Nominally a post-WWII thriller in the vein of The Third Man, about a German-American peacenik who hopes to be part of the postwar rebuilding effort (as a sleeping-car conductor, of all things) but who finds himself embroiled with Kafka-esque bureaucrats, Patton-esque militarists, and Third Reichian bitter-enders known as Werewolves. Questions about who these Werewolves are and what they are up to are forever being overridden, however, by questions such as: How come one character is in color and another is in black-and-white in the same shot, or how come the same character switches from color to black-and-white within a single scene? Much use is made of rear-screen projection, superimposition, miniatures, deep focus, and such. Some of this trickery (two stationary actors walking in place in front of a backward-tracking backdrop) recalls the studio techniques of the heyday of Alfred Hitchcock. More of it recalls the latterday "distancing" devices of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg. In other words, it isn't so much marginally amusing as frontally assaulting -- i.e., demanding that you ask yourself whether you might after all be stupid. The hyphenate narrator-hypnotist, by his mode of address, doesn't allay any self-doubts ("You are in Germany. The year is 1945"); and the fact that the voice belongs to Max Von Sydow rather tends to exacerbate them. The more legitimate response to all this might be renewed unhappiness over the self-consciousness and strangeness in which any use of black-and-white nowadays seems doomed to be enveloped. With Jean-Marc Barr, Barbara Sukowa; directed by Lars Von Trier. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd