Cleopatra
Monumental film action, Arte, Sunday, 8:15 p.m
Cinema should be bigger than life? Here you go: Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, that alone is already a monumental love story, but after Caesar’s assassination the film becomes a portrait of customs full of intrigues, battles and parades about the new tragic lovers Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor) and Marc Antony (Richard Burton). Just the genesis of this four-hour version, reconstructed in 1996, with changing directors, nine months of shooting, exploding production costs, the Cleopatra until 2009 (avatar) the most expensive work in film history would be worth a (monumental) film. Kitsch, glamour, surface? Anyone who wants to see why directors dream of using fewer computers should not miss scenes involving 10,000 extras.
The Feuerzangenbowle
School Comedy, The First, Saturday, 9:45 p.m
There may be some arguments against this film, 1944, the year of its release, for example, and perhaps also the star, Heinz Rühmann, who was always a favorite of the Nazi regime. A propaganda film, but a work glorifying the regime The Feuerzangenbowle Not. The great comedian Rühmann, smart and charmer, had to enforce this film against Hitler’s ban by the Reich Minister of Education, because the minister saw the school’s authority as endangered. Finally, the quirky drummers have to endure prank after prank. Rühmann plays a successful writer who never went to school and pretends to be a high school student. And he surpasses himself as a teacher parodist, whereby he and the brilliant ensemble are very well suited to the dialogue joke of Heinrich Spoerl’s politically unsuspicious 1933 template.
The man who shot Liberty Valance
Edelwestern, HR, Sunday, 11:35 p.m
John Ford’s reckoning with the myths of the West is a celebration of those myths. The story is told in historical black and white, although color film had long since dominated the screen in 1962, the story of Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), who returns to the tiny, once wild town he came to as a young, idealistic lawyer , armed not with pistols but with books. But even the gentle Stoddard must recognize that even the most peaceful message cannot do without violence. Ford tells it as reserved as it is concentrated, more intimate drama than western stage, with big stars at Stewart’s side: John Wayne as a tough guy who only trusts himself, and Lee Marvin as the unsurpassed mean Liberty Valance.
The Hunger Games
Science Fiction, Pro Sieben, Monday, 12:35 p.m
Suspense-packed action, sci-fi drama in a dictatorial society and youthful performance magic – The Hunger Games make it easy to get drawn into the story of modern deadly gladiatorial combat. The amazing thing: This start of a four-part film series (based on novels by Suzanne Collins) is one of the first films in which a woman clearly outperforms the man at her side in the fight for survival, years before the solo female superheroes. Jennifer Lawrence as archer Katniss and her male counterpart Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are an unusual couple: Strength and weakness are rebalanced in the relationship between woman and man – without cerebral dialogues. It is always a pleasure to be touched anew by this game of the sexes.