Redhead

One of Kautner’s final films before his turn to television is also among his most personal. Ruth Leuwerik stars as Franzizka, a woman who, on the cusp of 40, has grown terribly bored with her husband and their lifestyle; so she flees to Venice, stumbling into an affair with an Englishman. Soon, she discovers that he has a vengeful agenda stemming back to the Third Reich, and she finds her life in a state of upheaval once more. Kautner’s desire to tell postwar Germany bitter truths about itself anticipated the New German Cinema, and he said “[Leuwerik] who for many years was the immaculate lady of German society, the tender loving mother, was here a modern, broken figure, a secretary who lived with two men and fell prey to a third in Venice—that was something which people just didn’t want to see in her.” 35mm print courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek.