Polizeibericht Überfall (1928)

★★★★★ · SUPERB · bearpuf · 2008-07-04

A terrific piece of cinema that tells a story without dialogue visually to pull out the trepidation and anxiety of the would be victim. If you had any inclination to visit the craps table this will clear your mind of such a thought.

★★★★ · A moral play · jonc · 2008-07-07

This film was banned in Germany. The director tries to provoke fear of moral decline in depression-era Germany. He uses a seedy character who happens upon a counterfeit mark. The man is doomed to ruin as other low life want to take advantage of his brief luck. This has some interesting visual work, innovative for its time. In particular, there is a dream sequence near the end that uses effects rarely seen in that era. It's artsy but entertaining as well. I personally held out hope for the man with the counterfeit coin.

★★★★ · Greed ruins people? · Deichbrand_1 · 2009-07-31

Does greed ruin people? Or do the bad have thelast laugh? These and more questions can be asked, as the setting is a quite strange one. One coin can bring ruin to people and whoever touches it, is marked with a stigmata and looses it all in the end. One person is run over by a car, another one robbed and then beaten. The moral message remains unclear; is there such a thing here? It looks to me like a portrait, an impression of a time, but without putting the finger up and pointing towards a better behavior. Only upon reflecting it upon the current moral principles of the society it is…