HOTEL BERLIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 351, 15 March 1946, Page 18

HOTEL BERLIN

(Warner Bros.)

WISH it wasn’t necessary, nearly every time I see a Warner Bros. film, to comment on the fact that it is

out of date. But the fauit is too obvious in Hotel Berlin to pass wholly without notice, This is still a good, exciting melodrama, a fictional thriller with a political twist done just about as competently as these things can be; but if we had been able to see it soon after it was made at the beginning of 1945, instead of having to wait until now for its release (in Wellington anyway) it would have been a good deal more; the fiction would then have had the appearance of fact; there would have been a timeliness in this tale of Berlin society cracking up under the Allied blows which: would have made > the shadows on the screen seem like the shadows of coming events. Making the best of it, however, we find that Vicki Baum, who is something of an expert on hotel life, has here given us a vivid! and varied picture of the Nazi regime in process of disintegration. For dramatic effect, the picture is framed within the walls of a luxury hotel: this concentrates our interest while still allowing full scope for plot and sub-plot and a wide range of characters. Overhead the R.A.F. are regularly unloading their bombs, and Hitler’s Reich is tottering to a fall; inside the human ant-hill of the Hotel Berlin there is feverish activity. The Gestapo (commanded by George Coulouris) are hot on the trail of a leading member of the German Underground (Helmut Dantine), who has escaped from Dachau and taken refuge in the hotel, disguised as a waiter; one of the generals (Raymond Massey) involved in the plot against Hitler has been given 24 hours and a loaded pistol and told what he is expected to do with it; a famous actress (Andrea King) wavers between love and duty and makes the wrong decision; the hotel hostess (Faye Emerson) balances the chance to get a new pair of shoes against the chance to save a life and finally chooses rightly; a liberal professor (Peter Lorre) is trying to make up his mind whether to be a man or a mouse; some of the high-up Nazi rats (led by Henry Daniell) are preparing to leave the sinking ship, by way of submarine to America; others, less important, are solacing themselves with champagne and Armagnac brandy in the lounge; the reception clerk grows more and more defeatist, the manager more and more harassed, while the main body of guests pack into the airraid shelter or surge aimlessly but desperately around the foyer. This, orie feels, may have been very much what life was like in those last days of Hit-

ler’s Berlin; but good acting and more than usually intelligent dialogue cannot wholly compensate for the loss of topicality.