Die Brücke

How a small band of teenage soldiers repulsed an American armored unit at an insignificant bridgehead in Germany.

The dog and the manger, a chain of accidents, the Kinder im Krieg also prevent German engineers from destroying the bridge, which pertains to their small town.

All die save one, who exits weeping.

Russell in Billion Dollar Brain cites the final training formation before his Alexander Nevsky treatment.

The Visit

The fine, “superfine”, Hitlerian nightmare is built up until brownshirts are hunting a man down in the streets, the price of the township’s prosperity, everyone buying on credit and so forth.

And it goes much further, until everyone assents in his judicial murder, and then it’s over.

The lone abstainer departs for anywhere, but not Trieste.

“All the effort goes for nothing,” says Halliwell of this film, oddly.

Of course it is a marvel, shot at Cinecittà and post-synched with Bergman and Quinn, but that never stops a critic.

Local girl makes good, in the end, the bankrupt town is saved, her vengeance is complete, no-one is killed but her “wild panther”, shot dead.

Morituri

It is necessary to understand that “merciless fanatics” have taken over the Fatherland, about which “mildewed notions” have to be discarded. This concerns an æsthete hiding out in India from “idiotic wars”, and a sea captain years from home who finds in vino veritas.

Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner have these two roles. The Wickian details proved much too much for Crowther to understand, though in his New York Times review he took some fleeting notice of scenes more or less considerable filmed from a helicopter above the ship.

The Third Man is implicated in the suspension of willful disbelief, and Frankenheimer’s The Train in the more general sense of disguises and deceits on a shifting route with a valuable cargo in “enemy waters”.