Death in the morning
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Death in the morning |
| Original title | Four in the morning |
| Country of production | Great Britain |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1965 |
| length | 94 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Anthony Simmons |
| script | Anthony Simmons |
| production |
John Morris , Roy Simpson |
| music | John Barry |
| camera | Larry Pizer |
| cut | Fergus McDonell |
| occupation | |
| |
Tod am Morgen (German alternative title: Four o'clock in the morning , original title: Four in the Morning ) is a British film drama in black and white from 1965 by Anthony Simmons , who also wrote the screenplay. The leading roles are cast with Anne Lynn , Brian Phelan , Judi Dench and Norman Rodway . The film first hit cinemas in May 1965 in Great Britain. It premiered in the Federal Republic of Germany in October 1965 at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival . The TV premiere took place on August 1, 1967 in the ARD program .
action
London in the 1960s. The police patrol finds a woman's corpse on the banks of the Thames . - At the door of a nightclub, a young man meets a girl whose duty has just finished. - In a small house near the river, a young woman is waiting for the return of her husband, who has gone to a party. - These are the starting points of three stories told in parallel that change over to one another.
Judi, the young wife, cannot sleep. The child is teething, the child's restlessness has passed on to them. The feeling of helplessness has made her aware of loneliness, has turned into anger that pours over her husband who has finally returned home. It turns out to be one of those ugly arguments in which each partner is only anxious to hit the other with a sharp tongue. Judi describes the situation desperately: "You know what the worst thing of all is: We can no longer talk to each other without arguing!" Even Joe, the friend who accompanied Norman home, cannot save anything with his clowning - the Communication between the spouses is exhausted.
The girl from the bar and the young man are only at the beginning of their relationship. They drink coffee together in a pub, stroll along the river, take the bus, then a sleek motorboat, the lock of which the man broke without further ado. Gradually they get to know each other better, talk about their disappointments and their hopes. Their tongues loosen; waiting her words dance around the confession of affection. They kiss on the boat, but when his hand wants more of her, she stops him. After all, it is the girl who overcomes herself. “I think I love you,” she says in the midst of the people on the ferry, but the words set up a new barrier between the two. The man is out for a quick conquest, not a long and permanent bond. He knows what the girl expects from him, but his kind of tenderness is brutal: “I want you - I want to sleep with you!” At the end of the encounter there is a sudden farewell on a subway station, looks out of the windows two trains going in different directions.
At the end of his journey is the girl that the police found on the gravel of the Thames. The final stop is the autopsy table and the morgue . With the step into death, with the abandonment of all human relationships, it has also given up its identity - it has become an object of administrative routine, one number in a series of other numbers.
Awards
In 1965 the work received the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival .
Reviews
The Protestant film observer was full of praise after the television premiere: “In his debut, Anthony Simmons shows the inadequacy of interpersonal relationships: with two couples on the way to find each other and lose each other, and a girl who is already each other lost to death. The artfully intertwined actions gain their expressiveness through the freshness and impartiality of the presentation, through the brief, impulsive dialogue and through the excellent visual work of the cameraman Larry Pizer. ”The lexicon of international films also has a positive opinion of the work:“ Debut film, staged as a multi-faceted relationship protocol in which melancholic, cheerful and ironic sequences are confronted with one another. The integration of the plot into social milieus is in the tradition of British free cinema; intensive figure portraits and pointed montages refer to the influence of the ' Nouvelle Vague ' ”.
Web links
- Death in the morning in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Evangelischer Filmbeobachter , Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 362/1967, pp. 463–464.
- ↑ Death in the morning. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 29, 2017 .