Pour Le Mérite (Karl Ritter) 1938 DVD

Ja, das ist gut!

POUR LE MERITE is a big movie -- much larger in scope and ambition than most of the Karl Ritter films I have seen, even the sprawling UBER ALLES IN DER WELT. It attempts nothing less than to tell the story of Germany from the near-end of the Great War in 1918 to Hitler's assumption of power in 1933, and it does this in a rather curious guise, by purporting to be about the death-and-rebirth of the German air force. I say "purporting" because this movie is really about Germany coming back spiritually and psychologically, not just materially, from the defeat in WW1 and the humiliation of Versailles. The Luftwaffe angle is important, but it is just that -- an angle.The film opens in WWI. A cocky young German ace named Fabien (Albert Hehn) has just been notified that he has been awarded the coveted Pour le Merite, the highest medal for bravery in the German Empire. He returns to his unit to support the great Luddendorf Offensive of 1918, mean to win the war, but the offensive fails, morale in the unit cracks, and the first signs of disintegration -- and revolution -- occur. The commanding officer, Captain Prank (Paul Hartmann) tries to hold things together, but some of his pilots, including Fabien, have lost their will to fight.Defeat and revolution follow. The once-lauded pilots now suffer the indignity of Bolshevik rule and then Allied occupation: because Germany can have no air force under the Treaty, they have to hide the few remaining aircraft in barns, and are subject to raids and searches. As the Weimar era unfolds, Prank, who is a "Rittmeister" (a captain who transferred to the air force from the cavalry and is thus used to being considered a one of socety's elite) tries to go into business for himself by opening a garage, but he can't abide his loss of status or having to kowtow to petit bourgeois customers, and ends up bankrupt. A former squadron mate named Mobius (Fritz Kampers) tries to help him, revealing his plans to use his old aircraft as the nucleus of a flight school, but the communists strike again, and an embittered Plank flees the country after a term of imprisonment. Fabien, on the other hand, temporarily succumbs to the sticky pleasures and saccharine charms of Weimar's "decadent" culture, only -- in the end -- to experience a kind of spiritual nausea (one of the film's most telling scenes occurs when he's at a nightclub and is revolted by a kind of minstrel dance performaned by -- horrors! -- black people). As the Nazi movement rises, the various characters gravitate slowly back to each other, and the film's political angle becomes more overt, with each man coming to realize that only National Socialism can restore the German air force (and presumably, Germany) to honor, dignity and power. I won't spoil the ending, but I will say that this is the only fiction-film of which I am aware in which a major Nazi appears playing himself: Hermann Goering, who was friendly with Ritter, shows up at the climax, thus closing POUR LE MERITE on an interesting historical footnote.POUR LE MERITE has quite a bit going for it. Because it's director Karl Ritter was a WW1 combat flier himself, he understood the mentality, mores and cameraderie of a fighting squadron, and the scenes set in 1918 are far and away the best in the movie. He also handles the early phases of collapse and revolution quite well, if a bit heavily. And there is a cleverness of sorts to the depiction of events: the theme of Germany's national humiliation is in many ways personified by humiliating, or spiritually degrading, the characters in various ways: Plank becomes bitter and morose and self-piteous, Fabien nearly succumbs to cultural degeneracy, Mobius must endure the bullying of the Communists and personal tragedy, etc., etc. These gentlemen (and the rest of the cast, including the womenfolk) are clearly meant to embody parts of German society and postwar German mentality. As far as politics go, Communism is embodied by cruelty, while Weimar is viewed as a pit of soul-rotting degeneracy and greed. Nazism is not presented as a political creed but a spiritual cure.The movie's largest sin, and it is fairly large, is that it is so vast in scope that its pace tends to crawl in the second act, and some of it is frankly boring. As if to make up for this, it accelerates too much in the final stanza, glossing over the political "evolution" of its characters by presenting it as a kind of natural progression which was bound to happen and therefore doesn't need much discussion. If you've seen the "political" trilogy of Nazi movies that came out in 1933 (HITLERJUNGE QUEX, SA-MANN BRAND AND HANS WESTMAR), you know that Joseph Goebbels was greatly displeased with them. He favored a much lighter touch with propaganda films and probably did not want to bore audiences with cartoony, ham-fisted National Socialist messages and heroics. Thus, Ritter's script was probably "encouraged" to avoid a lot of political polemicizing. It's understandable, but it doesn't help the movie's flow or the credibility of its conclusion, which is that Germany's bravest -- the men who won the Pour le Merite in battle -- would naturally gravitate toward Hitler and his movement.This is really a three-star film in terms of enjoyment but I gave it four stars because I believe it to be a truly important movie in a historical sense, better acted than many, shot with a high degree of technical competence (a Ritter hallmark), and one which presents a subtler-than-usual case for Nazism. Indeed, its main legacy, in my mind, is how it reveals to us, the modern viewer, how Nazis like Ritter saw themselves, and the flag they marched under.