Schwarzer Kies, a.k.a. Black Gravel (UFA Film Hansa, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, December 14) my husband Charles and I watched a quite fascinating film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: a 1961 West German film called Schwarzer Kies, which means “Black Gravel.” It was nearly two hours long – considerably longer than most of the films he shows from the U.S., which generally run between 70 and 90 minutes – and was directed by Helmut Käutner (1908-1980), who also co-wrote the script with the film’s producer, Walter Ulbrich. The film centers around the U.S. Air Force base in Sohnen in the West German state of Rhineland-Pfalz and the boom it’s engendered in the town’s economy. The town’s initial population has more than doubled and most of the new residents are young women who are selling themselves sexually to the American servicemembers. The number of bars, nightclubs and even seedier establishments in town has swelled to 11, and the decision of the U.S. Air Force to expand the base so it can accommodate not only aircraft but missiles as well has created major opportunities for Germans to graft off their construction and steal various items from the base they then sell on the black market. The film’s protagonist is Robert Neidhardt (Helmut Wildt), who steals loads of black gravel (actually the gravel doesn’t look particularly black and I suspect the title was a pun on the black-market destination Robert intends for the gravel he steals), puts them in the truck he owns and drives them off to a construction firm for resale. Robert runs into his ex-girlfriend, Inge (Ingmar Zeisberg), who’s now the wife of John Gaines (Hans Cossy), one of the American officers at the base. His attempts to win her back, by force if necessary, take up much of the film, though he also has an alternate girlfriend, the prostitute Elli (Anita Höfer). The film starts off with an amazingly brutal scene in which two truckers at the base get angry that a dog is blocking a road they both need. They throw rocks at the dog and eventually kill it – only to arouse the ire of the Americans, one American in particular, who angrily starts a fistfight with the German whose rock actually killed the dog. The work crew buries the dog under a load of black gravel they’re using to build the new section of the base. Alas, it turns out that the dog, “Tug,” belonged to John and Inge Gaines.

Robert attempts to scam them by pretending to have kidnapped the dog and charging them $10 for its return. He gives Inge an address, which turns out to be a house he’s built himself out of available scraps, and unsurprisingly it turns out his real motive in luring her there was to have sex with her whether she wanted to or not. Midway through the movie the dominoes start to fall for Robert as his confederate in the black-market gravel racket, Otto Krähne (Wolfgang Büttner), is arrested just as he was planning to emigrate to Canada with Elli and his ill-gotten gains. Robert and Inge, who’s in the truck with her since he offered to drive her home after his unsuccessful seduction attempt, accidentally run down a young couple, American servicemember Bill Rodgers (Peter Nestler) and his girlfriend Anni Peel (Edeltraut Elsner), whom he’s applied to the base commander for permission to marry but he’s been denied because she’s from East Germany. Ironically, Bill and Anni were killed just after she’d indignantly turned down a chance to have outdoor sex with him because she wanted their first time to be in a more “special” location, and the transistor radio they were listening to during their attempted tryst is still on when Robert and Inge bury the bodies under a load of black gravel. To cover up the murder they hint that the couple are alive and defected to the Communist East. Robert ultimately convinces Inge to have sex with him, her husband John refuses to take her back after she admits it to him, and Robert offers to help her leave town, only at the last minute he insists that she cannot come with him because he wants to flee alone. She grabs hold of the door handle of his truck, then falls off and dies from her injuries, and in the recently restored original ending Robert buries Inge’s corpse under his latest load of smuggled black gravel and lays down beside her, thereby committing suicide.

Schwarzes Kies turned out to be unexpectedly controversial, partly because of the ending and partly because of a scene about two-thirds of the way through the movie in which a local farmer who’s an unrepentant Nazi veteran insists on playing marching music on the jukebox at one of the clubs. The club’s owner insists that he play something else that the Americans will like. The Nazi calls him a “dirty Jew,” and it turns out the owner is not only Jewish but a Holocaust survivor (we can tell from the number tattooed on his forearm). The Central Council of Jews in Germany (one remarkable thing about that is that just 16 years after the end of World War II there were enough Jews left in Germany to have a Central Council) demanded that scene be removed because they thought it catered to residual anti-Semitism in Germany. Though one official on the Central Council read the scene (correctly, in my opinion) as “anti-German” instead of “anti-Jewish,” the scene was deleted. The film’s distributors also insisted that the ending be changed so Richard’s suicide would be deleted and he’d be shown alive and driving off in his truck at the end. Not until 2009 was a print of the original version discovered, and the missing scenes were finally restored by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in 2016. The film also ran into trouble from some young German filmmakers and critics who were trying to run out of the German film industry anyone who’d worked for the Nazis – which Käutner had, since he’d started his film career in 1939, albeit making almost exclusively innocuous comedies without any pro-Nazi political content. Käutner had previously tried for a career in Hollywood, signing with Universal in 1958, but he got only two films, The Restless Years (1958) and A Stranger in My Arms (1959), both vehicles for teen starlet Sandra Dee. After Schwarzes Kies and the unexpected attack on him by younger Germans, Käutner directed mostly TV-movies for the remaining 17 years of his career.

Schwarzes Kies turned out to be a great movie, if also an unrelievedly grim one. Though Käutner and Ulbrich avoided specifically political elements in the script, both Germany’s recent defeat in World War II and the ominous threat of the Cold War hang heavily over this film even though the only depictions of actual war weapons are occasional stock shots of U.S. aircraft flying overhead. Stylistically it doesn’t look particularly noir – it’s closer, quite frankly, to the early films of the French New Wave, with their morally ambiguous protagonists, their relatively clean black-and-white cinematography and their use of actual locations (Schwarzer Kies’s interiors were shot at the Tempelhof Studios in Berlin but the exteriors were made at an actual U.S. Air Force base in southwestern Germany), though ironically enough it was the films from France and Italy that Käutner’s critics thought should be the future direction for German cinema. One of the surprises about Schwarzer Kies is that the production is credited to UFA Film Hansa. UFA was by far the largest German studio in the Weimar Republic era and it essentially continued as an independent company for the first five years of the Nazi regime until Joseph Goebbels personally took it over in 1938, but I’d had no idea it survived as a going concern after the war. Its big studios in Neubabelsberg ended up in East Berlin and weren’t available to Western filmmakers until after East Germany collapsed in 1989 and merged with West Germany a year later, but apparently UFA as a producing studio survived even if it didn’t have access to its original facilities.