Wonderful character development!

The greatest movie ever made..!

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The Search (1948)This is a critical film in director Fred Zinnemann's career. After years of doing shorts and B features, and after WWII had ravaged the world, he turned to a subject that must have ripped him up every day he was shooting. The story of orphaned kids, most of the Jewish, in the rubble of post-War Germany. You see, both his parents were killed by the Nazis in the war. And here he was, a man with roots in documentary film in the 1930s, making real one of the remaining problems recovering from Nazi mess, these displaced children. The black and white filming is gritty and polished at the same time, and much of it is shot on location in the real ruins of Germany in the American sector (in Nuremberg). For that alone it's worth seeing. By the way, the interior work was done in a Swiss garage—the crew for the whole film consisted of a total of ten Swiss technicians and a truck. Though the movie was an American release, the main producer was Swiss, too. All of these are reasons why it feels different than what Hollywood might have attempted on studios lots, and probably failed at least in authenticity.Throw in that Montgomery Clift is starring in the lead role and you have another reason to watch. He's really wonderful, already feeling like the mature, charming, disarming young man he is famous for on screen. Be warned however—he doesn't show up until nearly halfway through. The first half of the movie is touching but makes for disappointing drama, forming a quasi-documentary overview of the horrid situation but with a voice-over that means well but makes it almost sentimental instead of tragic. Be sure to stick it out until the real plot kicks in with Clift sitting in a Jeep. There are other actors here—the mother looking for her child is an opera singer in real life and is more pathetic than persuasive, and the chief nurse, played by Aline MacMahon, is terrific. Still, the movie, and the screen time in the second half, is Clift's, thankfully, and the boy's. This child was discovered while scouting for the movie, apparently, and is a Czech kid names Ivan Jandl. Amazingly, he knew no English when the movie started, and was coached by Clift as they went, very much like happens in the movie. This obviously makes it more convincing top to bottom. And makes you love Clift even more. He took the role quite seriously, studying (according to a TCM article worth googling) American soldier engineers by living with them, especially trying to get the way they walked. Fascinating details for a movie that depends on its verisimilitude above all.If there is an inevitable arc to the events, you'll have to live with it. And if some of the acting is average, and some of the plot requiring patience, you'll have to live with that, too. It's not a gem taken whole. But the best of it is remarkable. An absolute must-watch if you like this period, the director, or even this kind of shooting, which has an echo of "Rome Open City" and other European productions shot in the actual remains of Old Europe.

This is a genuine overlooked gem, portraying the desolation of post-World War II Europe, and the hopelessness of hundreds of thousands of displaced child refugees with lost or dead parents, no place to go and nothing to eat. Some aspects of the plot and dialog are dated, but the story and the craftsmanship make the movie timeless. This was Montgomery Clift's second movie and he did an excellent job, both starring in it (for which he received an Academy Award nomination), and apparently in rewriting the original script substantially (the movie also was nominated for best screenplay, and won for best story, both in the names of the credited screenwriters). The entire cast, American and European, did an excellent job, and the use of bombed and destroyed German cities as backgrounds gave The Search a sense of reality and urgency that can be almost jarring and startling. Despite the bleak sounding summary of the plot, the movie is inspiring, witty and entertaining, and no downer.

This splendid tale filmed on location in the American occupied zone of Berlin is set after the 2nd World War . It deals about a nine-year-old amnesiac young boy (Ivan) who escapes from a military orphanage of displaced children led by a good woman (Aline MacMahon). Then he lives in the destructed Germany and has to do all kinds of tricks in getting food and barely survive. The unsettling kid wanders through the destructed city trying to find work or some food to reduce the starvation . One day he meets an American soldier named Steve (Montgomey Clift) . He gets support from him, and the ideas of this man lead the homeless boy in a clearer and safer way of living . Although Steve wants to adopt the child there are many obstacles for it. Meantime his mummy who has been searching the Displaced Persons Camps attempts to find his son, and the young boy convince Steve to find his mother until a touching finale.The picture is a moving drama seen through the eyes of a disturbed boy who eventually meets a good friend. At the beginning ¨The search¨ tells that portions of this film were produced in the United States occupied zone of Germany through the kind permission of the United States Army and the cooperation of I.R.O. The first part of the movie is set on a destroyed Berlin and is proceeded in similar style to classic titled ¨Germany , year zero¨ or ¨Deutschland in Sahre Null (1947)¨by Roberto Rosselini. Good performance from Montgomey Clift as upright American soldier stationed in post-WWII Berlin who befriends the unfortunate boy, this was his first screen appearance , although ¨The search¨ was really shot after his debut in ¨Red River¨ by Howard Hawks, however it was released first. This was also Ivan Jandl's first and only role , winning deservedly a special Juvenile Academy Award . Sensible musical score and average cinematography, as the film requires an urgent remastering. Intelligent dialog and story won an Oscar (1948) by Paul Jarrico and Golden Globe (1949) to best screenplay. This acclaimed motion picture is well realized by the classic Fred Zinnemann who appears uncredited as an interpreter. Rating : Better than average, worthwhile watching .

In the years following World War 2, stories about reconstruction and readjustment were popular with filmmakers, although they were somewhat hit-and-miss with the public, who at the time would accept nothing less than full understanding and sincerity on so sensitive a subject. Even viewed today, they are a bit of a mixed bag, and many seem to have been made with the best intentions but with naiveté in their presentation. The Search is one of these.The bare plot of the Search is kind of poignant-postwar-story-by-numbers. That's not such a bad thing in itself - often the simplest ideas are the best. Even its basic structure is a good balance, beginning with an objective exposition of the plight of children in war-ravaged Europe, allowing the Ivan Jandl character to emerge from the group, then parallelling his mother's desperate search with his own psychological recovery. I don't think the Oscar for Best Original Story was deserved but I can certainly understand it.The trouble is in the screenplay as it is written. Much of the scripted dialogue is bland and trite, and the way characters react in certain situations seems false - for example, the British UNRRA officer prompting Mrs Malik to keep questioning the Jewish boy even after she has suffered the shock of his not being her son. The very worst thing is the twee voice-over narration, which elaborates every point, regardless of whether it is already obvious or even necessary to know, in the most patronising tone imaginable. Perhaps the intention was to make these early scenes less confusing and threatening to child viewers - but other than its protagonist being a child, there is nothing to suggest that this picture is especially aimed at kids. And really, without the narration we would have been left with a more genuinely childlike view of the story. This is especially true of the flashback scene of Karel Malik's family - a young child would remember this time not so much in the adult context of where the city was or what his father did for a living, but more as a series of images. Imagine how much more powerful this scene could have been if we were to experience it the same way.Almost predictably, the director is Fred Zinnemann. This man would later do some great things, but his job on the Search is rather amateurish. I think his biggest problem here is failing to show things from the point of view of the child. In those early scenes we only see the rescued youngsters from the perspective of the UNRRA officers. We see that these kids are confused and daunted by their new guardians, but I feel truly great directing would have allowed us to share this feeling. Even in those cramped and crowded trucks the camera remains aloof above the children, rather than among them. And this from a director who tended to overuse point-of-view shots in his early pictures. The only thing I like about Zinnemann's direction here is the stark realism he gives to the ruined city, and the way he keeps this sense of a desolate environment at the forefront.I am glad to say it is the cast who make the best effort at rescuing this picture. Montgomery Clift gives a wide-ranging and naturalistic performance, but probably his best contribution is that he apparently improvised much of his own dialogue, making his scenes stand out above the turgid mess of the rest of the picture. Young Ivan Jandl gives an excellent performance for a child player. You can see that there is a lot of himself in the role, but that he is also clever enough to think about what he is doing and really put effort into acting. However the real treat here for aficionados of classic Hollywood is Aline MacMahon, who was busiest as a comic supporting player at Warners in the early 1930s. In the Search she is supremely dignified, even without makeup.The way things are in the Search is the way things often were for smaller productions in the postwar era. The studio system was weakened and the majors often found themselves collaborating with independent producers. Hollywood was not the well-oiled machine it had been in the 1930s, and we got teams where not everyone was on the same wavelength. The Search is one of the unfortunate collisions of this period, between arty-farty pretensions and Hollywood gloss.