Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Nackt unter Wölfen" or "Naked Among Wolves" is an East German black-and-white film from 1963, so already over 50 years old. The director is Frank Beyer and he is considered the GDR's most talented filmmaker by many. The fact that he also made the Oscar-nominated "Jacob the Liar" certainly helps this theory. But back to this one here. Beyer also worked on the script, together with Bruno Apitz, the man who wrote the original novel. The title here is a reference to a child who gets found by inmates of a concentration camp and they need to decide what to do with the Jewish boy. Risk their own lives by trying to protect him or hand him to their captors and maybe get a reward? This is the major plot of the film, even if their decision becomes obvious really quickly, which certainly took out a lot of tension from the film and may have kept it from becoming a better work and more thrilling watch.The novel has been adapted 3 times so far and this was the second shot at the material I believe. The 3rd one was extremely recent, a television movie from last year and both approaches did not convince me unfortunately. The struggles were of a different kind, but neither filmmaker managed to make this a compelling watch. In this old version here, every time the action moves away from the child story, it becomes fairly boring and uninteresting and sadly it does on many occasions. Another problem here is that many of the characters seem interchangeable. The cast includes a couple names who may be known to fans of old (East) German cinema, but I personally would not call myself like that and that is probably why the only one I am familiar with here is the fairly young Armin Mueller-Stahl, almost half a century before his Academy Award nomination. All in all, I thought this movie here had too many lengths and too little interesting content, especially for a film that ends just seconds before the 2-hour mark. Thumbs down and I do not recommend the watch.