Gravel takes on new meaning in Helmut Käutner’s Schwarzer Kies (US: Black Gravel), its use for re-building roads and infrastructure after the war taking a backseat to its use for burying evidence of rampant degradation and evil acts. Like corpses. Sharing a backdrop with John Brahm’s The Golden Plague (1954), an impoverished German town surviving off the thousands of Americans stationed at a nearby military base, the film stars Helmut Wildt as Robert Neidhardt, an independent truck owner who sells and transports gravel on the black market, whose old flame Inge Gaines (Ingmar Zeisberg) happens to arrive in town with her new husband, an American officer (Hans Cossy) with business at the base. Despite Inge’s initial protestations, she and Robert restart their affair, which takes a dark turn when they run over and kill a young couple from town while fleeing a police raid in Robert’s truck. After Inge hurries away to avoid exposing their affair, Robert buries the bodies rather than informing the police (“justice is only for those in power”); the cover-up, of course, will only lead to more deaths. With planes roaring overhead and construction detonations sounding frequently in the background, Schwarzer Kies often feels like a war film, the battlefields crawling with fears and doubts rather than soldiers and tanks, the marks of concentration camps still on Jewish forearms, the reborn community percolating with as much anxiety as possible. Anita Höfer is outstanding as Elli, an occasional prostitute and barmaid who wants Robert but will take the company of any man who comes along. Dog lovers beware: the opening scene features a sweet, little canine getting crushed to death, setting the tone for the bleakness to come.