'Spotlight' on German director

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In "Film in the Third Reich," his critical survey first published in 1969, historian David Stewart Hull singled out Helmut Kautner (1908-1980) as the best German director to have emerged during Adolf Hitler's regime, when the movie industry was subject to policy directives and systematic interference from Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda.

In Mr. Hull's estimation, Mr. Kautner's output -- he completed nine features between 1939 and 1945 -- resembled "some slightly unwholesome flower blooming in a field of hot-house weeds."

This belated admiration -- no Kautner films were shown in the United States during World War II -- also was shadowed by the realization that whatever merit attached to the filmmaker's ability to deflect propaganda commissions and sustain a precarious artistic independence within the Nazi system was no longer of interest to a younger generation.

Although Mr. Kautner remained active in German theater and television in his 60s, he was being tailored for oblivion. "It would be hard to find a personality currently less fashionable," Mr. Hull wrote, explaining that Mr. Kautner had become "the particular bete noire of the young Marxist intellectuals who control contemporary German film criticism."

It's possible that this faction resented Mr. Kautner's international esteem during the 1950s more than his balancing act in Germany during World War II. Anyway, a reassessment -- even a fragmentary one -- is overdue.

In my adolescence, I became familiar with Helmut Kautner as the director of such prizewinning and importable movies as "The Last Bridge," with Maria Schell, and "The Devil's General," with Curt Jurgens. Both dealt with the war years, as it happens, and both will receive rare 50th-anniversary revivals at the Goethe-Institut next month as part of a tribute called "Spotlight on Helmut Kautner." Limited to a handful of titles, the series recalls some of the director's credits from the 1940s this month, then showcases better-known titles from the 1950s in August.

Born in Dusseldorf and educated (in literature, theater, art history, philosophy and psychology) at Munich University, Mr. Kautner was known professionally first as an actor.

In the early 1930s, he helped found a popular cabaret troupe called the Four Night Riders, banned by the Nazis in 1935. He seems to have advanced methodically from acting to screenwriting before making his feature-directing debut with a romantic comedy in 1939.

His first major success was a durably haunting and perverse tear-jerker of 1943, "Romance in a Minor Key," a postmortem account of infidelity set in Paris in the late 19th century.

Shown a week ago to inaugurate the series, "Romance" is one of the Kautner movies available from specialty video outlets, although usually in transfers from duplicate prints that have faded or darkened appreciably.