Heinz Bennent Movies

Karin (Miriam Spoerri) is the 30-year-old wife of Robert (Herbert Fleishmann), a middle-aged engineer and workaholic. When Karin feels lonely and neglected, she takes comfort in an extra-marital affair with her bachelor friend Ulrich (Heinz Bennett). Director Christian Rischert uses a realistic, straightforward style that does not glamorize infidelity. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Based on a very successful play of the same name by Tankred Dorst, this film tells a story about Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (here played by O.E. Hasse), a Nobel prizewinner for literature who was notorious for having collaborated with the Nazi regime. After the war, rather than hand him over for prosecution, he was sent to a retirement home. A young man, bitter about the war, tracks him down and begins to harass him in various ways. The author handles everything that comes to him with remarkable dignity, which eventually removes some of the taint from his actions. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum marks the directorial debut for actress Margarethe von Trotta, who co-directed the film with her then-husband Volker Schlöndorff. At a costume party, Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler) meets Ludwig Goetten (Jürgen Prochnow ) and spends the night with him. The next morning, he's gone and the police bust into her apartment looking for him with the belief that he is a dangerous terrorist. She is taken into police custody and interrogated by Kommissar Beizmenne (Mario Adorf), who questions her about her every action. Meanwhile, sleazy reporter Werner Toetges (Dieter Laser) makes her story into a scandal in the papers by writing sensational stories about her personal life and portraying her as a criminal in photos. He exaggerates the testimonies of her ex-husband, neighbors, and even her elderly mother who is dying of cancer in an intensive care hospital. With the fear-induced public thinking she is a Communist and terrorist sympathizer, Katharina receives hate mail and personal threats until she is finally driven over the edge. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide

This tragic drama is adapted from a popular Ibsen play about the relationship between a mother, her egomaniacal husband, and their daughter. The father never approves of anything the daughter does. Desperate to win his love, she gives up her own life so a wild duck may fly free. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Chafing under her suppressive parents, Nea begins keeping a secret diary, recording her innermost erotic yearnings. When imagination proves inadequate, she decides to experience first-hand the things she's previously only fantasized about. Nea eases into her sexual adventures out of boredom rather than supposed necessity. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

The West German The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (Das Zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages) stars Tina Engel in the title role. Unable to pay the rent on the day care center that she operates, Christa steals the money from a bank, then tries to cover up her crime by passing the money off as a church donation. When the priest will have none of this, Christa and her accomplice, Werner (Marius Muller-Westerhagen), go into hiding. Werner is killed in a police ambush, whereupon Christa moves to Lisbon in a vain effort to start her life anew. Broke and dispirited, Christa returns to Germany, where she is promptly arrested, but that is far from the end of her story. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

What if General George S. Patton didn't die in a car accident, as history tells us, but at the hands of a paid assassin? That's the premise of Brass Target, another in a series of espionage thrillers, like The Eagle Has Landed, that speculates on the fates of real-life figures from World War II. Robert Vaughn, Ed Bishop, and Edward Herrmann are three Allied officers in occupied Germany who steal Nazi gold with the help of OSS officer Patrick McGoohan. Patton (George Kennedy) personally supervises the investigation of the theft, assisted by Major Joe DeLuca (John Cassavetes). Soon, however, a professional assassin (Max Von Sydow) is on their trail, Patton is killed on the orders of his own staff, and only DeLuca and his lover (Sophia Loren), who is also involved with the assassin, are left alive for the finale. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

In Volker Schlöndorff's award-winning adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass' allegorical novel, David Bennent plays Oskar, the young son of a German rural family, circa 1925. On his third birthday, Oskar receives a shiny new tin drum. At this point, rather than mature into one of the miserable specimens of grown-up humanity that he sees around him, he vows never to get any older or any bigger. Whenever the world around him becomes too much to bear, the boy begins to hammer on his drum; should anyone try to take the toy away from him, he emits an ear-piercing scream that literally shatters glass. As Germany goes to hell during the 1930s and '40s, the never-aging Oskar continues savagely beating his drum, serving as the angry conscience of a world gone mad. The intense and visceral Tin Drum was one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s and won the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the 1979 Golden Palm (which it shared with Apocalypse Now). In the late '90s, the film became the center of a censorship controversy when some U.S. videotapes were confiscated because of the film's supposed violation of a child pornography statute. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Noted political filmmaker Costa-Gavras turned his attention to personal issues in this drama. Michel (Yves Montand) has had to deal with the death of his wife, while Lydia (Romy Schneider) is mourning the loss of her daughter. Both Michel and Lydia are lonely, and they are attempting to start a relationship together, but neither has been able to purge themselves of their sorrows, which makes it difficult for them to live in the moment. Clair de Femme was based on a novel by Romain Gary. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The Last Metro is set virtually in its entirety in a crumbling French theatre. During the Nazi occupation, Jewish director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent) hides in the basement of the theatre, while his wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve) stars in its latest production. Marion is enamored of leading man Bernard Granger (Gerard Depardieu), and he with her, but they resist temptation out of respect to her husband. When she is given a choice between loyalty to her husband and to her countrymen, her dilemma offers two logical solutions--both of which are acted out on stage during the play. This Pirandellian ending aside, The Last Metro is one of the few films to accurately capture the feeling of what it was like to live in Paris under the thumb of the Nazis. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Usually misattributed to the horror genre, this challenging and highly unusual drama stars Isabelle Adjani as a young woman who forsakes her husband (Sam Neill) and her lover (Heinz Bennent) for a bizarre, tentacled creature that she keeps in a run-down Berlin apartment. In the beginning, her husband knows nothing about the monster and sincerely believes that his wife is insane. He has her tailed by private detectives, whom she kills and feeds to the creature. Still unaware of what has happened, the husband contends with the reserved and inadvertently seductive presence of his wife's look-alike (also played by Adjani), a schoolteacher who frequently comes to tutor his son while his wife is away. Though tempted by her quiet goodness and beauty, he is still passionately in love with his wife and even after he finds out about the murders, he stays by her side and helps her conceal her crimes. Filmed amidst the oppressive backdrop of the Berlin Wall by the expatriate Polish director Andrzej Zulawski (who was unable to work in his homeland after too many clashes with the authorities), the picture is so relentlessly intense and so deliberately esoteric, that most viewers would find it too hard to connect with. Still its symbolism, its unbridled and flashy directorial style, and the tour de force performance by Isabelle Adjani earned this unique tale a cult following in Europe. The version originally released in the U.S. had 45 minutes chopped out; in this form, it is barely comprehensible and looks like a cheap, gory feast. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide