The endless night
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The endless night |
 | |
| Country of production | Federal Republic of Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1963 |
| length | 85 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Will Tremper |
| script | Will Tremper |
| production | Will Tremper, Hanns Eckelkamp , Wenzel Lüdecke |
| music | Peter Thomas |
| camera | Hans Jura |
| cut | Susanne Paschen |
| occupation | |
| |
The Endless Night is a German film drama that can be assigned to the genre of ensemble film by the director and author Will Tremper from 1963.
action
Thick fog lies over Berlin-Tempelhof Airport . The announcement announces that all flights to West Germany have to be canceled and that landings in Berlin are not to be expected before the following morning. Since it is not possible for many guests to continue in transit traffic through the GDR for various reasons, this announcement leads to considerable problems for a number of passengers.
There is the aging actor Stoltmann, who flew from Hanover to Berlin without the knowledge of his artistic director to take on a small radio play role. The next evening he is supposed to play King Lear in Hanover - finally the main role he has been waiting for all his life. Stoltmann fears that his director will fire him and that he will have lost what is probably the last chance of his life to make it big again. The situation is similarly dramatic for the young businessman Wolfgang Spitz. He is urgently awaiting the arrival of a business partner from Frankfurt am Main . If he does not arrive by tomorrow morning and give him the promised order, bills of exchange will be due whose signature Spitz has forged. He took his girlfriend Lisa to the airport so that she could use feminine charm to help bring the negotiations to a positive conclusion. When the wealthy major freight forwarder Schreiber appears, Spitz believes he recognizes his lifeline. But he's only interested in Lisa. When Spitz wanted to leave for Düsseldorf the next morning , he was arrested by the Berlin police for fraud.
The chief fitter Ernst Kramer had come to Tempelhof to fly to Karachi . His wife, who had brought him, left again, and so Kramer seized the opportunity to meet his lover Mausi. He waits for her for hours, but Mausi doesn't come. Suddenly Kramer is afraid that his wife could cheat on him as he could cheat on her. And so he gets into a taxi and drives back to his house. But she is alone and is suspicious of her husband's delayed return. The equally attractive and burned-down starlet Sylvia Stössi comes fresh from the hairdresser to the airport and, because she arrived too late, has forfeited her right to a hotel room paid for by the airline. She doesn't know anyone in Berlin, and her attempts to be approached by halfway serious men in order to be invited to dinner at least fail. Finally she leaves the airport hall accompanied by two questionable young men.
Mascha came to the check- in hall with her friend Renzo . For his sake, she abandoned her husband and two stepchildren. But husband Herbert suddenly appears in the company of the children in Tempelhof. Renzo fears a scene and escapes. So disillusioned, Masha decides to return to her husband. The situation is completely different for the farmer John McLeod, who actually wanted to fly home to his lands in Kenya . He is not particularly sad about this delay, however, because behind a counter he discovered the pretty Juanita. The unplanned stay enables him to talk to the young woman. The two get closer at a breathtaking pace and are even making plans for a future together. However, when McLeod was awarded a surprisingly vacant seat the next morning on the next plane leaving Berlin, he didn't even find the time to say goodbye to Juanita. A messenger is supposed to deliver her a bouquet of flowers, but she has already left her job.
The fog over Berlin-Tempelhof means that a Polish jazz combo is also stuck. The quintet came here from Schönefeld Airport in East Berlin to fly on from Tempelhof. Communist indoctrinated, they initially met passengers from the West with suspicion. But the encouragement of the other passengers stranded here lead the band to improvise a jam session . When they walk across the airfield to their plane the next morning, the five are still playing. And the mistrust has evaporated, as has the fog over Berlin-Tempelhof.
All these incidents are not told as separate episodes, rather the stories are interwoven.
background
The endless night was created between November 18, 1962 and January 31, 1963 on the airport grounds of Berlin-Tempelhof. It had its world premiere in the Berlin Marble House on May 8, 1963. The film was made in 45 days without a finished script. Tremper improvised from one day to the next. The shooting took place during the night, as you then had the airport to yourself.
The film was financed by a premium of 250,000 DM from the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which Will Tremper had received for the previous film Escape to Berlin . When the director and producer ran out of money after 21 days, he had to help himself out with loans, pledge his car and borrow something from private donors. So Tremper raised another 200,000 DM with which the film could finally be completed.
For director Tremper, The Endless Night was the most successful production of his entire career, which should bring him consistently positive reviews. Hannelore Elsner has named Die Endlose Nacht as her favorite of the films in which she was involved .
The English all-star film Hotel International with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton , shot almost at the same time, was thematically similar, but was rated significantly worse by the critics.
The Peter Thomas composition Come, put your arm around me is sung in a scat version by Wanda Warska accompanied by the Andrzej Trzaskowskí quintet . The melody originally composed for the film The Strange Countess was also released in 1963 as a sung version by Esther Ofarim with a text by Günther Schwenn on a single .
Reviews
The Lexicon of International Films praised: “Tremper's second film [...] surprises with its remarkably sober visual language and its fresh directorial style. A comparatively respectable performance by German cinema in the 1960s. "
The film's large personal encyclopedia wrote in Tremper's biography: “In calm, almost documentary sober images (camera: Hans Jura), in the tradition of Vicki Baum's novel 'Grand Hotel', he traced a few more or less dramatic hours in the life of several people whose flights are canceled due to fog. "
The Protestant Film Observer drew the following conclusion: “A remarkable attempt to break the boundaries of the conventional in a justifiable way with a German film. Therefore worth a recommendation from 16 onwards. "
Awards
The film received the German Film Critics' Prize in 1963 and the Silver Film Ribbon at the German Film Prize in the same year . Harald Leipnitz received the gold film tape for the best performance, Hans Jura for the best camera work and Peter Thomas for the best film music . In addition, Walter Buschhoff received the Ernst Lubitsch Prize for the portrayal of the chief fitter Ernst Kramer .
Web links
- The endless night in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The endless night at filmportal.de
- Official website for re-release on DVD
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cupped in Der Spiegel, May 8, 1963
- ^ Hannelore Elsner in tagesspiegel.de
- ↑ Der Spiegel of October 2, 1963
- ↑ Cf. Come, put your arm around me For the song version with Esther Ofarim
- ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexikon des Internationale Films Volume 2, S. 860. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987.
- ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 8: T - Z. David Tomlinson - Theo Zwierski. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 43.
- ↑ Evangelischer Film-Beobachter, Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 261/1963
- ↑ Deutsche Filmakademie ( Memento of the original from March 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Internet Movie Database - Awards for The Endless Night
