Film Music of the Quarter

Abstract

AN AMERICAN watching Wonderful Times is likely to get the feeling that he is turning the pages of someone else's family album. He recognizes how closely the album resembles his own, but all the characters seem merely funny to him while those in his own album are not only funny but dear. Or he may feel that he is looking at one of those newfangled azimuthal maps which ridiculously places the U.S.A. somewhere out there beyond the confines of what is after all a minor continent. Wonderful Times was made in the American Zone of West Germany. Following the technique of The March of Time, it assembles clips out of newsreels and old films to tell the story of how, since the century began, wonderful times were regularly promised the German people by their rulers, and just as regularly dissipated by the catastrophes of war or depression. Politics and diplomacy, science and invention, entertainment and the arts, fashions and customs-all are reviewed in shots of the principal actors in the events. A thread of narrative, together with gratuitous bits of analysis and philosophy and preachment, is provided by a character who emerges from a page of a family album, grows old with the film, and ends it, from the vantage point of a rubble heap in postwar Berlin, with solemn reflections induced at once by his memories and by the sight of a group of little children symbolically building the world of tomorrow out of the rubble. The music track, credited to Werner Eisbrenner, is interesting from two points of view, historical and theatrical. Although it would be an exaggeration to call it a history of film music, it does recall many of the musical fashions that accompanied the development of films themselves. The repertoire ranges from the "hur[ 69