The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich| his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.。日本战国时代,东海道甲斐的武田信玄(中村锦之助 饰)以《孙子兵法》中的“风林火山”为军旗,征战四方,立下赫赫威名。中年浪人山本勘助(三船敏郎 饰)用计投入武田信玄帐下,在武田攻略昔日盟友诹访的过程中,山本堪助全力配合主公的背义战略,击破诹访,虏获诹访家千金由布姬(佐久间良子 饰),山本堪助劝说美丽的由布姬做杀父仇人信玄的侧室,并决心扶立二人的子嗣为武田家之主。信玄在山本等家臣的辅佐下与村上等强敌连番激战,而为了实现自己对由布姬承诺的山本堪助也在暗中为这对儿母子进行谋划……
本片改编自井上靖的同名历史小说。。