Watch Asphalt For Free

I'll tell you why so serious

Don't Believe the Hype

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Its hard to like 'Asphalt' simply because the lead characters are so unlikeable. A policeman who is too weak to stand by his moral compass falls for a seductive jewel thief. The film consists of his attempts to refrain from her seductions, feeling low after his failures, then going back only to fail again. It is fine for half an hour or so (the first half hour is the best), but becomes tedious and quickly loses momentum. It doesn't help that these femme-fatale stories were so overdone already.The most winning aspect of this film is the technical achievements. After a shaky Vertov-esque beginning, it quickly becomes sleek and controlled, very modern. The noir cinematography is typically excellent for the German silents of the time. Despite these virtues however, it is not a story that moves you in any way, except to strong dislike of the characters.

"Asphalt" is a German 90-minute silent movie in black-and-white. This was made in 1929 and at that time, it was already the final years for silent films as sound movies took over a little later. And this film here was unfortunately also no great farewell to the old days. This film brings really nothing new to the table. It is the old femme-fatale story that was so popular during the days of silent film and her male equivalent is a police officer this time, which obviously result in quite a few issues in terms of breaking the law or not. Lead actress Betty Amann sure looks the part and it may have been her performance here that let her work with Hitchcock not much later. Yet, that part was nowhere near as big as her role here, so this stays her career-defining performance. She looks a lot like Louise Brooks by the way and I wonder why femme-fatales were basically always dark-haired in film during that era.The writer and director here is Joe May, very simple name, but he is not really known today anymore and this one here may also be his most famous work. Sadly, I do think that it was his script that was the reason why I did not find this a particularly great watch. The actors were okay. The film also could have needed more intertitles, but that's true for 95% of the old films from the silent era. So overall, not a failure, but also not a particularly good watch and I found little to none memorable moments in this movie. I cannot recommend. Sorry, I have to give it a thumbs down.

I wasn't familiar with the work of director Joe May - apart from THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS (1940) and the Silent epic THE Indian TOMB (1921), a film I was disappointed by and which I always considered more of a Fritz Lang film anyway - although I had always been intrigued by this one and, now, thanks to Eureka and "Masters Of Cinema", I've managed to catch up with it.From watching ASPHALT - followed, in short order, by SPIONE (1928) and TARTUFFE (1925) - I've reacquainted myself with the peerless craftsmanship of German cinema during the 1920s; indeed, May's film is technically quite irreproachable - particularly his depiction of city-life by night, but also the opening montage (echoing contemporaneous Russian cinema) which forms part of the title sequence. Apart from this, the film's slight but compelling plot later became a staple of the noir genre where a naïve man is embroiled in the sordid life of a femme fatale with tragic consequences (the most obvious example, ironically enough, being perhaps Fritz Lang's superlative THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW [1944]).In this regard, the film benefits greatly from the perfect casting of the two roles but especially the captivating Betty Amann, who effortlessly exudes sexuality throughout: distracting the elderly owner of the jewel shop with her considerable charms, while casually concealing one of the precious rocks in the tip of her umbrella; seducing the young, inexperienced traffic cop by excusing herself from his presence but, when he follows her into the bedroom, finds she has slipped under the sheets and is waiting for him; when he tries to leave, she literally leaps on him and, by wrapping herself around his waist, making it practically impossible for him not to give in to her. Also notable is a brief pickpocketing scene at the beginning featuring Hans Albers; the rather violent fight between the boy and the girl's elderly associate/lover, when the latter comes back to her apartment and catches them in flagrante, in which the furniture (conveniently held by visible wires) gets literally thrown around the room; the concluding act, then, marked by a number of twists (which lead to a sort of happy ending more akin to Bresson's spiritually-infused PICKPOCKET [1959] than the hard-boiled noirs it inspired), is enormously satisfying.

Joe May's "Asphalt" is not as well remembered as the other masterpieces of German silent expressionist cinema, possibly due to the lack of immortals in the cast and its decidedly commercial scenario. But it certainly deserves a mention alongside the great works of Lang, Pabst, Murnau, et al. The cop-seduced-by-the-sexy-crook plot is the prototype for many a great (and not-so-great) film noir to come, and the seduction scene certainly packs a punch. Like most films of the time, it eventually descends into melodrama, but Gunther Rittau's remarkably mobile and probing camera is so skillful in revealing the characters' thoughts and lending pathos to their plight that he and the director transcend the clichés in the manner of Stahl and Ophuls, with some Langian irony peeking through at times. The opening profile of the city is a justly famed visual tour-de-force, but the stark, expressionist compositions that highlight the climax are just as striking and iconic. May never made the big time in Hollywood, but spun a few good programmers for the B picture mill.