One of two adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet toward the tail end of the noir cycle, the other being Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Helmut Käutner’s Der Rest ist Schweigen (US: The Rest Is Silence) transplants the Dane’s family crisis to postwar Germany when a family’s manufacturing plant is struggling, and Nazi ghosts are omnipresent. (Lucky for us, the Bard penned Hamlet chock full of film noir elements: adultery, suspicion of murder, mistaken identity, mental illness, a castle full of conflict.) Here the prince is John Claudius (Hardy Krüger), who returns to Germany after 20 years in self-imposed American exile; his father Johannes has died (in a collapsed bunker during air raids), but John suspects lethal collusion between his mother Gertrud (Adelheid Seeck) and her new spouse, John’s uncle Paul (a particularly threatening Peter van Eyck), who had been dallying with Gertrud even while Johannes was alive. As John becomes monomaniacally focused on learning the truth, he blowtorches his way into a mysterious safe, reads his father’s private diary, and allows himself to fall for his cousin Fee (Ingrid Andree), presumably a riff on Ophelia, whose nervous condition places her at risk for a mental breakdown at the slightest bit of trauma, which, of course, will arrive forthwith. Even without the dramatic expressionist lighting we’ve come to love about noir, the Claudius mansion swirls with palpable tension, heightened by the presence of life-sized statues, imposing oil portraits, and secret storage spaces.