Kameradschaft (1931)
A year after directing the enlightening World War I drama Westfront 1918 (1930), Georg Wilhelm Pabst directed this foreign language (with subtitles) drama about "comradeship" between French and German miners who work the same coal mine on opposite sites of the border. Like director John Ford's subsequent Oscar winner, How Green Was My Valley (1941), the film gives one a very real sense of (the family) life in a mining town and the dangerous (and claustrophobic) nature of the work. Based on a real incident some twenty-five years earlier, Pabst and his writers Peter Martin Lampel, Karl Otten & Ladislaus Vajda begin their story by illustrating the tensions between the citizens of two mining communities, one in France and one in Germany. Unemployed Germans are refused work in the French-side Tribault mine and some others find that they're really not welcome to mingle (e.g. with the women) in France's social settings. Prejudice and mistrust between the neighboring countries are still fresh more than 10 years after the Great War had ended. But an un-extinguishable fire burning in the core of the Tribault mine, which requires that a new wall be built to contain its heat regularly, eventually finds gas and causes a large scale disaster cave-in that traps or kills more than six hundred French miners. The special effects are terrific, especially for the time.
Upon hearing of the tragedy, one of the German rescue team members named Wittkopp (Ernst Busch) convinces his fellow countrymen that "a miner is a miner", and an entire team of Germans gear up and travel by the truckload to "the other side" to help, hoping to save their "comrades". A near tragic border incident is narrowly avoided before the German teams are welcomed by their grateful French peers, with a symbolic handshake. Even some of the previously shunned Germans - like the French speaking, mustached Kasper (Alexander Granach) - join the effort, by tunneling through a barred border (erected in 1918) two thousand feet below ground; they end up having to be rescued in the railcar room along with an old retired French miner (Alex Bernard) who'd gone down by himself to save his grandson Georges (Pierre-Louis). Another subplot involves Françoise (Andrée Ducret), who'd refused to get too involved with a miner named Emile (Georges Charlia), her brother Jean Leclerc’s (Daniel Mendaille) best friend, for fear that he'd suffer the same fate - being killed in the mine - that her father had. She'd even left by train to "escape" to Paris before seeing that the mine was on fire and returning, on foot and by automobile, to join the gloomy vigil.
The film premiered on TCM in November, 2005.
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