Die Vier im Jeep (Four in a Jeep)

Die Vier im Jeep (Four in a Jeep)

1950. Switzerland. Directed by Leopold Lindtberg, Elizabeth Montagu. Screenplay by William Harding, Hans Sahl, Richard Schweizer, William Michael Treichlinger. With Ralph Meeker, Viveca Lindfors, Yossi Yadin. Between the liberation in April 1945 and Austria’s independence in 1955, Vienna was a partitioned city: the wartime allies—Soviet Russia, the United States, Great Britain and France—each took control of one sector of Vienna (and of Austria as a whole). While the local population quickly became the subject of Cold War propaganda, the Allies also attempted to create a harmonious picture of their shared duty to rebuild the city and the nation. The most popular embodiment of this was the international patrol: four sergeants, representing each occupying nation, driving around the city in a jeep. With an international cast and directed by Austrian exile Leopold Lindtberg—a major figure in world cinema between the early 1940s and mid-50s, before returning to his first love, the theater—the Swiss-produced film Die Vier im Jeep is a lasting document of this historical juncture: winner of the first Golden Bear in Berlin, it gave a much less depressing and more humanist view of postwar Vienna than The Third Man. (As it happens, Elizabeth Montagu, Jeep’s co-director, guided Graham Greene around Vienna during the fateful visit in 1948 that would lead to The Third Man, for which she also served as an advisor). Cold War tensions pervade this drama about a POW and former concentration-camp inmate on the run from the Russians. What lingers in the mind, however, is the film’s stark portrayal of life in the ragged, multilingual city of lost souls, and a sterling cast headed by Viveca Lindfors; Ralph Meeker in his screen debut (soon to be immortalized as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly); and Paulette Dubost, the legendary maid Lisette in The Rules of the Game, as the romance-starved wife of a French MP. Courtesy Swiss Films and Praesens Film, AG. In German; English subtitles. 95 min.