Black Gravel

How do you like your film noir? To misquote the Supersister song, I prefer my noir like I like my gravel, hot, hard and black. Helmut Käutner’s 1961 drama is stark stuff, a black-market economy drama in which lives are trampled in the name of progress. Germany is depicted undergoing post-war reconstruction, outlined by several opening screens busy with captions which explain how a tiny village next to a US air-force base might end up with a huge population, and consequent corruption, prostitution and all kinds of illegal business activity. It was the frank depiction of surviving anti-Semitism that made Black Gravel controversial at the time, and both cut and uncut version are included in this new Radiance release, part of the Volume 2 servings of their eye-opening World Noir collection……