The gateway to peace

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Movie
Original title The gateway to peace
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1951
length 98 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Wolfgang Liebeneiner
script Leopoldine Kytka
production Lambach film
music Bert Rudolf
camera Günther Anders
Willi Sohm
cut Arnfried Heyne
occupation

The Gate to Peace is a German feature film from 1951 by Wolfgang Liebeneiner with his wife Hilde Krahl in a leading role. At their side, Paul Hartmann and Vilma Degischer played other leading roles as a devout Catholic couple.

Place of action: the Mercy Church of Mariazell

action

After the Second World War , the Hungarian landowner Paul Dressler and his wife Elisabeth were driven from his land by the Hungarians and Russians. When the two met the "incredulous Thomas", a gruff and mocking farm boy who before the war made fun of Paul Dressler buying his wife a statue of the Virgin after the wedding ceremony in Mariazell in 1910, the now grown-up Thomas grants him the Dressler's accommodation. However, he has still not lost his hatred of faith, and so there is promptly a tangible argument between the embittered and gnarled Thomas on the one hand and the youngest Dressler son Martin on the other when Thomas wants to throw the statue of Mary, rediscovered by the Dresslers, into the blazing fire. The boy tries to prevent this and is killed in the scuffle that follows.

Despite infinite pain and extreme despair, the Dresslers find consolation in their Catholic faith, especially since they also draw hope again because their other two children have found their fiancée who had disappeared in the war. As a thank you, Paul and Elisabeth go on a pilgrimage to the Gnadenkirche Mariazell to say thank you to God. They are astonished to meet the once unbelieving Thomas there, who wants to repent for his actions that led to the death of the Dressler boy. In the end, the experiences made all those involved in the story solidified in their beliefs, and even the death of the Dressler boy seems to make a deeper sense. By the way, everyone will also witness a new miracle, the spontaneous healing of concert singer Maria Gebhart, who had lost her most important asset, her voice, in the recent war.

Production notes

The Gate to Peace is a church-financed film that Liebeneiner shot in Austria in 1950. The world premiere took place on March 19, 1951 in Vienna, on April 27 of the same year the German premiere was in Cologne.

The film structures come from Fritz Jüptner-Jonstorff . The Mozarteum Orchestra plays .

The strongly Catholic German state of Bavaria awarded the film rating "artistically particularly high".

useful information

The producing Lambach-Film refers to the core financing of the film, the Upper Austrian Benedictine monastery Lambach . Abbot Petrus Trefflinger showed himself to be in charge, and after a visit by the screenwriter, who was largely inexperienced in film, founded the church production company Lambach-Film. The intention was to put Mariazell with his supposedly miraculous statue of Our Lady at the center of the action, integrated by a framework. "Final apotheosis: the power of faith triumphs over all delusion and dangers." Abbot Trefflinger, who also acted as a church advisor during production, insisted, according to Spiegel , on taking on the small but important role of the monk Magnus.

Reviews

Time was harshly judged with the film: “Everything that the church has repeatedly declared in so-called religious films to be unacceptable for a Christian feeling has now been brought out again by the new film" The Gate to Peace ...: The mystery is again sacramental consecration with the camera, once again what is going on in the souls of the believers is illustrated with close-ups of images of saints and ritual devices, and once again the most subtle mystery of the Catholic faith, the healing of a sick person in front of a miraculous image of Mary, is shown until The amateurish script ... describes the fate of a Christian family over the last few decades whose pious happiness is disturbed by an unbeliever named Thomas, but when in the end all of them seem to have lost each other through war and post-war , they find themselves in the pilgrimage church, through a wound all pain is relieved and the wounds healed ... Wolfgang Liebeneiner as director and Hilde Krahl and Paul Hartmann as actors were quite helpless in the face of the simple-minded, talkative script, and the excellent camera work by Günther Anders could not do much for the clumsy and illogically reconstructed plot gain interesting points of view. "

The film service ruled: “A fateful novel prepared in legendary style by an Austro-Hungarian landowner family spanning two generations against the backdrop of the pilgrimage site of Mariazell. The unmistakable weaknesses of the carefully staged film supported by well-known actors result from the inexperienced producer's sappy script. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Der Spiegel of March 21, 1951, p. 37
  2. ↑ The Gateway to Peace in The Time of May 10, 1951
  3. ↑ The gateway to peace. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 25, 2019 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 

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