Berlin - Alexanderplatz
Director: Phil Jutzi
Year Released: 1931
Rating: 2.0
Early version of the famous novel by Alfred Döblin (with screenwriting assistance by Döblin himself) is an ineffectual affair - while the feeling at the end of Fassbinder's magnificently nuanced version is one of awe, this barely stirs any personal emotion. It goes to show that sometimes great novels - right now I'm thinking of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead - fail on-screen because the 'lived in' feeling and deep association with the characters that take time to develop is lost in the formulaic, 90-minute Hollywood versions, where everything has to move at a brisk pace and those pesky "ambiguous parts" are left on the page. It isn't fair to director Jutzi to compare this film to Fassbinder's masterpiece, but when you've already dined on filet mignon you don't want to go back to hardtack and water.
