The devil played balalaika

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Movie
Original title The devil played balalaika
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1961
length 122 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Leopold Lahola
script Johannes Kai ,
Heinrich Déchamps ,
Leopold Lahola
production Alf Teichs ,
Peter Bamberger
music Zvi Borodov
camera Karl Schröder
cut Karl Aulitzky
occupation

The Devil Played Balalaika is a German war drama with the young Götz George from 1961.

The black and white film is set in Siberia in 1950 in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. Both the director Leopold Lahola and the producer Peter Bamberger were interned in camps themselves. The film premiered on February 21, 1961 in the Federal Republic of Germany, was re-released in 1977 and was released on DVD in 2008 .

action

Siberia after the Second World War: Lieutenant Fusow, as camp manager in a POW camp for German and Japanese POWs, harassed the POWs.

The prisoners have to do hard labor in a quarry during the day and are given just enough to eat to survive. Only the Jewish officer Seidenwar and his wife Elena - she herself was an Austrian with Jewish roots in a German concentration camp - treat the imprisoned with respect and try to help them. Among other things, they try to change the prisoners' minds when some of them plan to escape.

The escape plan is betrayed by a fellow prisoner to the German guard, but at the same time the prisoner Peter Joost von Seidenwar and his wife, who also falls a little in love with Peter, are interrogated and suspected by those willing to break out of having betrayed their plan. That is why one of those involved in the plan is put in jail. When he is released again, he wants revenge on Peter Joost and therefore manipulates the track on which Peter drives with his fully loaded stone cart. This derails and Peter is seriously injured. Despite an injury to his head and arm, he does not yet come to the hospital, but into the barrack as normal.

In the evening the barracks are searched. There, Peter is given a map of those willing to escape to hide in his association. A German supervisor finds them. He reports this to the officer Seidenwar, who does not pass it on, but puts Peter in the hospital and puts him and the three escapes on the list of returnees. The three got scared after all and fled that same night. The next morning, Peter comes along on the returnee's truck and drives home.

When Lieutenant Fusow was reported that he had escaped, he gave the alarm and started the search. The German guard also made him aware that he had found the map with Peter and reported this to Seidenwar. Lieutenant Fusow tries to stop Peter's transport, but it is too late. The three fugitives are caught, one is shot and the other two come back to the camp. Seidenwar was transferred because of his offense, but his wife, who suffered greatly from the stay in the camp because of her imprisonment in the concentration camp and was exposed to Fusov's harassment, had to stay in the camp.

Reviews

Der Spiegel wrote in 1961: "This film (director: Leopold Lahola) adapts the panorama of figures of a Siberian prison camp to new German historical ideas in a more subtle way than earlier Plenny stories."

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in 1961 of a "serious German contribution to our recent history".

In 1961, the Frankfurter Rundschau criticized that the film lost itself in the “nebulous, cosmic”.

Günter Dahl wrote in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in 1961 : “It seems to have been one of those subjects that a man caught up in the production of films has to turn off his mind at some point in his life. Bamberger was himself a Plenni, a prisoner of war. He knows what it looks like beyond the Urals. Who could have talked him into this sonorous but stupid film title? "

Prisma.de described the film as an "ambitious war drama", but called it annoying that "Lahola equates the hardships of the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp with the terrible extermination camps of the Nazi".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c The devil played balalaika on the website of the German Historical Museum
  2. ↑ The devil played balalaika. In: Zelluloid.de. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; accessed on September 12, 2018 .
  3. ↑ The devil played Balalaika (Germany) In: Der Spiegel, issue 14/1961 of March 29, 1961
  4. ↑ Is the devil musical? In: The time of March 3, 1961
  5. ↑ The devil played balalaika. In: prisma.de. prisma-Verlag , accessed on September 24, 2017 .