The Good German

[tzarinna]

http://www.us.imdb.com/title/tt0452624/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_German

Directed by
Steven Soderbergh

Genre: Drama / Mystery / Romance / Thriller /

Plot Outline:
An American journalist (Clooney) arrives in Berlin just after the end of World War Two. He becomes involved in a murder mystery surrounding a dead GI who washes up at a lakeside mansion during the Potsdam negotiations between the Allied powers. Soon his investigation connects with his search for his married pre-war German lover (Blanchett).


Credited cast:

Cate Blanchett .... Lena Brandt

Beau Bridges .... Colonel Muller

George Clooney .... Jake Geismar

Tobey Maguire .... Tully

The Good German by Joseph Kanon

With World War II finally coming to an ending, Jake Geismar, former Berlin correspondent for CBS, has managed to wangle one of the coveted slots for the Potsdam Conference. His assignment: a series of articles on the American occupation of postwar Berlin. His personal agenda: to find Lena, the German mistress he left behind at the outbreak of the war. When he stumbles onto a murder -- an American soldier has washed up on a lakeshore on the conference grounds -- he thinks he has found the key that will unlock his Berlin story. What he finds instead is a larger story of corruption and intrigue reaching deep into the heart of the occupation and a city not only physically but morally devastated, where children scavenge for food in the rubble, sex can be had for a cigarette, and the black market is the only means of survival.

Berlin at zero hour is like nowhere else -- a tragedy, and a feverish party after the end the world. And nothing is simple-not the murder of a soldier and not any of the lives, American and German, that Jake encounters as he tries solve it. More unsolvable still is the larger crime that hangs over everything in 1945, a crime so huge it seems beyond punishment.

At once a murder mystery, a love story, and a riveting portrait of a unique time and place, The Good German is a historical thriller of first rank.

 

[tzarinna]

I just got back from seeing at an AFI screening.
Review later.
Morg can you merge this with green's thread?