REVIEW: MARTINA - EIN MÄDCHEN OHNE HALT / MARTINA - AN ANCHORLESS GIRL (1949) The impressive start to Vice-Crime after WWII
An essential part of the German Krimi films had always been the parallel existing "Sittenfilm." A truly German-Scandinavian movie genre, depicting of - well - loose girls who were certainly doomed and would destroy everyone that would be close to them. Certainly, prostitution is their profession, and so the boundaries between drama, educational moral tales, and Krimi are very blurry. Without these films, movies like DIE TOTEN AUGEN VON LONDON, DER MÖNCH MIT DER PEITSCHE, or DAS PHANTOM VON SOHO would not exist. The endless cycle of bars, brothels, and correction homes, even prison, that these girls would go through would later develop into the lurid fantasies of Jess Franco - and there is a definite connection between the Sittenfilm and movies like the sensationalist 99 WOMEN. In comes this totally forgotten oddity from 1949. One of the few movies, produced under the Berlin Blockade, when the Soviet Union skipped all supply chains to Berlin and American airplanes were...
