Die letzte Geschicht von Schloss Königswald
This afternoon I watched a fantastic German film called "The Last Story of Kingswood Castle." I bought the DVD when I was in Germany in November and decided to break it out today. I really didn't know anything about the movie. I bought it because of the cast - a cast of old (70-80 year old) German movie stars - these were the Lauren Bacalls and Greta Garbos of Germany. The film bills itself as "Peter Schamoni's homage to the big German film stars like Camilla Horn, Marianne Hoppe, Carola Höhn, and Marika Rökk." These four women have all since passed away, as well as Rose Renée Roth, who played Gräfin (Countess) Posadowsky, my favorite character in the movie (seen front in the picture). She passed away less than two years after the release of the film.
The film takes place in May of 1945. Eight old women find themselves in Schloss Königswald waiting for the end of the Second World War. Many of them have been run out of their own homes and have come to the Schloss seeking refuge. The castle is situated between two fronts of the war - with the Americans approaching from one side and the Russians from the other. Which troops will arrive at the Schloss first, and what will become of these women? As it turns out, the German troops arrive first and decided to take over a portion of the castle. As aristocrats, the women are against Hitler, and so they risk their lives and the destruction of the castle and come up with a "verrückten Plan" (crazy plan) to get the German troops to leave.
This is by no means a "Hollywood" film. In fact, besides the fact that it is German, it is far from Hollywood. First, it is unusual to see a film about World War II told from the German perspective. It was fascinating to see how the Germans portrayed not only the Russians and the Americans, but also their own troops. In addition, despite being a star-studded film, the movie doesn't force the "image of the star" on the audience like we see so frequently in American cinema. The camera work is, for the most part, simple. The sound work crude at times. And yet, I found this to be a beautiful and moving film.
I am struck by the thought that, while the stars of this movie were some of Germany's biggest and brightest film stars, I have never heard of a single one of them. This, I think, is a continuing tribute to the fact that Americans, in general, focus all of their attention on Hollywood, and usually ignore cinema from other nations. Whereas most Germans would recognize the names of our biggest stars, the only German star that most Americans would recognize is likely Franka Potente (from Run, Lola, Run).
Schloss Königswald is likely very challenging to find in America. While it is possible to order it from Amazon.de, Amazon.com doesn't even list it as existing. eBay has no copies of the film for sale, though there are some trading cards from the film for sale, but they ship from Germany. While I would recommend this film to anyone, unfortunately, my copy will be useless to most people. It is in German (with a little snippets of English, Russian and Czech) and the only subtitles available are German (which, I admit, I turned on in case I missed any of the spoken words). However, for all of those German speakers out there who want to see a pretty amazing film, check this one out.