QuickTime video clips from the film
On May 14th we went to
see another movie - Das Boot. It was the new Director's
Cut and it added 65 minutes to an already two-and-a-half-hour
long movie. The sound was completely reedited. None of us had
seen the original version (released in 1981) so we didn't know
what to expect.
We were pleasantly surprised. We were
never bored by the length of the film. The events sometimes
flowed slowly, but there was enough action and suspense to keep
the film entertaining. The film put a different perspective on
life as a Nazi in World War II. Never in the movie did you feel
that these guys were the bad guys, even when they were attacking
the Allied ships. Infact, the filmmaking was so powerful, you
wished death on the Allied ships.
Three hours of the movie were set in the
submarine - 100 feet long, 10 feet wide. When eating dinner, the
crew members had to ask "permission to pass" and the
officers sitting in the aisle had to stand up to let the other
pass by. One of the many things we left this movie with was the
desire to never step onto a submarine.
We don't know what the sound was like in
the previous version, but it played a huge roll here. The leaking
water and shooting bullets echoed all over the theater. You could
hear the approaching destroyer's propeller and the explosion of
each depth charge shook the room. The sub's silent runs were
dramatically juxtaposed with the racket of the storm above the
sea to great effect.
We enjoyed the film thoroughly. Towards
the end we didn't even notice that the film was in German. We
were living the movie and shocked with the unexpected ending.
Everyone who likes submarines, is not claustrophobic, and is
willing to spend 3 and a half hours inside during the summer,
should go see this worthwhile film.
- Matejko
Riding a flood tide of rereleases, the newly packaged
version of
'Das Boot' offers a diverting alternative to the hits of the
moment.
By Owen Gleiberman
A few months ago, when Star Wars became a smash hit the second time around, the only "surprise" was the number of Hollywood executives who claimed to be surprised. Audiences, eager to reexperience the collective high of the first mall-era blockbuster, seemed almost destined to turn out in droves. Yet could another movie duplicate Star Wars' redux success? As the current rerelease of The Godfather has proved, even the greatest movies don't necessarily stir up a mass hunger to be seen again. They don't compel us to come back because, in the age of video, they never really went away. My hunch is that only two more films will prove exceptions.
When Saturday Night Fever is rereleased this fall (as is tentatively scheduled), it's likely to provoke a wave of nostalgic ecstasy--for the young John Travolta and for the spangly hedonism of disco, a music that, in all likelihood, was mocked by many of the people who'll now look back at the Bee Gees and the Hustle with a fondness they couldn't have then imagined. And in the era of The X-Files and the Heaven's Gate cultists, the timing could hardly be more right for a 20th-anniversary rerelease of Steven Spielberg's eerie extraterrestrial bliss-out Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's seriously doubtful, though, that audiences would line up for many of the other popular landmarks of the last two decades. Jaws? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Rocky? Grease? Raiders of the Lost Ark? Top Gun? They're all too familiar, too there. There's no mystery to their magic--nothing, indeed, that needs to be rediscovered.
Still, that hardly means the trend is fading. Increasingly, smaller movies are being spiffed up, repackaged, and remarketed on a national level--movies that have no chance of becoming d&eactuejávu blockbusters but are simply ripe to be seen again. Movies like Das Boot (Columbia, R), the 1981 German submarine thriller that's opening this month in a "restored" three-and-a-half-hour director's cut. In effect, rereleases like these convert your local theater--or, at least, one screen of it--into a makeshift repertory house. And that, to me, seems a trend worth celebrating. With all the plastic product around, an evening spent at a film that has, for one reason or another, stood the test of time can prove a nutritiously entertaining event, a reminder of why we all started going to the movies in the first place.
Anyone who ever saw Das Boot probably hasn't forgotten the scene in which the title vessel, a Nazi U-boat crammed with sausages, gizmos, and German soldiers, as packed and oppressive as a rat's nest, sinks deeper and deeper into the gray-soup ocean as it evades the echoey beep of an enemy warship's sonic detector. As the sub descends, 10 ominous meters at a time, the water pressure builds to an unbearable degree. Bolts pop out of the welding like bullets; the entire ship seems to be imploding. A few of the men start to vibrate with tension, and so, in its way, does the film. Thrillers set aboard submarines are usually sleek technological affairs, with the sub itself portrayed as an invincible sci-fi womb. Set in 1941, Das Boot, the great anti-high-tech submarine movie, might be described as the world's first "inaction" thriller. Sweaty and claustrophobic, exciting and horrifying at the same time, it never lets us forget we're riding aboard a giant, primitive tin can, a hunk of industrial machinery that mingles the illusion of omnipotence with the reality of a floating prison cell.
Writer-director Wolfgang Petersen, who went on to make such Hollywood thrillers as In the Line of Fire and Outbreak, has expanded Das Boot from 145 to 210 minutes by adding some acrid mess-hall exchanges featuring Jürgen Prochnow's taciturn, heroic captain, and by stretching out a number of the slow-build attack sequences to greater existential density. The new Das Boot feels rawer, gloomier, more pungently authentic than it did before. Mostly, though, it feels longer. Bracing as it is to see this film on the big screen again, there's little reason why a movie set almost entirely aboard a German submarine need be quite this protracted. Prochnow, wary and ravaged, as crafty in his intelligence as Tommy Lee Jones, creates just about the only character worth rooting for. The younger soldiers are a mangy frat-house crew; their lack of heroism is meant to be the revisionist point, but it's a point that may mean more to modern German audiences than it does to us. Still, seen in its full, indulgent form, Das Boot remains a quintessential movie experience, with a rivetingly squalid, you-are-there realism unmatched by that of any other war film.
From Germans in Tinseltown by Ross Johnson.
The entertainment industry, as the cliché goes, is a business of relationships, and relations are about people -- who, after all, are only human. Which is to say that some prejudice does linger. Consider the experience of the German film director Wolfgang Petersen. He vividly remembers his first night in Los Angeles. It was a fall evening in 1981, and the Fine Arts theater in Beverly Hills was jammed for the American premiere of his award-winning movie Das Boot. The film, about a German WWII submarine crew, had smashed box-office records in West Germany, but now it was about to be shown for the first time in a community that had a sizable Jewish population.
Das Boot opened with an on-screen crawl that read "Of the 40,000 U-boat men in WWII, 30,000 never returned." At this, the Beverly Hills audience burst into applause. For Petersen, who had worshipped American films since he first saw John Ford's The Searchers as a 15-year-old in Hamburg, the cynical clapping confirmed his worst fear. "I had finally made it to Hollywood," says Petersen, "but because I was German, I was not welcome."
Fortunately, art -- at least, on a good night -- knows no boundary, and when Petersen's film about the cruelty of war ended two and a half hours later, the audience rose in a standing ovation. In the years that followed, Das Boot would become one of the highest-grossing foreign-language films in the history of American cinema. Petersen himself moved to Santa Monica and teamed up with producer Gail Katz on such box-office hits as In the Line of Fire and Outbreak.
The Sony Pictures page for Das Boot.
The International Movie Data Base entry for Das
Boot.
That's right, we found a Herbert Groenemeyer fan page!
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