Episode 773: Black Gravel (1961)

The Projection Booth Podcast

The Projection Booth

Film Reviews, Film Interviews, Film History, Tv & Film

4.8 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Noirvember keeps rolling with Helmut Käutner’s Black Gravel (1961), a scalding portrait of postwar Germany buried under guilt, corruption, and American occupation. Mike is joined by Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan to dig into this bleak anti-Heimatfilm, where gravel trucker Robert Neidhardt (Helmut Wildt) scrapes by on the black market and rekindles an affair with Inge (Ingmar Zeisberg), now married to a U.S. officer. When an accident turns deadly, their secret unearths a moral wasteland of complicity and denial. Once condemned by the Oberhausen critics as “the worst achievement by an established director,” Käutner’s film now stands as a bold, unflinching noir that dared to confront the rot beneath Germany’s economic miracle.

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