Black Gravel

The underrecognized Kautner’s best-known film is this rugged, paranoiac noir set in the West German village of Sohnen around the site of an American airbase in progress. A trucker, who illegally sells black gravel as a side hustle, unceremoniously reunites with a former lover who has moved to Sohnen with her new, American husband, only for them to accidentally off a younger couple. Naturally, a cover-up ensues. Kautner’s portrayal of the ongoing presence of anti-Semitism, even after Germany’s denazification, strangely landed it in hot water with the Central Council of Jews in Germany and led to a scene being cut; this new digital restoration, which premiered earlier this year at the Berlinale, returns the censored scene to this seminal yet too-little-seen work of postwar cinema.