At the Edge of the World

A mill situated on the border between two unnamed countries and the residents therein become pawns in a future war. Am Rande der Welt (At the Edge of the World) was a German antiwar film that had the bad luck to be released in the U.S. at the same time as several other antiwar efforts. Even so, the picture was successful in London and Paris, a fact that the critics attributed as much to the direction by Karl Grune as to the subject matter. Brigitte Helm, who'd scored a sensation a year earlier in Metropolis, was the biggest "name" in the picture. The story was easy enough to follow in the film's original form: alas, the producers decided to severely curtail the film's running time, and as a result several important scenes were lost. The Variety reviewer complained that the characters were "abstractions" rather than people, but this was hardly unusual in German films from this period.