Owned version: The 2019 Blu-ray release by Mill Creek Entertainment in partnership with Kit Parker Films, as included in the Noir Archive 9-Film Collection, Vol. 1: 1944-1954 set.
Acquired: From Amazon on May 3rd, 2019.
Seen before?: Never even heard of before this - a true blind-buy.
"Looks like a storm's coming."
I had no clue what this was about when I put it on, but it didn't take long to figure out. Ten minutes into the film, art dealer Martin Schulz has returned to his native Germany and is unpacking his belongings. His four cherubic blonde children cavort in the gated front yard, and we see them framed through the bars as a mysterious black-clad man man with a dog glares at them. As he stands, dark clouds begins to gather behind him; noticing this, the Schulz family invites him in.
As metaphors go, it's a pretty blatant one. But there are times for subtlety and times for immediacy, and Address Unknown is nothing if not a ferocious and immediate work crafted especially for and in response to tumultuous times, a bombastic work that confirms the above metaphor not five minutes later when Martin's partner asks in a letter, "Who is this Adolph Hitler who seems to be rising to power in Europe?" Martin's partner, left behind to run their studio in San Francisco, is named Max Eisenstein. The rising action in the film is Martin's indoctrination into Nazism, given a government post and comfort in exchange for his complicity (edging on approval) regarding the Jewish people - even those he once counted as friends, colleagues and family. His letters to Max become more curt, more official and couched in language parroted from the words spoken by his higher-ups and social betters (represented in the person of the Baron von Friesche, the man at his gate at the outset). Max is assured by Martin's son Heinrich, who has stayed in the US to help Max, that Martin is merely writing in a fashion that will appease the German censors, but soon, communication dries up entirely. This rising action, this gradual overwhelming corruption of an ordinary citizen, culminates in an act of violence, and Martin's refusal to offer a gesture of benevolence to prevent even this ends up being his downfall.
It's strange on its surface to see this included in a noir anthology - the plot certainly doesn't play out like a typical noir story, especially its second half, which more or less boils down to a series of aggressions manifested as telegrams. Formally, though, there's no way it could be associated with anything but - Menzies goes heavy on the looming shadows and light/dark dichotomy that plays into a strong majority of noir entries. Even in the earliest scenes, when things are still light and cheerful, he still lights a scene in the Schulz's bedroom so that the shadows of the iron grating outside are cast within, marking the homestead as a prison even before it's a proper home.
The second half of the film pays this off - as Martin begins to receive a sudden influx of letters from Max, all containing inscrutable instructions about the buying and selling of paintings clearly intended as some manner of code (the first missive in this series contains the line "YOU AND I WILL UNDERSTAND"), the home begins to feel as ominous as the country containing it. The barred gate becomes more prominent, a metal edifice meaning to keep in as well as out, and the mere presence of the postman becomes an existential threat; witness in particular the sequence of shots that stars with a wide shot of an empty room in which Martin hovers nervously in the background, then cuts to a shot of him foregrounded while the postman can be seen arriving in the background through a large picture window, a strong wind blowing the leaves in the courtyard away as though they were Martin's capricious good fortune. Isolated from the action, at the whims of forces above and beyond him, caught between a code he can't break and a governmental machine that assumes he can... he's a spectre in his own life, framed and shot like he already doesn't matter. The black-and-white checkered tile that serves as his flooring implies a chess match in which he is but a pawn, which is a clever touch; that the climax sees him locked out of his own home is another. This is sharp stuff.
He never did matter, of course - he was never more than a functionary. His actions only mattered inasmuch as they were extensions of the desires of the State, a State that demonizes a section of the populace to the point where it demands censoring of the Sermon on the Mount. (Again, a clever move - conflating an attack on Judaism with an attack on Christianity.) This attempt inspires an exasperated cry of, "Can that little man do this?" and while the immediate target is the censor, the larger import is evident: can these little men, these tyrannical and terrified little men, do this? And the answer: only if other little, terrified men do nothing to stop it. A bloody handprint on the doorframe of Martin's home signifies his irreversible transition into one of these little men - but where blood on the door was a sign of salvation for the Israelites, here it presages the sickness of Nazi Germany suddenly refusing to pass over Martin's house as a punishment for that whom he did not protect. The final, last-minute twist of the knife is a jaw-dropper of an affirmation: You never know who your inaction is going to hurt - or what response that will inspire.
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