The peculiar background behind what seems like a generic short-form tribute to the Third Reich infantry stems from the Wehrmacht being peeved by receiving not only a paltry 2 mins. of screen time in Triumph of the Will (1934), but having to fight for that much of an allotment in what was the Nazi party’s definitive propaganda advert…
In 1933, Leni Riefenstahl made the move from dancer, actress, and fiction film director to documentaries, launching her new career as the Third Reich’s premiere propaganda filmmaker with her hour-long chronicle of the fifth NSDAP party rally, held in Nuremberg in 1933…
After the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, one of the U.S. Government’s efforts to de-Nazify Germans was via film screenings, and Stuart Schulberg made his first and only effort as director with this documentary that assembled courtroom footage from the Nuremberg trials…
Although House of Bamboo is technically a remake of Harry Kleiner’s superb noir script The Street with No Name (1948), it’s really a re-imaging of the core story in which a government investigator infiltrates a gang to solve and put an end to a series of murders and robberies…
Not unlike House of Strangers (1949), The Street with No Name is a fellow noir that’s perhaps been overshadowed by its bigger, and in this case, crazier colour CinemaScope remake, Sam Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955), but Harry Kleiner’s story and William Keighley’s direction managed to form a near-perfect 1948 thriller that’s more true crime than noir…
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