100 minutes into the film and we're on. Klaus Kinski's first and only scene in Douglas Sirk's A Time To Live And A Time To Die. As a Gestapo Lieutenant handing John Gavin's Ernst Graeber the ashes of his wife's dead father. A cold and mildly menacing performance executed with the unglamorous but reliable efficiency of a VW motor. In this scene, like in the entire movie, Sirk avoids having to show us explicitly any Nazi insignia, so Kinski has to wear a somewhat militaristic uniform with a few emblems that could have been on a Nazi uniform but can not be specifically linked to it (except for the SS sign on his collar).
The movie as a whole suffers from the unfortunate alliance of Sirk and Universal Studios at a time when it was apparently inconceivable to shoot a serious film about war without having to water it down with a senseless Hollywood romance. While it is laudable that Sirk tried to show that Germans were human beings (even at that time!) that suffered under the circumstances too, the script uses the setting to set up a rather boring romance between the two leads. Any respectable Hollywood sob stuff needs some obstacles that the lovers need to overcome before they can consummate their relationship, and Gestapo, concentration camps, air raids and food shortage supply more than enough of it. And really, the movie doesn't even attempt to look seriously at the reality of living in a German city during the late years of World War II. Everything has to be presented through the prism of the love story central to the narrative.
It is interesting to see, however, how much quicker stories were told 50 years ago. And how much more screewriters used plot to reveal characters, instead of having them sit around and give on-the-nose speeches. The first encounter of our two love-birds plays out over a few scenes, and at the end we have a very good sense of who these people are, and how they relate to each other. And we can move on to the next plot point. You would be hard-pressed to find an original movie that tells story that efficiently today.
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