Movie: "The Good German"

Cate Blanchett and George Clooney in a scene from The Good German. Credit Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Brothers Pictures

We watched The Good German (George Clooney and Cate Blanchett) the other night. Not bad. It was interesting seeing goody two shoes Spider Man (Toby McGuire) playing a slimeball. The story takes place in Berlin after the Allied victory over Germany, but before Japan was defeated. The Allies are meeting in Potsdam to carve up the spoils. The Russians want Eastern Europe. There are a couple of different groups from the U.S. One wants to prosecute all the Germans as war criminals. A second group is trying to locate all the scientists who worked on Germany's V-2 Rocket. Another group, which may be the same as the second group, or not, I am not sure, wants to locate any scientists who were working on Germany's atom bomb project. Nobody mentions this until the paper has news about the atom bomb being dropped on Japan. Anyway, some of the scientists are suspected war criminals, so we have two Allied groups competing to get ahold of these guys. Camp Dora was where the workers who made the V-2's were held. The V-2's were built in an underground complex. Workers were getting 800 calories a day. This was calculated as the most efficient use of resources. When they died of starvation, they were replaced. Evidently they had plenty of slave labor, but a real shortage of food. Anyway, we have plenty of intrigue with people trying to hide their past, people trying to get to the U.S. sector, avoiding the Russian sector. George gets beat up a lot. The plot is complicated. The movie is pretty good, except for the last scene. The last scene really looks a lot like the last scene from Casablanca, down to the hat. It didn't strike quite the right tone.

Update April 2017. Added the picture. The movie was based on the book of the same name, written Joseph Kanon, who also wrote Leaving Berlin. Potsdam, I now know, is a suburb of Berlin (map).