Although Helmut Käutner had worked in Germany during the Third Reich, making such films as Port of Freedom (Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7, 1944), he managed to maintain a certain ideological independence. In the assessment of Mein Kampf director Erwin Leiser, Käutner’s wartime films maintain “the right to a free life as opposed to the requirements of discipline.” Käutner himself speaks of “the filmmakers’ stubbornness to allow any of the horror which surrounded us to seep into our work.” Produced and filmed during the confused final months of World War II, Under the Bridges is considered by some critics to be Käutner’s finest film. Echoing Jean Vigo‘s L’Atalante, the tale revolves around a romantic triangle on a small boat that wends its way up and down the Havel near Berlin. Käutner took leave of the artifice of studios and, while bombs continued to fall on the Reich, shot on location. His film also took leave of UFA production values and departed from the Nazi era’s script-bound predilections, rediscovering the wonder of immediacy and physical reality—with no mention of the war at all.