Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Loui Blair It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

jpb58 This late German silent film, Asphalt, was incredibly fun! It's an amazing treasure and treat for the eyes (and ears: it boasts a marvelous jazz score on the DVD that is perfect for the film!). No spoken dialogue needed in Asphalt to communicate sensuality, and in fact dialogue would ruin the intensity of this incredible film. An added plus is seeing Berlin in 1929, with all its decadence before National Socialist Hitler moved in and spoiled things in 1933. Starring the adorable, funny, and sensual Betty Amann, and the handsome Gustav Fröhlich from Metropolis, Asphalt tells the story of a puritan traffic cop (Gustav) who is tempted to sin with a jewel thief (Betty). His devoted parents trust him entirely and maybe that's part of his problem: he's been pampered and treated like a pet more than a son, obviously cushioned from much unpleasantry in life. In fact the father of the cop has his own pet, a little canary in a cage, and the mother of the cop has her son for her pet! In the art of silent film the director can emphasize small things like these and keep the audience's interest perked through symbolism. In sound films there rarely seems to be time devoted to this kind of creativity. My favorite scene is the long one where the cop has arrested the jewel thief and she cries and cries and cries (with the music making moaning sounds that are hilarious) and she tries to win his sympathy. She tries every trick in her book to keep from being taken to the police station. She begs him to take her to her apartment so she can get her papers. Exasperated with her, he does so. Once there the poor cop doesn't stand a chance. The climax of that scene really stunned me. I could swear Betty Amann said the F word, though of course I could be wrong because the film is German. ;) There's a somewhat predictable ending but it's how the director, Joe May, spins it all together, with artful, passionate camera-work, that keeps you on the edge of your seat.The two leads give incredible performances, especially Betty Amann. She had even more fire and intelligence in her portrayal of the jewel thief than any performance I've seen given by Clara Bow or Louise Brooks. Her career should have been better. The only other film I've seen her in is an early Hitchcock sound film Rich and Strange (1931). Gustav Fröhlich also shows a more tender side here than in Metropolis. A marvelous late German silent that must be seen to be believed. If you haven't watched it yet you are REALLY missing out! Don't get turned off by the unromantic title. Get it today!

netwallah Produced by Murnau, and brilliantly directed by May, this silent drama is a masterpiece of cinematography. From the opening montages, with workmen tamping down hot asphalt and the steamrollers behind them and the rain-wet streets shining in the street lights, to the traffic slanting across the street while the young policeman directs traffic, to the change in the lighting at his home after he feels he has fallen—he stands in shadow while down the hall in a halo of light his mother is busy in the kitchen, as if he were observing another world—to the expressionist shadows on the staircases toward the end—it's magnificently conceived and photographed. The lighting effects are astonishing. The story is not profound, involving an upright young traffic policeman falling under the spell of a diamond-thieving courtesan (Bette Amman), and when they are surprised in her bedroom by her regular lover, an older diplomat, who hurls the woman to the ground, the young man defends her, and himself, with the result that the man dies. He goes home and tells his parents he has killed a man, and the father, also a policeman, stands up, puts on his dress helmet, and they go downtown. But the woman intervenes, calmly incriminating herself to save the young man. She is taken away to prison, but the young man says he will wait for her, and she looks at him with eyes brimming with tears, and a smile. Amman has impossibly big dark eyes and a helmet of bobbed, curly hair. Her cloche hats give her head a sculptural look, and she also moves sometimes with astonishing sensual power, as when she throws herself on the young policeman, winding her arms around his neck, her toes clinging to his boot-tops, her huge luminous eyes inches from his. In the early part of the film she is hard and manipulative, but at the end she has been shaken by real feeling and humanized. Okay, it's an old story, riddled with cliché, but in this treatment it works, largely because the film is so beautifully shot.

MARIO GAUCI I wasn't familiar with the work of director Joe May - apart from THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS (1940) and the Silent epic THE Indian TOMB (1921), a film I was disappointed by and which I always considered more of a Fritz Lang film anyway - although I had always been intrigued by this one and, now, thanks to Eureka and "Masters Of Cinema", I've managed to catch up with it.From watching ASPHALT - followed, in short order, by SPIONE (1928) and TARTUFFE (1925) - I've reacquainted myself with the peerless craftsmanship of German cinema during the 1920s; indeed, May's film is technically quite irreproachable - particularly his depiction of city-life by night, but also the opening montage (echoing contemporaneous Russian cinema) which forms part of the title sequence. Apart from this, the film's slight but compelling plot later became a staple of the noir genre where a naïve man is embroiled in the sordid life of a femme fatale with tragic consequences (the most obvious example, ironically enough, being perhaps Fritz Lang's superlative THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW [1944]).In this regard, the film benefits greatly from the perfect casting of the two roles but especially the captivating Betty Amann, who effortlessly exudes sexuality throughout: distracting the elderly owner of the jewel shop with her considerable charms, while casually concealing one of the precious rocks in the tip of her umbrella; seducing the young, inexperienced traffic cop by excusing herself from his presence but, when he follows her into the bedroom, finds she has slipped under the sheets and is waiting for him; when he tries to leave, she literally leaps on him and, by wrapping herself around his waist, making it practically impossible for him not to give in to her. Also notable is a brief pickpocketing scene at the beginning featuring Hans Albers; the rather violent fight between the boy and the girl's elderly associate/lover, when the latter comes back to her apartment and catches them in flagrante, in which the furniture (conveniently held by visible wires) gets literally thrown around the room; the concluding act, then, marked by a number of twists (which lead to a sort of happy ending more akin to Bresson's spiritually-infused PICKPOCKET [1959] than the hard-boiled noirs it inspired), is enormously satisfying.

goblinhairedguy Joe May's "Asphalt" is not as well remembered as the other masterpieces of German silent expressionist cinema, possibly due to the lack of immortals in the cast and its decidedly commercial scenario. But it certainly deserves a mention alongside the great works of Lang, Pabst, Murnau, et al. The cop-seduced-by-the-sexy-crook plot is the prototype for many a great (and not-so-great) film noir to come, and the seduction scene certainly packs a punch. Like most films of the time, it eventually descends into melodrama, but Gunther Rittau's remarkably mobile and probing camera is so skillful in revealing the characters' thoughts and lending pathos to their plight that he and the director transcend the clichés in the manner of Stahl and Ophuls, with some Langian irony peeking through at times. The opening profile of the city is a justly famed visual tour-de-force, but the stark, expressionist compositions that highlight the climax are just as striking and iconic. May never made the big time in Hollywood, but spun a few good programmers for the B picture mill.