An awkwardly made drama that somehow garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974 (it lost to Truffaut's Day for Night), The Pedestrian hasn't dated well and now makes unspectacular and uneasy viewing. Anchored by a strong lead performance by Gustav Rudolf Sellner as Heinz Giese, a German businessman suspected of ordering the massacre of a Greek village during World War II, the film follows a group of journalists trying to scoop the story. They're far from the idealistic writers we usually see in films, however--they're mostly interested in the story because it will sell papers. There's one particularly nasty moment when the Giese case is consigned to page 3, because there's a spectacular car theft photo that absolutely must make the front page. Perhaps that's the point: in The Pedestrian, no one is wholly innocent, as the film's coda underscores with its reference to collective guilt. Technically, Maximilian Schell's direction seems cluttered and unfocused, though Embassy Home Video's English-dubbed VHS does the film no favours. The Pedestrian is not a likely candidate for a Region 1 digital overhaul, but it's worth seeing for Sellner's performance alone, and the supporting cast (including Lil Dagover, Peggy Ashcroft, and Gustav's real life son Manuel as Giese's hippie offspring) is an interesting one.
Review of The Pedestrian
