I always wanted to do a film festival of my favorite movies.  This is the first of a series of reviews of some of my favorites instead:

Watched once again “The Odessa File” with Jon Voight, a film set in Hamburg in 1963.    It has my favorite film opening, with Hamburg’s evening rush hour, already dark,  the balmy North German city seen from high above, amid heavy opening heroic chords of “Deutschland Uber Alles,” spires standing agains the indigo sky.  Two arteries of traffic can be seen below in the evening, two moving streams of car lights winding through the suburbs converging near the Alster, then diverging again.  You see tall, modern office buildings below, walls of lighted windows, white specks.  Then the camera is down at tire  level, showing the modest cars of the day, the DKWs, Opals, and Volkswagen Beetles, streaming by along with the numerous minibuses and Mercedes Benz taxis.

The camera switches to the action, to the St. Pauli/Rapperbahn district lit with Christmas lights.  Jon Voight (journalist Peter Muller) is behind the wheel of his dark green Mercedes negotiating the holiday shopping traffic, the camera focused on his face through the windshield, the Mercedes ornament on the hood, Voight’s driving gloves clasping  the ivory steering wheel, the reddish leather seats, the bright lights of stores flashing by.  Overhanging Christmas decorations are reflecting off his windshield,  flashing off the glass as he drives, the reflections changing as he moves along.  You see a modern red tram next to him slowing down, with a “winding down” sound, paralleling him next to the street as he slows for a red light.  Perry Como’s “Christmas Dream” is now playing, with a “pom, pom, pom” beat: “watch me now…”  “here I go,”… “all I need’s… a little snow,” … “to help me…”  “dream, my Christmas dream.”   Como’s smooth, light tenor voice is the background.

Voight is stopped at the red light, and the camera pans from his face to the sidewalk:  shoppers and children’ laughter, store windows with red and white plastic Santas inside, steam rising from a wurst stand, and pedestrians buying sausages.  Focus shifts to a carousel, with pipe, whistle, and organ sounds coming from its calliope.  Credits emerge on the screen.  We are seeing pedestrian shoppers scurrying across the street in front of the streetcar and Voight’s Mercedes at the crossing, waiting for the light.  The Germans are wearing scarves and wool hats and overcoats, some leather and some wool, some with fur collars, but not all coats are buttoned up.  They are hurrying before the light changes.  Perry Como’s singing stops, and you hear the calliope, interrupted suddenly by a more Germanic march, and a German boy’s choir singing “Christmas Dream” in German now, all voices in unison, cadence taking over, waiting for the light.

We are brought back to Voight and reality with the metallic “clang, clang” of the streetcar as it takes off.  We once again see Voight’s face as he accelerates and pushes the gear shift upward.  Reflections from the street are again bouncing off the car’s front windshield, letters appearing now, then sliding upward and off the glass as the car moves on.  Strings of  Christmas lights and decorations draped over the street, snowflake cut outs, bounce off the windshield as we once again watch Voight’s driving face.  The youth choir fades, and Como’s voice reemerges, singing his melodic solo again, but now in German, the words the youth choir was just using.  The magical clear photography and lively Christmas music takes me back to 1967 , and my own visits to Hamburg on the weekends.

The music stops, and credits disappear, and the movie starts.  We are now on downtown streets, Voight driving, as an announcement suddenly comes over the car radio, an update on President Kennedy’s condition, that doctors at Parkland Hospital have said that President Kennedy is dead.  Voight pulls over, as do other cars around him, and listens to the news.  He is like all Germans, who loved Kennedy, saddened.   The subsequent dialog between Voight’s character and his fiancee, Sigi, is inspiring, adding to the image of the younger “Good Germans.”  He is a “free lance,”  he tells Sigi with Voight’s soft  German accent, and he is proud of that, and he is open, like a German, about his ambition and his work, and he is idealisitc, and will not work for a larger (Komet) news magazine just for the money.  Sigi is the best German girl since Senta Berger’s Ilsa in “The Quiller Memorandum.”  The story moves on to Muller’s battles against neo-Nazis in the 1960s Germany, still not too distant from the war.  Sometimes  I just watch the beginning over and over.