Wet Asphalt (1958)
Wet Asphalt (1958)
DVDRip | MKV | 630 x 480 | x264 @ 1852 Kbps | 89 min | 1,32 Gb
Audio: English dub AAC 2.0 @ 160 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Film-Noir
DVDRip | MKV | 630 x 480 | x264 @ 1852 Kbps | 89 min | 1,32 Gb
Audio: English dub AAC 2.0 @ 160 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Film-Noir
In Berlin, when the journalist Greg Bachmann is released from prison six months before the end of his sentence, there is a driver named Jupp waiting for him. Soon he learns that the famous journalist Cesar Boyd was the responsible for the shorter sentence. Cesar offers a position of his assistant to Greg; in return, Boyd would write his story about his interviews to war criminals and Greg would help him in other matters. Meanwhile Boyd welcomes the daughter of a deceased friend, Bettina, and he becomes her guardian. Greg and Bettina feels immediately attracted by each other but Boyd is also interested in Bettina. When Boyd needs to send an article to a newspaper in Paris, he fabricates a story of a group of five German soldiers that have lived in a bunker in Poland for six years. In the end, one blind soldier would have survived and was sent to a Polish hospital. The story becomes a great sensation, affecting the governments of Poland, Russia and Germany and their inhabitants. When Greg discovers the big lie of his boss and mentor, he has to take an attitude; but Boyd is an old fox.
An amazing indictment of falsifying news stories and twisting the truth. Eeerily foreshadowing the 2003 New York Times scandal focusing on Jayson Blair who was fired after he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating elements of his stories. The film dialogues contain a lot of humor and fast paced, generally good to follow. Gert Fröbe and an excellent Marti Held create relatively multidimensional characters, in addition to Horst Buchholz's main character. Even though the latest dubbed version is (obvioulsy) in English, the subtitles contain one important recurring error: The town they talk about is Gdingen, a former German town in 1958 Poland. The subtitles, however, keep referring to Goettingen, which is confusing at best, but in the plot it is completely nonsensical. I would withdraw the DVD and redo the subtitles and replace them free of charge. Other than that the plot is nicely developed and another example of Frank Wisbar's talent. Wisbar had only come home from the US a few years earlier and would one year later make "Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen" in which he described the plight of refugees from former Polish territories from where he was from as well.
Wet Asphalt (1958)
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