Phil Jutzi | Berlin-Alexanderplatz / 1931

wobbly man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alfred Döblin, Karlheinz Martin, and Hans Wilhelm (screenplay, based on the fiction by Alfred Döblin), Phil Jutzi (director) Berlin-Alexanderplatz / 1931

 

Given the 90-minute run-time of Phil Jutzi’s 1931 version of Alfred Döblin’s fiction Berlin-Alexanderplatz, the film is quite intelligent in its focus on Franz Biberkopf (Heinrich George) and his re-entry after four years of prison back into Weimer Republic Berlin life. From its first early scenes when Biberkopf finds himself suddenly outside the doors of Tegel Prison almost wishing he might return, and through his dizzying streetcar journey back to his old neighborhood, we recognize that in the Berlin we are shown just what the murderer now faces in the terrifyingly reconstructed world where even the trolley lines are being torn up along with seemingly half the city as it is remade over after the War into the modern Berlin of not only Döblin’s panoramic fiction but that of the writings Joseph Roth, Irmgard Keun, Hans Fallada, and Heinrich Mann as well as the films of Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, G. W. Pabst and so many others who showed us just how it sped into the dead end of Hitler’s Nazi nightmare.

 

    Returning to his favorite bar Franz is greeted as if he never left, and almost immediately takes up with the prostitute Cilly (Maria Bard) who perhaps a bit less mysteriously than in Fassbinder’s later version is immediately attracted to him. Jutzi’s figures are harsher and less attractive than Fassbinder’s characters, and we comprehend that at least Biberkopf, within the world presented to us through the bar-life dominated by Reinhold (Bernhard Minetti) and his gang of robbers, is more loyal and even honest.

      Biberkopf, ever the fool, is determined to make a better life after his murder of his beloved Ida. But the brutally of the street world he quickly encounters makes it nearly impossible to survive, particularly given his sensitive nerves and the taunts of Reinhold’s men sent out to make certain that he does not succeed and accordingly will be forced to join up with them.

      Even Cilly is pressured to pull him into the gang, although she does her best to keep him free of Reinhold and to herself.

     What Jutzi’s film is lacking, however, is the broad range of detail of the original fiction, the multitude of other jobs Biberkopf takes up only to abandon, and the dozens of minor characters, including his landlady, all of which and whom subtly push him into Reinhold’s arms.

      The metaphor I used is intentional because, although this film much like Fassbinder’s seems to erase all evidence of male and female homosexuality in the notoriously sexually liberated hothouse environment of Weimar Berlin, Jutzi’s film nonetheless does make it clear that there is almost a homoerotic attraction between the two unlikely “friends.”

      At this point, Reinhold has not come to terms with his sexuality, and Jutzi’s film doesn’t allow him to follow Reinhold into his later prison life and the arms of his prison lover. But even here we see an evil being recognizing in the mass of flesh that defines Biberkopf as a malleable force which he might reshape into his own image, a sort of sexual servant who if nothing else can take over his women when, as he always does, he tires of them.

  

    Despite the mockery of Biberkopf by his gang members, Reinhold sees something in the heap of German flesh that he recognizes as crucial in his underworld life, not only a kind of “yes” man but a gullible and likeable Berlin bully who might serve as another aspect of his leaner and intellectual self. In a manner that even Fassbinder didn’t quite manage, Jutzi makes it apparent that Biberkopf and Reinhold are mirror opposites of one another, the “other” lurking within each of them that might bring them both into a fuller life.

      That doesn’t mean, of course, that once Biberkopf is bullied, societally driven toward as an outsider, and subliminally catapulted into the evil world Reinhold represents, that the fool will not suffer for the error of his ways. Biberkopf with lose his arm—when Reinhold pushes him from the moving auto when his men believe they are being followed by the police to whom the newcomer has reported them—and will lose the devotion of Chilly—who is convinced her lover is dead as he recuperates in a hospital bed. But strangely that only draws him closer to the satanic figure.

      In the wonderful cabaret scene of Jutzi’s film, Biberkopf, dressed in a new suit and now surrounded by women and champagne thanks to his share of cash through participating in one of Reinhold’s capers, tells his dinner companions to get lost as he makes room for his friend, eagerly leaning into conversation with Reinhold while his girlfriends are forced to hover nearby in anticipation. Nothing much happens in this dramatic “conference” with Reinhold, but Biberkopf’s “opened armed” participation says everything about his devotion to his imagined brother.

      It is only when Reinhold rapes and murders Biberkopf’s new lover, Mieze (Margarete Schlegel) that the absurd idiot turns against Reinhold and finally finds some sort of resolution within the dead society in which he still must survive resolutely selling a roly-poly or wobbly doll toy that no matter what you do, stands its ground just as the “beaver faced” simpleton hopes to be able to. 

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).