We just got finished praising a picture by the ace filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, but have little choice but to be honest with this 2006 homage to postwar intrigue movies set in divided European cities. It stars George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire, and we’re sad to report that it’s a real catastrophe. Expect brief, sympathetic coverage, accompanied by ‘what happened?’ questions. Is what’s wrong as obvious as it looks, or does everybody love this picture?

The Good German
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Warner Home Video
2006 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 108 min. / Street Date April 29, 2025 / Available from 29.99
Starring: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Beau Bridges, Tony Curran, Leland Orser, Jack Thompson, Robin Weigert, Ravil Isyanov, Christian Oliver, Dave Power, Don Pugsley.
Cinematography: Peter Andrews
Production Designer: Philip Messina
Art Director: Doug Meerdink
Costume Design: Louise Frogley
Film Editor: Mary Ann Bernard
Composer: Thomas Newman
Screenplay Written by Paul Attanasiao, from the novel by Joseph Kanon
Produced by Ben Cosgrove, Gregory Jacobs
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

It isn’t often that we watch a promising movie cold, and have this kind of reaction. The cast is interesting, and we usually like George Clooney; the director is a favorite. The subject matter always interests us, too. The immediate postwar period, before the Iron Curtain fell and the Cold War took over, now seems like a turning point in history where things went wrong. The messy victory left some of the worst enemies rewarded instead of punished, and America lost some of its moral footing. These postwar movies often feel like negative versions of  Casablanca. Several take place in the divided cities of Berlin and Vienna, and all have a soured romantic viewpoint.

The Good German promises to be an entertaining thriller with sex and violence. It’s set during the Potsdam Conference in July and August of 1945, several months after the V-E day surrender and just before Hiroshima and Nagasaki finished the War in the Pacific. An American journalist arrives with a double agenda, to cover the conference but also to look up an old flame.

This will be a short review. Steven Soderbergh made and continues to make consistently superior pictures, alternating between  popular crowd-pleasers and engaging filmic experiments. When handled an important topic like the threat of  a worldwide pandemic, his film became a modern classic. This causes us to wonder about Soderbergh projects that seem like bad ideas from the get-go, like his remake of Tarkovsky’s  Solaris, with George Clooney. The Good German is even more problematic. Very little in it seems to work at all, so much so that we can’t fathom what happened. Where was Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant filmmaking judgment?

Journalist Jake Geismer (George Clooney) arrives in Berlin on the same plane as Congressman Breimer (Jack Thompson), to cover the Potsdam conference between Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. As he may be traveling in different sectors of the divided city, he’s been issued a Captain’s uniform. Jake has been assigned a driver, Corporal Patrick Tully (Tobey Maguire), who turns out to be a real problem. Deeply involved in Black Market corruption, Tully is dealing stolen army goods with a Russian officer, General Sikorsky (Ravil Isyanov). He also has a cruel relationship going with Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett), a nightclub entertainer who supports herself with prostitution, along with her roommate Hannelore (Robin Weigert).

Lena is the center of several mysteries. She’s a Jewish survivor in Berlin, so is presumed to have had serious protection from a Nazi. Both the Russians and the U.S. Military chief Colonel Muller (Beau Bridges) want to find her husband Emil, who Lena keeps insisting is dead. And Lena turns out to be Jake’s old girlfriend, transformed by the harsh necessity of survival during the Russian occupation.

Jake can’t attend the conference because Tully has stolen his wallet and is using his I.D. to move freely between sectors. Jake is frustrated by Lena’s cold welcome, and revelations of Tully’s cynical sadism; the Corporal offers to ‘rent’ Lena to Jake. Jake suffers beatings by thugs convinced that he knows where Emil Brant is hiding. He goes to an officer friend for help, only to find himself in the middle of a killing: an American Corporal is found dead in Potsdam. Both powers want it swept under the rug, and for Jake to hand over Lena.

It sounds complicated, and it is. By the midpoint Jake Geismer has been sapped more times than Philip Marlowe, with whom he shares a talent for getting roughed up. The hard-bitten Lena and the venal Tully aren’t very mysterious at all; we soon realize that Jake has used the Potsdam confab as an excuse to track down his old flame. Jake never gets a handle on what’s really happening. He’s convinced that the fact that his driver just happens to be Lena’s lover/pimp must be some kind of a setup. But it appears to be just one of several coincidences. Naturally, none of the various shifty characters we meet in and out of uniform are completely honest about their activities.

Character inconsistencies prevent us from believing in these people. Tully abuses Lena, but apparently also loves her and takes big risks to get the cash necessary to spirit her out of the country. Lena is presented as a burned-out dame who has had to abandon all of her previous scruples. Yet she’s still tormented by her moral crimes. Make up your mind, Lena. Are you damaged goods and redeemable, or have you completely lost your soul?  Neither possibility feels like an original idea.

We keep waiting for the Other Shoe’ to drop, letting us know what terrible war crime Lena and/or Emil were involved with. When the revelation finally comes, it’s a big letdown. Could Lena have survived because she betrayed other Jews?   We’re shocked, shocked I say, to find that there’s gambling going on here. With what we know about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, we’re ready to forgive terrible behavior by almost any victim.

Forty years ago, it was noted that an entire generation of film student directors made movies based not on direct human experience, but on fantasies encoded in other movies… the great Spielberg/Lucas accusation. The Good German seems assembled from a Cliff’s Notes list of ‘things we thought were cool’ from classic postwar occupation cinema. There are the bombed-out cityscapes, of course. If this is just July of ’45, Berlin looks much more cleaned up than it ought to be. It must have taken a year to clear out millions of tons of bricks and masonry from the streets.

Most details reprise situations from notable occupation thrillers. I’ll spare the reader a show-off list, but for one example, we see a person making cigarettes by re-rolling bits of tobacco found in discarded butts. That’s directly from Jacques Tourneur’s  Berlin Express. Tobey Maguire’s Tully is a nasty version of John Lund’s Army captain in Billy Wilder’s  A Foreign Affair, hiding and shielding an undocumented woman with unsavory Nazi connections. Various thugs and bartenders aid or obstruct Jake’s pursuit, just like the experience of Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins in Carol Reed’s  The Third Man.

We wait in vain for the original twists that will steer The Good German into something memorable. Soderbergh’s writers instead provide a wrap-up that copies the finale of Casablanca, and adds the fatalism of  Chinatown. The ending isn’t just like those movies, it Xeroxes them, right down to the camerawork and Cate Blanchett’s hat and purse. Her costume is just like that of Ingrid Bergman, except dark instead of light. She’s a ba-a-d woman, remember.

We were honestly shocked to think that Steven Soderbergh thought this story a worthy film subject. The original novel may be insightful and original, but what we see on film seems researched no further than a DVD shelf.

Equally perplexing is Soderbergh’s general visual approach. He’s made plenty of movies with experimental techniques, and even when they don’t work, the experiment seems like a good idea. The Good German is formatted in Academy ratio, which allows easy cutting with newsreel and feature stockshot outtakes from the period. That’s an okay choice, because the matching between film of the real Potsdam meeting and Soderbergh’s footage filmed on Hollywood sets is excellent. Matte paintings and (maybe) clever digital composites blend old footage with new. Only an expert (not me) could say for certain what’s new and what’s old.

The style choices are less understandable. Sometimes the film seems to be trying to emulate the look of a postwar picture. Some of those old movies made extensive use of rear-projection to put actors in Germany who never left Hollywood. Good German begins with some digital composite driving scenes that seem especially artificial. From that point on we suspect that everything we’re watching is a fake CGI composite.

Soderbergh’s camera angles and visual direction may be too stylized. In between broad-daylight shots of jeeps tootling through the ruins come endless baroque interiors. Military offices have been set up in former grand halls; these contrast with spoiled grand staircases in crumbling apartment buildings, some with holes in the walls. Lena also leads Jake on chases through crumbling ruins and catacombs – attractively art-directed sub-basements where a fugitive could hide.

Is Soderbergh attempting to emulate an authentic 1947 style?  Not really. Scenes use standard back and forth closeup coverage, and even hand-held shots when Jake gets beaten up. What’s missing are the can’t-be-improved-on vintage mastershots we remember being so powerful … not just the exotica of  The Third Man, but the epic-documentary realism of  Decision Before Dawn or the excellent 2nd-unit tours of Berlin in  A Foreign Affair. The characters of Good German seem marooned in dusty movie sets.

Killing the notion of adopting a 1947 style is the profanity — Corporal Tully’s every third word is f___. We get non-explicit sex scenes to reinforce the idea that the Russians have already raped every female in Berlin, and that the Yanks are now getting the same same service on a paying basis. The vivid historical drama of occupied Berlin can be best appreciated in the down-to-earth, location-filmed features by George Seaton ( The Big Lift) and Fred Zinnemann ( The Search). The Zinnemann film is a humanist classic, a must see.

How to describe what seems not to be working?  The show feels consistently over-art directed, as if Soderbergh’s designers asked, ‘What would Orson Welles do?’  To his credit, Soderbergh doesn’t tilt the camera like Robert Krasker. But we’re soon suspicious when selected shots of Cate Blanchett doll her up as ornately as Marlene Dietrich in a glamour movie, costume, hair style and make up. Then they apply dramatic noir lighting.

We wanted to give the movie a chance and didn’t view it in some foul state of mind — but so much of what we saw struck us as a problem. Tobey Maguire may have welcomed the opportunity to play a nasty creep. His Corporal Tully is so transparently vile, we can’t understand how anybody would put up with him for a second. George Clooney is decent, but nothing Jake Geismer does is a surprise, and he seemed a fool to put up with Lena’s posing. Jake spends most of the movie being dissed as a patsy, just like his namesake Jake Gittes in  Chinatown. We really expect somebody to tell the clueless reporter, “Forget it Jake, it’s Potsdam.”

Warner Home Video’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Good German is one of those movies that slipped by us when new, and we always wondered if we’d missed something special. The 4K encoding is exemplary; just make sure your monitor is adjusted for a ‘film look’ and non-Sports frame rate, so it doesn’t come off looking like a bad video. The B&W image is technically excellent, even with the insistent noir lighting effects.

We’re told that this is the first videodisc release for The Good German, 19 years after it reportedly flopped at the box office. We’re big fans of many George Clooney pictures, but this one didn’t appeal at all. We can note that Thomas Newman’s music score is a big plus, emotionally appropriate and consistent.

The use of a standard aspect ratio also never feels quite right, at least not on today’s wide-screen monitors. A widescreen scan would ruin many compositions, but the trailer for the picture is presented wide-screen — and somehow seems more natural. Did it really show in theaters at 1:37?  How many U.S. multiplexes can still do that, and not reduce the screen image to a postage stamp?

The only extra is that original trailer, formatted in standard widescreen.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Good German
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Fair
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplement: Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: April 4, 2025
(7321good)

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