Accident
About Accident
A man reaches for a coin in the street and is hit by a car. The coin rolls into the gutter. Another man picks it up. A cigar seller refuses it as counterfeit. In a bar he stakes it at dice and keeps winning. A customer paints a face on an egg and cracks the shell with a knife, the sign that he and two others will rob the winner. The man leaves with the money. A heavy man follows. He ducks in with a prostitute. Her pimp is behind the curtain. A candle is still smoking, a knife vanishes, and in the coffee pot he sees her signal. She and the pimp gag him and take the wallet. He is thrown into the street. The heavy man clubs him. A coin rolls out. In the hospital a doctor and a policeman ask, over three titles, whether he can face the arrested men and say who is guilty. He closes his eyes. A coin spins.
Cast & crew
More about Accident
Ernő Metzner directed and wrote the script with Grace Chiang. Eduard von Borsody photographed it for Deutscher Werkfilm in Berlin. Filmportal gives one reel, 423 metres, 21 minutes, silent, black and white, and names Atlas as distributor. The German title is Polizeibericht Überfall. The Filmprüfstelle banned it in April 1929 as brutalizing and demoralizing. The Oberprüfstelle rejected the producers' appeal. A later card is dated May 30, 1929, B.22552, also a ban.
Themes
Making
Metzner and Chiang wrote it as a fear dream. The censors filed it as a crime picture.
Reviews
In Close Up for May 1929 Metzner wrote that he could not see why the censors called it a criminal film, since the aim was fear and the fear dream that follows.
Look
Eduard von Borsody photographed the street, the bar, and the room, including the coffee-pot reflection and the spinning coin.
Preservation
Banned in Germany in April 1929. A copy circulates on the Internet Archive as ueberfall.
Notes
- The robbery pact is an egg with a face, smashed with a knife.
- Heinrich Gotho, Eva Schmid-Kayser, Sybille Schmitz, Kurt Gerron, and Gustav Püttjer are in the German Wikipedia cast. Roles are not assigned there.
- Metzner answered the ban in Close Up, May 1929. He said the scenes were built to produce fear, and that the censors had read that fear as brutality.
- Gerhard Lamprecht put the short in his catalogue of program-length German features despite the length.
- A copy is on the Internet Archive as ueberfall.
Scenes
- A face is painted on an egg and the shell is cracked with a knife.
- In the hospital he shuts his eyes while a coin spins.
Also available
- Internet Archive (ueberfall)