Phoenix (2014)

September 26, 2014 (Germany), July 24, 2015 (United States), release dates

Directed by Christian Petzold

Screenplay by Christian Petzold, Harun Farocki

Based on the novel Le retour des cendres (The Return from the Ashes) by Hubert Monteilhet

Music by Stefan Will

Edited by Bettina Böhler

Cinematography by Hans Fromm

Nina Hoss as Nelly Lenz

Ronald Zehrfeld as Johannes “Johnny” Lenz

Nina Kunzendorf as Lene Winter

Michael Maaertens as Arzt

Imogen Kogge as Elisabeth

Felix Römer as Geiger

Distributed by The Match Factory

Produced by Schramm Film, Tempus Film

Phoenix is a powerful film about a German woman’s struggle to rebuild her life, her sense of self, her very identity after surviving a concentration camp in World War II. Many films noir produced in the postwar period, in the 1940s and 1950s, address the dislocation and alienation of returning veterans, but Phoenix addresses the trauma of wartime imprisonment. These extraordinary circumstances have shattered Nelly physically and emotionally, and she can think of only one way to get back her sense of herself.

At the start of the film, Nelly Lenz’s face has already been shattered by a bullet under somewhat mysterious circumstances. It’s hard to know what is true and what is false because Lene Winter, Nelly’s friend, is trying to find the surgeon who will reconstruct Nelly’s face, and she must navigate land that is now occupied by “the enemy,” in other words, the Allied forces.

When the narrative starts, Lene Winter is driving at night, with Nelly in the passenger seat. Nelly’s head is bandaged and bloody. When they are stopped at a roadblock by American soldiers, Lene tells them that she is Swiss, and she has a passport to prove it. The American soldier who questions her doesn’t quite believe her, and he demands to see who she is traveling with. He orders Nelly to take off her bandages, and it’s only when he sees her wounds that he allows the two of them to proceed over a barricaded bridge. The narrative reveals later that Nelly and Lene are German—and Jewish. Once they are past the military checkpoints, however, the two main characters, Nelly and Lena, become reliable narrators. The postwar conditions are still treacherous for them, a continuation of what they endured during the war.

(This blog post about Phoenix contains all the spoilers.)

Lene Winter is a lawyer working for the Jewish Agency to identify the victims of war and the concentration camps. Her position gives her some connections that prove useful after the war. She also helps Nelly through her reconstructive surgery and will help her through the legal process of reclaiming her inheritance. She arranges for both of them to move to Israel so they can start new lives. Nelly has other ideas, however: She wants to find her husband, Johnny Lenz, even though he gave her up and identified her as a Jew to the Germans two days after his arrest. Nelly doesn’t know it yet, but he also divorced her right before her arrest. Lene has a copy of the divorce decree, which she was able to retrieve after Johnny tried to steal it from one of the offices near Lene’s. But she hasn’t told Nelly this bit of information just yet.

Nelly is grasping at any ray of hope, and Lene senses that she must proceed delicately. In fact, Lene and Dr. Bongartz, the plastic surgeon, seem to be the only characters who have Nelly’s best interests at heart. All of her family have been killed, and she is almost completely alone.

After her hospital stay, Nelly moves into Lene’s house. Lene has a housekeeper, Elizabeth, who helps both of them during the transition from war to peace, as it were. But it’s still a dangerous time. Nelly finds this out when she goes out at night to look for Johnny. A blind musician, a violin player, that she meets while he is playing on the street tells her that if her husband is a pianist (Nelly used to sing with Johnny before the war), she should look in the clubs. That is, if he is lucky. If he isn’t lucky, she should look on the street because he might be playing an accordion on a corner somewhere. Nelly doesn’t know any clubs, so the musician tells her to look in the American sector.

The name of the first club that Nelly sees is Phoenix, so the title of the film has many shades of meaning for the narrative. For more information about the myth of the Phoenix, click on each list item below:

◊ Wikipedia

◊ Britannica

Nelly finds Johnny in the Phoenix nightclub and tries to talk to him, but he doesn’t seem to recognize her. She has to return again for a chance to talk to him. He still doesn’t seem to recognize her, but she is determined to go back to her previous life, even though that is impossible and the city has been reduced to rubble. Johnny tells Nelly that she looks a lot like his wife, who he says is dead. He wants her to impersonate Nelly (herself) because he wants to claim Nelly’s inheritance. Right now, he has no proof, no physical evidence, that Nelly is dead, so he wants her to return as a survivor. And because Nelly refuses to give up hope, she agrees to Johnny’s plan. Johnny gives the back room of his apartment to Nelly, and she works on her own handwriting, wearing her own clothes, making herself over to look as she did before the war.

When Nelly tells Lene what she plans to do, Lene is furious. She believes that Johnny is a traitor because he betrayed Nelly to the police. But Nelly isn’t willing to let go of Johnny. She even invents a story that she tells Johnny about how the police followed him to his wife’s hiding place and that is how they found her. She’d rather make excuses for him.

The next time that Nelly returns to Lene’s home, she learns from Elisabeth that Lene has committed suicide. Lene leaves a reference letter for Elisabeth, and Elisabeth gives Nelly an envelope that Lene left for her. In it is the divorce decree: Nelly finally learns that Johnny divorced her before her arrest.

Nelly continues acting out Johnny’s plan. Everything is going as he wishes. She meets him and his family at the train station, and everyone greets her as though she is Nelly, a survivor of the concentration camp returning home. Everything goes as Nelly and Johnny rehearsed it. They go back to a family member’s home, and Nelly invites everyone inside so that she can sing once again to Johnny’s piano accompaniment. She sings the song “Speak Low” in English.

This scene is pivotal, and it is very moving. Johnny recognizes her voice as Nelly’s, and Nelly recognizes the power of her own voice. When she places her hand on the piano, Johnny sees the tattooed numbers from the concentration camp on Nelly’s arm. At this point, Nelly stops singing: She realizes that she has found her own voice, literally and figuratively. The music and Nelly’s singing are contrasted with the silence of Johnny’s family members: They, like Johnny, are stunned by the revelation that no one can ignore any longer. In spite of all that she has experienced, Nelly gathers all her inner strength in this final scene.

The first time that I saw this film, I sometimes thought that Nelly’s character was a bit unbelievable. But on second viewing, it is easier to see how someone can be so powerless, so traumatized, so beaten down, by the horrors that she witnesses inflicted on others and that she experiences for herself. And when all of that comes to an end, her former life is gone. Life is almost as dangerous as it was during the war. The film is worth seeing twice to appreciate the details and how everything interconnects, and to understand how Nelly’s transformation is so miraculous. Like so many films noir from the 1940s and 1950s, Phoenix is really a simple story, with few characters and nothing extraneous, and one in which all the details are important.

Down Three Dark Streets (1954)

September 2, 1954, release date

Directed by Arnold Laven

Screenplay by Gordon Gordon, Mildred Gordon, Bernard C. Schoenfeld

Based on the novel Case File: FBI by the Gordons

Music by Paul Sawtell

Edited by Grant Whytock

Cinematography by Joseph F. Biroc

Broderick Crawford as FBI agent John Ripley

Ruth Roman as Katherine (“Kate”) Martell

Martha Hyer as Connie Anderson

Marisa Pavan as Julie Angelino

Max Showalter (aka Casey Adams) as Dave Millson

Kenneth Tobey as FBI agent Zach Stewart

Gene Reynolds as Vince Angelino

William Johnstone as FBI agent Frank Pace, Ripley’s boss

Harlan Warde as FBI agent Greg Barker

Jay Adler as Uncle Max Charles Martell

Claude Akins as Matty Pavelich

Suzanne Alexander as Brenda Ralles

Myra Marsh as Mrs. Downes, the Martell housekeeper

Dede Gainor as Vicki Martell

Joe Basselt as Joe Walpo

Alexander Campbell as Alex Shurk

Alan Dexter as police Lieutenant Jake Kuppol

William Schallert as Ben, the gas station attendant

William Woodson as the narrator

Distributed by United Artists

Produced by Edward Small Productions

After the opening credits over shots of Washington, DC, the story begins with an exterior shot of the FBI building. A narrator extols the virtues of the science and technology that the FBI (the Federal Bureau of Investigation) uses to track crime and apprehend criminals, and then introduces the FBI and talks about its most important asset:

. . . But often more important than science is the intelligence, the imagination of the individual agent. The FBI man. The FBI man with his special knowledge of human weakness and his ability to probe that weakness and thus trap the criminal into his own betrayal.

It's all very official and very male-dominated. (It helps to remember that this film was released in September 1954, several years before the women’s movement.) The narrator adds a voice of authority and continues making points throughout the film. The based-on-fact nature of the story and the narration make the film a semidocumentary. The men in the FBI are the long arm of the law and, in this film, they are always on the right side of the law.

The switch in the action to Highway 91, heading into California, is also introduced by the narrator. John Walpo is driving along Highway 91 and stops at a gas station. Ben, the gas station attendant, recognizes him from wanted posters. He attempts to call the police inside the gas station office, and Walpo comes in and shoots him, but not before Ben gets some information to the operator who takes his call. Eventually, the FBI is brought in, and FBI agent Zach Stewart is given the Walpo case.

The second plot line in the narrative concerns someone named Vince Angelino, who is in the FBI office for questioning. The agents, including Zach Stewart and John Ripley, want to know more about his associates, but Angelino isn’t talking. He’s suspected of transporting a stolen car over state lines to Nevada, but he claims to know nothing about the car or anyone connected with it, other than that someone paid him to drive the car.

The film then switches to the third thread in the narrative. A man using a disguised voice calls Katherine Martell and threatens to harm her daughter Vicki if she won’t hand over the $10,000 she recently received on her husband’s insurance money, which he left to Katherine on his death. The caller will give Katherine instructions later, but, in the meantime, she is not to tell anyone. On her own initiative, however, she calls the FBI office. FBI agent Zach Stewart answers, and so the Martell case is his.

During the course of Ripley’s and Stewart’s investigations, Stewart is killed. The FBI now has two murders to solve: that of Ben, the gas station attendant, and FBI agent Zach Stewart. Ripley and his boss, Agent Frank Pace, conclude that Agent Stewart’s killer must be connected to one of his open cases (Joe Walpo, Vince Angelino, and Katherine Martell are Zach Stewart’s three open cases) and that they must solve all of these cases to find this person. The three dark streets in the title of the film are metaphors for the three files that FBI agent John Ripley must close to discover his partner’s killer. The rest of the film follows FBI agents and Los Angeles police officers as they track down the clues in each case and figure out who is responsible for Stewart’s murder.

One of the details that really stood for me in Down Three Dark Streets was the weird sexual aggression, which could have been called the fourth dark street. It was never mentioned as being part of Agent Stewart’s three open cases and is probably a way to confuse viewers about the identity of his killer. The first instance of this sexual aggression appears when the character of Uncle Max is introduced. Uncle Max is Max Charles Martell, uncle to Bill Martell (Katherine Martell’s deceased husband). He is a gambler and has come to the attention of law enforcement in the past because of fraud charges. But viewers don’t know any of that when he makes his first appearance in Katherine Martell’s bedroom. She has undressed down to her slip, and Uncle Max opens the bedroom door without knocking, taking Katherine by surprise. Viewers learn that Uncle Max has a real problem with knocking and that this isn’t the first time Katherine has been unpleasantly surprised by him.

Another instance of sexual aggression occurs thanks to Dave Millson. Millson has already appeared in the film: He shows up unexpectedly and introduces himself when Ripley meets Martell to discuss the details of her case over lunch. After he departs, Martell tells Ripley that Millson is a friend of the family, more specifically, a close friend of her deceased husband Bill. Millson next appears at Martell’s front door for a date that she completely forgot about—a turn of events that took me by surprise because it never seemed that there was a romantic relationship between Martell and Millson before this point in the story. Millson is upset about Martell’s unwillingness to keep the date and won’t accept her fatigue as a valid reason for postponing it. He forces a kiss; the bag of popcorn kernels that he brought along breaks during the struggle and spreads kernels all over the floor. Here is part of their conversation on this occasion:

• Millson: “I’d rather you fought me off, Katie. Anything but you just standing there.” [After an awkward pause, he bends down to clean up some of the popcorn kernels.]

• Martell: “That’s all right. Mrs. Downes [the housekeeper] will clean it up.”

• Millson: “You’re really sore, aren’t you?”

• Martell: “Let’s say I won’t be if you go now.”

• Millson: “And let’s say I just had one too many.”

• Martell: “Let’s say that, and all is forgiven.”

• Millson: “Nice going, Katie. [heads for the front door, opens it, and stops before leaving] You break the date, and I have to be the one who’s forgiven.”

Millson is happy to blame Katherine Martell, but he’s the one who forces himself on her. It’s an unsettling scene in a film that is supposed to be unsettling. But this scene is especially unsettling because Millson’s appearance at this point in the story is seemingly out of the blue, and nothing about any of the FBI’s cases has anything to do with men assaulting women.

Uncle Max and Dave Millson don’t escape the notice of the FBI later in the film because they are on the list of people who have regular contact with Katherine Martell. A next-door neighbor, Alex Shurk, also becomes a suspect. Even the postal carrier is subjected to a background check simply because he is someone who could potentially see her every day.

Down Three Dark Streets is based on a book by the Gordons, and I was afraid it was going to be a slightly different version of Experiment in Terror, another film that includes the character of FBI agent John Ripley and is also based on a book by the Gordons. Both films do have numerous similarities:

◊ Woman supporting herself with one person dependent on her

◊ Blackmail of this woman by someone she doesn’t know or recognize

◊ A campaign of terror waged by the blackmailer via phone

◊ Threats to kill the woman’s loved one (daughter in Down Three Dark Streets, teenage sister in Experiment in Terror)

◊ Woman calls the FBI for help despite threats to her and her loved one if she does

◊ Woman’s residence is placed under FBI surveillance

◊ FBI agent Ripley comes to admire the female victim for her strength and resolve in the face of danger

◊ For more information about the Gordons, click here.

◊ For my blog post about Experiment in Terror, click here.

But there were enough differences to keep me interested in Down Three Dark Streets. Another plus was that I really wasn’t sure about the identity of FBI agent Stewart’s killer until the end. It’s always fun to be surprised by a story, whether in print or on screen. If I have any complaint about the film, it would be about casting Broderick Crawford as agent John Ripley. Crawford is not very convincing as a squeaky-clean FBI agent or as a person with much compassion. I think Glenn Ford in the same role in Experiment in Terror is a much better choice.