***May Contain Spoilers***
I have been hunting down this movie for 35 years. I could not get out of my mind the image of Paul Douglas' confrontation with a German from his past. It and the followup remain uniquely powerful and among several surprises that reward the patient viewer of what may for its first half-hour seem a mediocre effort by the writer/director of Miracle On 34th Street (1947, -73, and -94).
As I began watching Big Lift in 2002, it was no more than a whitewash of the Germans who had become the enemy of our Cold War enemy. Paul Douglas' character did seem like a clumsily portrayed boor. By the end of the movie, I recognized a complexly structured, though-provoking screenplay, and favored Douglas' performance far over Clift's.
I often mentally program double features. The mate for The Big Lift is The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), the former filmed among ruined Berlin, the latter in postwar Vienna. Both use the settings effectively to start the viewer thinking about the artifices associated with civilization and the depths to which we ourselves would probably sink to meet our material desires. Each movie has an engaging American (Monty Clift, Jos. Cotten) whose naivete gets him in over his head in the Old World. Both movies bear repeated watching for the subtlety of the thematic content and their shifting perceptions of good and evil.
I have been hunting down this movie for 35 years. I could not get out of my mind the image of Paul Douglas' confrontation with a German from his past. It and the followup remain uniquely powerful and among several surprises that reward the patient viewer of what may for its first half-hour seem a mediocre effort by the writer/director of Miracle On 34th Street (1947, -73, and -94).
As I began watching Big Lift in 2002, it was no more than a whitewash of the Germans who had become the enemy of our Cold War enemy. Paul Douglas' character did seem like a clumsily portrayed boor. By the end of the movie, I recognized a complexly structured, though-provoking screenplay, and favored Douglas' performance far over Clift's.
I often mentally program double features. The mate for The Big Lift is The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), the former filmed among ruined Berlin, the latter in postwar Vienna. Both use the settings effectively to start the viewer thinking about the artifices associated with civilization and the depths to which we ourselves would probably sink to meet our material desires. Each movie has an engaging American (Monty Clift, Jos. Cotten) whose naivete gets him in over his head in the Old World. Both movies bear repeated watching for the subtlety of the thematic content and their shifting perceptions of good and evil.