在桥下

亨德里克和威利是一艘运河驳船的船主和船员。他们在哈维尔河(HavelRiver)上游来游去，到处交女朋友，梦想着“稳定”的生活。一天晚上，他们看到一个年轻的女孩安娜，她显然是要从桥上跳下去。他们都跑去救她，但却“失望”地发现，她只是把一张10马克的钞票扔进河里，希望摆脱自己的糟糕记忆。安娜被说服作为“乘客”和他们一起回到柏林，两个朋友很快就爱上了她。在Willi侮辱性的评论之后，Anna离开了船，两人达成了一个协议:无论谁赢回Anna，都必须放弃对驳船的要求。威利自信满满地踏上陆地，照顾她。然而，他很快意识到她爱上了亨德里克，并诚实地向他的朋友承认了这一点。但对他来说，与亨德里克的友谊比他们的协议更重要，所以三人一起在驳船上开始了新的生活。

Made in the last year of the Third Reich by Helmut Käutner, one of themajor figures of post-War German cinema, UNDER THE BRIDGES decisively shucks off its cardinal historical hallmark and taps into an alternative realm where warfare and defeatism make no trespass in its blueprint. A proletarian love triangle between one woman and two men which predates Truffaut’s JULES AND JIM (1962), but in Käunter’s head space,ménage à trois is a too risqué cop-out, monogamy is still the keynote and one of the two men must be friend-zoned.

The twobachelors areHendrik (Raddatz) and Willy (Knuth), good friends and co-owners of a towed barge, who lament that living and working on the Havel river has taken a heavy toll on their chance of meeting a decent woman and getting married. Even their taste for the opposite sex is quite similar, both dally with a waitress called Vera (Grabley), who cannot choose between them because sometimes she cannot tell them apart, so naming a fatty goose Vera is their petty revenge, and Vera the goose will meet a very sorry ending when the suitors move onto their next target.

One night, they accidentally clock that there is a distressed girl leaning on the bridge's balustrade and it seems that she is going to jump but instead, she drops a 10-mark note into the water. And in the quirks of fate, the young girl Anna (Schroth) takes shelter on their barge while they sail toward Berlin where she lives on her lonesome. Both men take a fancy to her, whereas Anna is too defensive to reciprocate hers, and after learning that she earns her 10 marks from modeling, it casts a shadow on their courtship, and strains the bonhomie between the two men, whereupon Willy abandons their Amsterdam freight delivery and stays in Berlin with Anna, but her heart wants what it wants (a little friction is always the best catalyst of romance), three months later, everyone will find his or hers right place, on the barge of course.

Gauged as a progenitor of poetic realism, UNDER THE BRIDGES is visibly eking out its skimpy sustenance but graced with a beguiling silver allure (although the restoration is far from immaculate) through its embracing of both classic stock-in-trade (soft focus, glamorous close-ups, stark chiaroscuro) and unconventional montage choices (Dutch angles, heady editing, rustling flashback shots etc.), and remarkably,Käunter holds the central story tenably empathetic through its rational building of his three protagonists’ inscape. Hannelore Schroth comports herself as a melancholic damsel-in-distress, but not without touching niceties;Carl Raddatz gives a convincing turn in solidifying Hendrik’s amenable yet skeptical make-up andGustav Knuth zippily runs away with his avuncular innocuousness.

In a word, UNDER THE BRIDGES is a heart-winning romantic imbroglio level-headedly earns its auspicious ending fair and square, a fitting morale booster and divertissement to its frazzled populace of the time.

referential film: François Truffaut’s JULES AND JIM (1962, 8.6/10);Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (1930, 7.2/10).