Read More @HJ Previews: Visual Review David Bruce, Webmaster

From the vintage Warner Brothers logo at the beginning of the film, it's obvious that The Good German is trying to be retro. With its black and white cinematography, an overbearing mood-directing score heavy on strings, and overacting that falls just short of camp, everything about it seems designed to take us back to films of a previous generation. Director Steven Soderbergh obviously wants this film to be a Humphrey Bogart film.

For those not old enough to know Bogie, he often played a tough guy with a soft spot. As Sam Spade or Philip Marlow or Rick Blaine, though he seemed to care only about the case or himself, in the end he always did the right thing even if it cost him everything. The Good German is a film about doing the right thing.

The story revolves around Jake Geismer (George Clooney), a war correspondent sent to Berlin after the fall of Nazi Germany to cover the divvying up of Germany at the Potsdam Conference. As the AP bureau chief in Berlin before the war, he had many contacts, including Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett) who worked as a stringer for him while they had an affair. When they meet again at Potsdam, she becomes the heart of a murder mystery rocket scientists and Lena's husband (who had been reported killed in the war). The Russians are involved. American intelligence is involved. And Jake tries to do whatever he can to help his former lover (and maybe win her love again.)

The plot twists like The Maltese Falcon. The love story between Jake and Lena has overtones of Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca (including the final scene). Like I said, this film wants to be a Bogie movie. Unfortunately George Clooney isn't Humphrey Bogart. He just doesn't carry the tough/tender dichotomy that Bogie pulled off so well. Cate Blanchett does a good job creating a Marlene Dietrich type character that is the opposite of a Bogart character, her toughness hidden beneath vulnerability.

The film finally comes down to a few people who try to do what is right-- tell the truth, even if it is inconvenient to the powers fighting over the intellectual resources of Germany. In a Bogie movie, doing what is right would have been all that mattered in the end. In this film we wonder if anyone really cares about what is right--or if they all just seek their own right.

It is of interest that all but one of the American characters in the film have German names (e.g., Geismer, Schaeffer, Muller, Teitel). As we wonder who the eponymous good German is, we are not limited to those who have survived the bombings and war, and we are asked to consider those seeking a self-defined right action and whether there is an overarching morality that defines what is right. The film does a good job of highlighting the kinds of moral discussion that need to take place in a world where spin and deception so often control the narrative of the issues our culture needs to face.

Bogie would have known.