Because I am a film noir fan, I looked forward to The Good German (2006). Shot in black and white in classic film noir style, Steven Soderbergh’s film is disappointing, and the problem is the script. If I came to you with this pitch, would you go for it?
Pitch: An American reporter returns to Berlin in the summer of 1945 to cover the Potsdam conference, although he never does. His assigned military driver is a sleazy American serviceman making money on the black market and pimping his German woman. The driver soon shows up dead, and the reporter goes after the woman, who used to be his secretary/”stringer” and lover. Unfortunately, the woman is essentially dead, soul-less, her eyes never once flickering with life. Was it because she was raped by a Russian? Apparently not. And why is everyone after her husband who is supposed to be dead but is apparently not? Because he was the personal secretary for a Nazi scientist who made rockets in a brutal concentration camp factory, and the Americans are trying to make the brilliant scientist a fine, upstanding American. As the soul-less woman finally wangles her pass to freedom and walks toward the airplane, she tells the reporter that her crime was turning in a dozen fellow Jews to the Gestapo so that she could survive. The end.
Such a script has major problems. There is no one the viewer can identify with. The reporter is so vague he floats through the movie. We never see him report anything. This is in stark contrast to old film noir-style movies that would have had a bustling newspaper office with noisy typewriters. Worse, he wears a military uniform because the US Army insisted, but instead of acting military, he usually just gets beaten up and told to watch his step. Nor does he have any of the a) righteousness or b) conflicted morality of traditional film noir characters. He wants desperately to find out what is going on with the woman and with her mysterious husband, but she is clearly a burned out wreck not worth the dogged effort. We wonder what is motivating this man. We don’t identify with the broken woman because we never see her any other way—she is just a heartless prostitute looking out for number one—and because we have no idea what happened to her until the last two minutes of the movie. This points to the other major problem besides the characters: the plot. The major plot concerns the woman’s husband and the brilliant scientist, but we hardly see them and have no reason to care. The other plot is the reporter’s attempt to re-establish a connection with his old lover, and this includes finding out what happened to her. But we are given no clues whatsoever that she betrayed fellow Jews until she announces the sordid fact in the last two minutes of the movie.