Some of the most unruly and inspired, inventive and experimentation-prone West German films of the 50s were made by auteurs for whom Berlin (West), Hamburg or Munich were merely stops on a journey from opportunity to opportunity. Many of the filmmakers came from Central and Eastern Europe, were deemed undesirable at home, and had often already some major works to show for themselves. The outstanding figure of this eccentric bunch was probably Victor Vicas, who got his industry entrée by way of his Marshall Plan—and re-education shorts. His biggest critical success, Weg ohne Umkehr, told the tale of Zorin, a reluctant defector, a man at odds with the USSR as well as the US, in love with Anna, a woman whose life he saved in the final days of WWII; she makes him finally flee his home in the east for an uncertain future in a west, whose promise of liberty he takes with a grain of salt. Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), the gold standard of critical judgment in those days, was often evoked to describe the film’s style—only to add that Vicas’ sense for the nitty-gritty of real life made this a superior work.