Hunted till morning

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Movie
Original title Hunted till morning
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1957
length 81 minutes
Rod
Director Joachim Hasler
script A. Artur Kuhnert ,
Ludwig Turek
production DEFA
music Walter Sieber
camera Joachim Hasler,
Otto Hanisch
cut Hilde Tegener
occupation

Hunted until morning is a German feature film from the DEFA studio for feature films by Joachim Hasler from 1957 based on the autobiographical novel Ein Prolet told by Ludwig Turek from 1930.

action

Mr. Kurda, who works as a shunter for the railway, loses his life in an accident at work. Now, at the beginning of the 20th century, his wife and two children are alone. The mother struggles through life with odd jobs and Ludwig, the 13-year-old older son, tries to make a living by organizing and begging.

One day, the older children play with the carts of a field railway and Ludwig's little brother Ulli is supposed to be a switch , but he disappears because he doesn't want to wait until the others come back. His way leads him to the train station, where he crawls under a waiting train to play railroad workers. In the meantime he is missing from his mother and together with Ludwig they look for him at the train station, where he had already stayed several times. Completely soaked and frozen, he is discovered on the tracks after the train leaves and immediately put to bed at home with a fever . But the coals are missing to warm the room.

Ludwig makes his way to the port with a sack in order to pick up the coal that has fallen during loading together with many others. Here the sack is taken away from him by an imperial policeman. When a skipper promises to give him two sacks if he jumps into the water, he doesn't think twice and does it, although he can't swim. While the boatmen are rescuing him from the water, several police officers come and clear the harbor area of ​​the coal-seeking people. Ludwig is hidden in the ship and, before he is sent home, he is dressed again and given bread, eggs and sausage. He can also take a sack of coal with him.

Karl Baumann, who loves Ms. Kurda, invites her to a celebration of organized printers . Since Ulli is still in bed, she asks mother Bühnemann to take care of him, because she also cares about Mr. Baumann. They spend a nice evening until Ludwig appears at the festival and tells his mother that Ulli died of pneumonia . Karl's father is a carpenter and is now supposed to make a coffin for the boy, for which Ludwig even wants to sacrifice his bed, as he is plagued by guilty feelings about his brother's death. There is an accident in the cemetery, Baumann is drunk and falls into an open grave. Ludwig gets scared when he realizes that the old man is dead and covers the pit with earth. The police quickly suspect that Ludwig is the culprit, but Karl, who as a socialist is also at war with the police, is convinced of the boy's innocence. At the police station, he also learns from the forensic doctor that his father died of a heart attack . He demands that the police stop the search and inform the mother that her son is not a murderer.

In the future, Karl Baumann and Martha Kurda, who got a job in the print shop, will be a couple and Ludwig will learn the trade of a printer there.

Production and publication

Hunted until the morning was shot as a black and white film and had its world premiere on December 6, 1957 in the Colosseum cinema in Berlin . The outdoor shots of the widescreen film were made in Görlitz and Berlin. The film was shown for the first time on February 7, 1958 on German television .

The dramaturgy was in the hands of Marieluise Steinhauer.

criticism

The Berliner Zeitung read:

“It is a shortcoming of the film that it takes a considerable run-up before it can really captivate the viewer. In the first third of the film you could have photographed and edited more boldly. Overall: a good film, an exciting film and a useful film - especially for the forgetful. "

Horst Knietzsch wrote in Neues Deutschland about Joachim Hasler's first directorial work:

"This is not a beginner's job that was properly and badly cut together, not an embarrassing order from the studio management, but one of the most impressive DEFA films of recent years, which the Berlin premiere audience acknowledged with stormy applause."

The lexicon of international films writes that the film portrays the social misery of a working class family in Berlin at the turn of the century. It is played vividly, expressively, and photographed with rich contours, but has a few dramatic defects.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of December 7, 1957, p. 3
  2. ↑ Neues Deutschland, December 8, 1957, p. 4
  3. ↑ Hunted until morning. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed September 29, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used