Der Ruf (1949)

Der Ruf (1949) is a returning professor as opposed to returning veteran post World War Two post-Nazi anti-anti-Semitism in German society drama Trümmerfilm starring Fritz Kortner and Johanna Hofer and directed by Josef von Báky.

Josef von Báky's 1949 film Der Ruf, known in English as The Last Illusion, occupies a unique and unsettling place in the postwar cinematic reckoning with Nazism. The film unearths the persistence of fascist ideologies within a defeated Germany, where the symbolic collapse of the Third Reich fails to extinguish the embers of antisemitic animus. 

Germany, Year Zero (1948)

Germany, Year Zero (1948) is a Robert Rossellini episodic tragic Italian neo-realist Trümmerfilm in German, French and Italian, and could and shall be qualified as a film noir, not in the least for the fact that Trümmerfilm are in every capacity actual or virtual noir, by virtue of their subject fields, which comprise the tragedies of the mid to late 1940s with comment on the Second World War and its effects.

Third of what is trailed as a trilogy of stories of World War 2 Germany, Year Zero is Rossellini’s Meditation on Post-War Devastation and Neorealist Experimentation and is as a necessary counterpart to 1940s film makers attempts to present the unreal in as realistic a tone as possible, making the timing of the neo-realist movement excruciating in its combinations of tone.

A Foreign Affair (1948)

A Foreign Affair (1948) is a post-war light-hearted romantic comedy Trümmerfilm combining political commentary and goofy-style humour-infused look at the rebuilding of Berlin and the construction of Western narratives around the destruction and villainy of the World War of the 1940s. 

A Foreign Affair is a genuine American Trümmerfilm and cinematic exploration of life in post-World War II Berlin, occupied by the Allies during the early stages of the Cold War. Featuring an ensemble cast led by Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, and John Lund, the film is set against the complex backdrop of a city still reeling from the aftermath of the war. 

Der Verlorene (1951)

Der Verlorene (1951) is a post-World War II Peter Lorre directed West German rubble vengeance and regret existential experimental-Nazi vivisection lab film noir, directed and starring the recovering morphine-addicted super-scion of film noir, Peter Lorre.

Peter Lorre does manage within the scope of this late period rubble film, to create a most memorable character, although he does so much Lorre drift, peer, stare and smoke, and like all Peter Lorre films, and like all of Peter Lorre's life, the mis en scene is heavy on the cigarette-based action.

Marriage in the Shadows (1947)

Marriage in the Shadows (1947) or as we should prefer to offer it its proper title, the film called Ehe im Schatten is a beautiful noir melodrama masterpiece of East German Trümmerfilm, telling an epic war-spanning tale of Nazi complicity and Nazi attrocity and the Nazi destruction of art and the Nazi destruction of social bonds, and the Nazi destruction of the theatre of Germany and the Nazi destruction of personal relationships and friendness, with the Nazi destruction of social bonds driven home, sad frame after sad frame, in a story of Trümmer awfulness, elevating liberal thought and love, and showing that the only things stronger than Nazism are on the threshold of being itself.

Here is the story, as it were: in Nazi Germany actor Hans refuses to divorce his Jewish wife Elisabeth. He is threatened to be drafted and sent to the front while she will be deported to a concentration camp. Desperate, Hans decides that suicide is their only way out.

Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946)

Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946) is an immediately post-war German Trümmerfilm, a style or genre translated as rubble film and was possibly the first film to be produced in Germany after World War Two, and maybe even the first anti-fascist film should such a canon be similarly useful.

To compare the cinema of 1946 and sample that of the US and that of Germany is to stumble upon the most severe of contrasts, and yet within this the word noir might still function to explain what we are seeing.

Die Mörder sind unter uns, known in English as The Murderers Are Among Us, is the most naturally ironic film one could imagine. The irony of anything at all happening in the rubbled remains of Berlin is strong enough without adding romance, and Christmas.

Berlin Express (1948)

Berlin Express (1948) is a train-bound post-war espionage cloak and dagger military mission movie with plenty film noir tones, themes and touches.

Drenched in the unappealing and captivating intricacies of the post-war milieu, rife with a tapestry of tropes, landscapes, and clichés that echo the discordant symphony of a world grappling with the aftermath of conflict, Berlin Express (1948) is an unusual and compelling espionage noir.

In the brutal theater of World War II's ferocity, where mushroom clouds etched indelible scars on history, few glimpses pierce the collective consciousness like the haunting images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's atomic abyss. 

Yet, within the silent reels of this revelation, a different, less heralded tale unfolds — a cinematic odyssey unearthing the aftermath of conventional bombardment upon the ancient lands of Germany.

Night and the City (1950)

Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950) is a cinematic excoriation, a nocturnal fugue of failed aspiration, doomed enterprise, and lurid spectacle. This British-American hybrid noir, directed by an expatriated American director fleeing the sordid tribunal of the House Un-American Activities Committee, coalesces around the jittery figure of Harry Fabian—a human perversion of motion itself. Played with convulsive energy by Richard Widmark, Fabian is a miscreant whose ambition corrodes every surface it touches. In his breathless pursuit of legitimacy through London’s professional wrestling underworld, he performs a danse macabre before the abyss.