Aaron Igay I've been watching the proto-noirs of this era and this is the first film which I would say fits smack dab in the subjective category of pure noir. A grimy city, stark photography, a femme fatale, an unapologetic somber ending, and even a wrongly-accused man. At the close of the silent era, this UFA production with all the big names in the German film industry made what Hollywood was doing look amateurish. I loved the scenes early on showing the traffic in Berlin, Opel 4/16s trying to compete with double-decker buses and our hapless hero the traffic cop stuck in the middle of the chaos. I could have done with a little more help from the inter-titles, many utterances went unwritten. But then again, words just get in the way anyway.

zetes It's a good film all around, but it's most notable for finding yet another remarkable silent beauty queen, Betty Amann, who could perhaps have been a huge star if the era had continued. With her jet-black bob-cut, she'll remind many of Louise Brooks, but, aside from a similar hairdo, she's not much like Brooks. The story concerns a cop (Metropolis' Gustav Froehlich) who picks up Amann for stealing a diamond from a jewelry store. She tries to seduce him so he'll let her go, but he's so morally upright she basically has to jump on top of him to get what she wants. Froehlich walks away from the situation bewildered, but also kind of in love with her. She, too, develops feelings for the poor little innocent, but odds are against them. Especially when her gangster boyfriend shows back up. I wouldn't quite group this among the silent masterpieces, but it's a fine film. And Amann really is wonderful (she would go on to co-star in Hitchcock's The Rich and the Strange, and she also pops up in Nancy Drew... Reporter). I think it might be a bit better known if not for the lousy title. "Asphalt" only really refers to Froehlich's job as a traffic cop, but I don't see what else it has to do with the film.

Franz Asphalt (1929) begins stylishly with a city montage sequence and plenty of Germanic-styled subjective point of view shots before giving way to a more subdued, intimate Kammerspiel style. A Clara Bow/Louise Brooks look-a-like (Betty Amann) is shopping for jewelry. The storeowner, entranced by her salacious behavior, does not notice when a handful of diamonds fall to the floor. The woman uses the hollowed out bottom of her umbrella to steal one of the diamonds. She is eventually caught, but pleads poverty, which convinces the shopkeeper not to press charges. However, the arresting officer, played by Gustav Fröhlich, plays by the books and insists on bringing her to the police station. The woman asks if they can go by her apartment for her papers. Once in her apartment the seduction begins full throttle. The entrance into her sexual den is given special treatment with a slow, circular panning shot from the officer's point of view. His resistance is admirable, but not impenetrable. She tries everything, including lying in wait in her bed. When all seems to fail and the officer is about to leave she hops out of the bed and literally jumps into his arms, melting his final resolve with passionate stares and heavy breathing. The theme is a common one in German expressionism: the fall/degeneration of the moral upstanding male at the hands of a woman (Pandora's Box, Blue Angel) or social forces (The Last Laugh, The Last Command, American but Germanic in feel). But May handles it subtly and with an erotic-sexual undertone one finds most strikingly in German cinema of the late twenties (Blue Angel, Pandora's Box, Metropolis, Variety, etc.). The film also reflects social critic Siegfried Kracauer's point on pre-Hitler German cinema about the presence of the weak male figure. The young officer's moral and ethical resolve is broken down by the woman's sexual advances, to the point where he accidentally murders the woman's gangster lover in a fist fight after he returns home to unexpectedly find him there (the murder is shot through a mirror reflection). However, when the policeman returns home and tells his parents, the father, also a policeman, does not hesitate to don his police uniform and arrest his son. In the end, the police officer is exonerated by the woman's guilt of complicity. She is arrested, and the final image sees her walking away along a corridor filmed through a prison-like door. As an historical aside, in an underground scene where city workers lay out asphalt, we see a sinewy camera movement along the ground that foreshadows the similar documentary-like camera movements in Pabst's Kammeradscahft (1931).

MARIO GAUCI I wasn't familiar with the work of director Joe May - apart from THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS (1940) and the Silent epic THE Indian TOMB (1921), a film I was disappointed by and which I always considered more of a Fritz Lang film anyway - although I had always been intrigued by this one and, now, thanks to Eureka and "Masters Of Cinema", I've managed to catch up with it.From watching ASPHALT - followed, in short order, by SPIONE (1928) and TARTUFFE (1925) - I've reacquainted myself with the peerless craftsmanship of German cinema during the 1920s; indeed, May's film is technically quite irreproachable - particularly his depiction of city-life by night, but also the opening montage (echoing contemporaneous Russian cinema) which forms part of the title sequence. Apart from this, the film's slight but compelling plot later became a staple of the noir genre where a naïve man is embroiled in the sordid life of a femme fatale with tragic consequences (the most obvious example, ironically enough, being perhaps Fritz Lang's superlative THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW [1944]).In this regard, the film benefits greatly from the perfect casting of the two roles but especially the captivating Betty Amann, who effortlessly exudes sexuality throughout: distracting the elderly owner of the jewel shop with her considerable charms, while casually concealing one of the precious rocks in the tip of her umbrella; seducing the young, inexperienced traffic cop by excusing herself from his presence but, when he follows her into the bedroom, finds she has slipped under the sheets and is waiting for him; when he tries to leave, she literally leaps on him and, by wrapping herself around his waist, making it practically impossible for him not to give in to her. Also notable is a brief pickpocketing scene at the beginning featuring Hans Albers; the rather violent fight between the boy and the girl's elderly associate/lover, when the latter comes back to her apartment and catches them in flagrante, in which the furniture (conveniently held by visible wires) gets literally thrown around the room; the concluding act, then, marked by a number of twists (which lead to a sort of happy ending more akin to Bresson's spiritually-infused PICKPOCKET [1959] than the hard-boiled noirs it inspired), is enormously satisfying.