the aegis of British diplomat Roy Turner (John Welsh) and his contact Bill Seddon (Brian Wilde), Hans is very solicitous but suspicious due to the stories from the woman spying downstairs in Mutti’s house. Mutti confides to Jim she will be able to persuade Karin to return although her daughter feels guilty that she is able to enjoy freedom in the West. Then Jim’s new anti-communist associate Linda (Andree Melly) leads Karin to Pieter at a processing station where he’s been hiding out for 10 days since his cover was broken after years of working odd jobs and now with Karin back he tells her she’s being used as a decoy to bring him out. Hans betrayed everyone in the Berlin Rising six years earlier and had all the group shot but was unaware Pieter had escaped. Jim has other ideas than remaining in East Germany despite Hans’ threats that he knows he’s there under an assumed name however Krumm (Denis Shaw) is determined to track down Pieter … There’s also danger here even if you can’t see it. You can’t see a submarine when it’s under the water. Adapted from Charles F. Blair Jr’s & A.J. Wallis’ novel Thunder Above by John Cresswell and director Compton Bennett, with additional scenes by John Harlow, thsi is a tightly managed, excellently paced B thriller. The structure is even punctuated by three appearances from the waiter (Leonard Sachs) at the restaurant where we first meet Karin and Jim. When the couple goes on the run having successfully acted as another form of decoy to help Pieter get out of East Germany, their love is under threat: You had to come and rescue me from unmentionable horrors instead of which you found me comfortably free. They try to work out their various ideas about each other and a possible future while hiding under the hay from East German soldiers using a pitchfork to find them in a loft after escaping in a produce truck. The extended concluding chase sequence when the couple are on the run in the rubble and ruins of Berlin from a series of VW Beetles dressed with flashlights and wind up hunted down a series of tunnels is of course reminiscent of The Third Man. This isn’t that of course (what is?) but it’s highly suspenseful, convincingly dramatised as Karin has to decide what to do with that gun in her hand in a face off with treacherous secret policeman Doktor Hans that forces the issue. A conflicted Bartok is permitted to become hysterical knowing the situation she’s been avoiding since escaping the communist state seven years earlier: Goring exemplifies what happens when Germans stay and play ball with the Russians. This is highly atmospheric and great on the visual and psychological detail of living in the Soviet surveillance state (all those portraits of their glorious leader Honecker!). It’s the same as it was under the Nazis. Every house has its gauleiter. For those of us who only know native Berlinerin Lucie Mannheim from The 39 Steps it’s a nice opportunity to see her in a late career performance and alongside real-life husband Goring at that. Even though this is set in East Berlin (and the opening shots at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport and other establishing shots are done in Germany) it was in fact shot for the most part in England at Walton Studios with local rubble reminding us of how much Britain suffered under German attack and was still rebuilding in 1960. Cinematographer Eric Cross does a terrific job with overhead shots, in-car tracking and the noir-ish scene-setting. Directed by Compton Bennett who had previously worked with Goring on So Little Time (1952). Gripping stuff. Fasten your seatbelts!
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