Blood and Gold

Marie Hacke takes aim in Blood and Gold

Peter Thorwarth's Blood and Gold is a limber and enjoyable action film. Set during the last days of World War 2 in the European theater, the story revolves around a cache of gold ingots stashed somewhere in a German village. The gold, filched from the town's sole Jewish family, has been hidden by the town's burghers who are waiting for the Nazi regime to collapse before they cash in. However, an SS commander has been tipped off to the existence of the treasure and has his brigade frantically searching for the gold before the Allies arrive.

The film's protagonist, Heinrich (Robert Maaser), has served in the Wehrmacht for six years and, sick of war, has become a deserter. The film opens with Heinrich being captured and then strung up and left to die by the SS. He is saved from that fate by Elsa (Marie Hacke), a farmer who lives on an isolated property with her autistic brother. Their respite from carnage is short-lived. 

The film is well paced and performed. The over the top action and sardonic tone threatens to make the film a cartoon, but Thorwarth makes sure to invest in enough characterization as to render individual deaths, and there are many, as something more than inevitable results of choreographed violence. Even the death of a cow is mourned. The Westerns of Sergio Leone seem to be Thorwarth's main inspiration, so blatantly so that many of the motifs of Jessica de Rooij and Hendrik Nolle's score echo the contributions of Ennio Morricone to those films. As in Leone's films, Blood and Gold pictures a world in which greed unleashes an endless cycle of violence. Recommended to fans of action cinema and currently streaming on Netflix.