Asphalt (no 86)

by Allan Fish

(Germany 1929 94m) DVD2

Is this need?

p  Erich Pommer  d  Joe May  w  Joe May, Hans Zsékely, Rolf E.Vanloo  ph  Günther Rittau  m  Willy Schmidt-Gentner  art  Erich Kettelhut  cos  René Hubert

Gustav Fröhlich (Officer Albert Holk), Betty Amann (Else Kramer), Else Heller (mother), Albert Steinrück (father), Rosa Valetti (Frau an der Theke), Hans Schlettow (Consul), Hans Albers, Artur Duarte, Karl Platen,

Joe May is largely a forgotten figure in critical echelons these days, overlooked in favour of the more accepted Germanic masters of the silent era, Lang, Murnau and Pabst.  Certainly if his later Hollywood output was anything to go by, he deserved consignment to oblivion, but in the 1920s he was a film-maker as important as any other in Germany.  He directed the first version of the two part The Indian Tomb, scripted by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, who would go on to direct a remake/homage in 1958.  He was also a man haunted by his own private life – his daughter, Eva, a rising star of the German cinema, shot herself at just 22 in 1924.  It may explain, to a degree, the doomed, forlorn nature of the protagonists in his films, and the sense of duty.  His other major work, Heimkehr, predated Westfront 1918 as an indictment of the First World War, in this case the return of several soldiers after the armistice.  Duty hangs heavily in the air, and that same feeling pervades every shot of Asphalt, his most famous and best film.

            Out on traffic duty in Berlin, a young policeman, Albert, is called over to a jeweller’s where a young girl, Else, is accused of stealing a valuable diamond.  He takes part in a search of her person and belongings, and just when it seems the authorities cannot find the missing jewel, he finds it on the end of her umbrella.  He takes her into custody and gives her chance to get her things from her apartment, but while there she stops at nothing to seduce him and get him to avert arresting her.  Finally, he succumbs, and they become lovers, but Albert doesn’t realise the full nature of her criminal involvement, which comes to a head in a massive argument which results in murder. 

            There was a time when Asphalt was not so well regarded, Georges Sadoul in particular comparing it unfavourably with the avant garde of the time, but it owed less to the avant garde movement than it did towards both the ‘street film’ genre – exemplified in Karl Grüne’s The Street – and Ruttmann’s Berlin symphony.  Furthermore, in the character of Else, the jewel thief, it can be seen as a crossroads between the treacherous girl of the street in Lang’s spy dramas played by the likes of Lien Deyers, and the sophisticated jewel thieves that permeated the early thirties comedies of Ernst Lubitsch.  On one level, it’s a straightforward commentary on life in Weimar Berlin, on another it’s a morality play – our hero is guilty for not reporting his love, commits murder, dutifully gives himself up and is reprieved.  The street – its importance gathered straight away in the opening montage of workmen hammering the eponymous asphalt into the road – becomes a metaphor for poverty in a world of decadent excess, and for the bustle of modern life itself, with its endless stream of traffic on the roads and pedestrians on the pavements. 

            Gorgeously shot by Günther Rittau, it also benefits strongly from the intoxicating presence of Amann, sexy as hell as the cloche-hatted Else.  She seems, at first, a femme fatale before the term was even coined; her coy look to the camera as she pulls her skirt up to reveal a bit more leg to distract the shop worker from her nefarious intent is one of the great erotic come-ons in twenties cinema, topped by her seduction of Fröhlich’s officer, as near as you’ll come to a woman raping a man in silent cinema as you could wish to see, wrapping her legs around him in the flimsiest of negligees and stroking her feet down his calf.  Who could then see coming the turnaround of the ending, when she gives herself up, realises she actually loves the chump and is marched away to custody while he watches on through the bars of the police station after one of the most iconic final clinches in film history; Amann’s eye glistening with a tear as sparkling as the diamond she set out to steal in the opening reel.