What starts out with moderate explanations of the troubled world behind that curtain soon is revealed to the viewer through the eyes of the refugee Eva Bartok, an American stewardess from East Berlin who is forced back to her home when her plane is forced to land and she is removed from the flight. Even though her pilot boyfriend Richard Greene refuses to leave without her, he is told that she left of her free will, and he knows instantly that he's being lied to. Bartok is reunited with ailing mother (a touching Lucie Mannheim) who longs to see her daughter get away from the suppression of the communists.
An intense dark post war thriller (set in the increasing cold war, one seemingly impossible to fight against) is slowly paced but that adds to the intensity. It's really depressing when Bartok arrives at her large family home only to find out that it's been taken over by the government who has installed a nasty landlady on the property who spies on everyone. Her mother has been relegated to the top floor of the building, and is constantly checked on by the sinister Maurice Goring who is searching for her brother, an enemy of the state. It took me a while to get into this, but after a while I found myself enjoying it. Not the best of films about East Berlin, but an acceptable view of a dark time in post-Hitler Germany.
An intense dark post war thriller (set in the increasing cold war, one seemingly impossible to fight against) is slowly paced but that adds to the intensity. It's really depressing when Bartok arrives at her large family home only to find out that it's been taken over by the government who has installed a nasty landlady on the property who spies on everyone. Her mother has been relegated to the top floor of the building, and is constantly checked on by the sinister Maurice Goring who is searching for her brother, an enemy of the state. It took me a while to get into this, but after a while I found myself enjoying it. Not the best of films about East Berlin, but an acceptable view of a dark time in post-Hitler Germany.