The Good German (2006) on Netflix
R20061h 45mDramaMysteryRomanceThrillerWar
Berlin, 1945. War correspondent Jake Geismer covers the Potsdam talks and sees his driver Tully pulled dead from the river. The murder draws him back to his former lover Lena Brandt.
- Netflix2.9/5
- IMDb6.0/1027,095 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes34%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jacob Geismer, an American war correspondent, returns to Berlin in 1945 while the Allied powers negotiate at Potsdam. His driver, Tully, a black-marketeering American soldier, is pulled dead from the river near the conference grounds, with a large sum of reichsmarks on him. Geismer is drawn into that killing and into the search by American and Soviet forces for Emil Brandt, a former SS officer and secretary to Franz Bettmann, the engineer in charge of V-2 rocket production at Mittelbau-Dora. The search returns him to Lena Brandt, Emil's wife, a German Jew he had known before the war.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Good German (2006)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Although the finished film is in black and white, it was shot in color because that allowed faster film stock and the use of green-screen techniques; the color was then reduced in post-production to a grainier black and white so it would blend with the restored archival material.
- The set lighting was entirely incandescent and the audio was recorded on a boom mike instead of modern body mikes or automated dialogue replacement; combined with the limited coverage, these decisions allowed a rough cut to be produced two days after filming wrapped.
SPOILER
Lena, who survived the Holocaust by doing "what she had to" and is later revealed to be secretly complicit in the deportation of her fellow Jews, is based loosely on the real Jewish collaborator Stella Goldschlag.- Franz Bettmann, chief production engineer of the V-2 rocket at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp and only a minor character in the film, appears to be based on the real engineer Arthur Rudolph.
