Sky Without Stars

Helmut Kautner's Sky Without Stars, a story about despair in the divided Germanies, won the first prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Somewhat surprisingly, it is a flat-footed film with plodding photography and drab symbolism; the plot line (roughly Romeo and Juliet) has been reworked often enough; at least a fifth of the script might have been cut; furthermore, the propaganda element is badly disguised, and modern audiences tend to balk at any propaganda as a sign of poor taste. Despite these faults, Sky Without Stars succeeds absolutely; it has a shockingly desperate story to tell and three good actors with which to tell it.

The East-West border dispute, of course, is what rips apart the lives of the several characters who would otherwise be a happy family. Anna (Eva Kotthaus) an earthy heroine who wears her soul in her face, works in a Communist factory and looks after her war-ravaged grandparents. She has an illegitimate son by a dead war hero. Her son lives with his prosperous grandparents in the Western zone. Anna kidnaps the little boy from his grandparents, but she loses him in transport; when a Western policeman (Eric Schuman) risks his job to return the child, the two fall hopelessly in a love without hope. Horst Buchholz, as a young Russian soldier, makes a tragically ineffective attempt to help the lovers. The moral, hammered in to the sound of guns and fighting police dogs, is clear. Germany must be reunited.

"She looks terrible," says a West Berliner of Anna. "Typically East." This one comic, ironic touch may do more to unnerve the audience's conscience than the final close-up of two dead hands which almost meet. But perhaps the Berliners have been through enough to take their "frontier between you and your child" dialogue straight.

Something about the exhausted faces and the poverty and the ugliness may send most viewers home to stare at their walls for an hour or two. "I feel empty and cold," Anna says after she has made love in an abandoned railroad station. "So long as the border continues there is no hope for us."