Asphalt

Joe May's sensual drama of life in the Berlin underworld is in many ways the perfect summation of German filmmaking in the silent era: a dazzling visual style, a psychological approach to its characters, and the ability to take a simple and essentially melodramatic story and turn it into something more complex and inherently cinematic. —Anonymous Else, a beautiful girl enmeshed in the Berlin underworld, gets caught holding stolen jewelry by Albert, a Berlin policeman. He arrests her but she manages to persuade him to follow her to her apartment so she can get some of her possessions, as she is to be evicted the next day. Slowly she begins to see Albert, who is falling in love with her, as a possible way for her to escape the morass of criminality her life has become, but even as she begins to also fall for him, someone from her past shows up, and she finds herself engulfed in a murder. —frankfob2@yahoo.com