Burkhardt Driest Movies

Carl Hamilton is in one sense a peculiar sort of secret agent in that he has a license to kill but applies his conscience to that license far more often than is comfortable for him. In another sense, since he is Swedish, it makes sense that this would be so. In this story, one of a series of successful films based on this character from the novels of Jan Guillou, he has been given the task of infiltrating a group of terrorists operating out of Hamburg, who reportedly intend to attack the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm. After falling in love with one beautiful terrorist, he attempts to get her to change her ways by the force of moral persuasion rather than arms. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

More of an underground experiment than an above-ground, straightforward drama, this stylized film is about Teutonic decadence landing in and spreading around the cocaine capital of the world, Colombia. Some of the German ex-patriots delineated here have all the warmth of a Siberian winter, while some -- such as a gay-blade babbler surrounded by beautiful people of his own gender -- have all the depth of a fruit tart, and some are just fruity tarts. As these types go on and on about sex, government, justice and the lack of it, audiences might end up as alienated as the characters in the narrative. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Director Wolf-Eckart Bühler follows up his earlier, lengthy interview with Sterling Hayden in this three-part chronicle of the traumas in the actor's life. Based on Hayden's autobiography Wanderer, Bühler has three different actors deliver segments of the book in a detached way -- focusing on the problems created by sudden national media attention, the nature of intense pressure from high-ranking authorities, and the gradual formation of a betrayal of both ethics and friends. (Hayden was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 and named Hollywood colleagues as fellow leftists -- much to his lifelong regret). The literary readings, even when interesting in their own right, do not lend themselves to dramatic cinema, limiting this film to viewers with an avid interest in politics. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

A sailor learns to take, and give, it like a man in this surrealistic adaptation of writer and thief Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest by avant-garde German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In a colorful brothel in the port of Brest, proprietor Nono (Gunther Kaufmann) is known for wagering with his customers. Win a throw of the dice, and they get to make love with his wife, Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau); lose, and they must take it from behind by Nono himself. One day, Lysiane reads the tarot for her lover, Robert (Hanno Poschl), and learns in the cards of his intense passion for his brother, Querelle (Brad Davis). Querelle himself soon arrives, and the brothers enact a bizarre greeting halfway between a hug and a wrestling match. Querelle, it seems, is looking for partners in a drug deal; Robert points him in the right direction. An argument about the merits of sex between men soon leads Querelle to murder his fellow smuggler, Vic (Dieter Schidor). Back at the whorehouse, Querelle loses on purpose to Nono and finds he has a taste for passive gay sex. Meanwhile, fellow sailor Gil, who looks exactly like Querelle's brother (and is played by the same actor), murders one of his compatriots after the brute publicly impugns his manhood. Wanted by the police for both his own crime and Querelle's, Gil goes on the lam. Querelle soon crashes his hideout, and an intense bond develops between the two murderers -- a friendship that will lead Querelle to the greatest love, and the greatest treachery, of his life. Director Fassbinder was in the process of editing Querelle when he died of a drug overdose in June 1982. Gunther Kaufmann, who plays Nono, was Fassbinder's ex-lover; the film is dedicated to another former lover, El Hedi Ben Salem, the news of whose suicide had just reached the director. Critically derided even by many of Fassbinder's admirers, Querelle earned a Golden Raspberry award for Worst "Original" Song for "Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves," an Oscar Wilde poem set to music by Peer Raben and sung repeatedly by Jeanne Moreau. Moreau had previously starred in Mademoiselle, a Tony Richardson effort co-scripted by Genet. Look for Frank Ripploh, another pioneering German director, in a cameo. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Told through the eyes of children, this wartime film tells the story of anti-Nazi resistance actions within Germany in the Ruhr valley during the Second World War. Some of the resistance fighters were children. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

A quote from Bertolt Brecht ends this bitter and angry war film by Sam Peckinpah: "Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again." Peckinpah's intense and belligerently non-commercial work, (based on the book by Willi Heinrich), is a World War II tale told from the German perspective, following a platoon of German soldiers in the Russia of 1943, when the German Wehrmacht forces had been decimated and the Germans were retreating along the Russian front. James Coburn is Steiner, a German corporal and recipient of the Iron Cross who feels that he owes his loyalty to his family and fellow soldiers and not to Hitler and the German war machine. But when a new commander, Captain Stransky (Maximillian Schell), takes over the platoon, Steiner and Stransky come into immediate conflict. Stransky is a career soldier, the complete opposite of Steiner, and a man who pledges himself heart and soul to Hitler and the war. But he envies Steiner for having been awarded an Iron Cross and deeply desires one himself. The problem is Stransky is a complete coward and recognizes that the only way he can be awarded an Iron Cross would be to get the bitter Steiner on his side. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

In this prison drama, Franz Blum (Jurgen Prochnow) goes from being a fairly ordinary middle-class man to a hardened convict. Sent to prison for participating in a bank robbery, he learns how to use blackmail and graft in order to survive the harsh life he encounters "inside." The screenplay was written by ex-prisoner Burkhard Driest (who plays a prison bully in the movie), and is based on his own experiences. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide