Der Rest ist Schweigen

Slowly, the emigrants (far from all, but still quite a few) returned. Although that's technically the wrong word: returned – for the country they now came to didn't exist when they were forced (or felt the political necessity, compulsion, need) to leave. Many things indeed changed since, but quite a few remained the same from the Weimar Republic through the "Third Reich" and the post-war wasteland of total occupation to the relative independence of the Bonn Republic – one of those being the economic empires of the Ruhr region where most of the nation's heavy industries could then be found. Those dynasties of money and merit (the industrialist way) are the world in which Helmut Käutner set his modernised and quite noir'ish Hamlet, with Hardy Krüger as the scion who here returns to the family estate after years abroad, in exile. Few and far apart are the Shakespeare-modernisations that equal this in intelligence – incl. some radical changes that forcefully speak of the era's particular problems and needs. Never before and never again looked the iron foundries and collieries of the Ruhr region more majestic, impervious almost – in all that stunningly beautiful. Der Rest ist Schweigen, just like Monpti, had been vilely overlooked in its own days, probably because the critical establishment didn't know how to deal with the very unique brand of FRG-Modernism masters like Käutner, Staudte or Rolf Thiele started to develop – too home-grown for comfort, one is tempted to quip... (OM) (Midnight Sun Film Festival)