Hollywood Film: The Big Lift

The Berlin airlift provided the backdrop to a semi-documentary feature film that was made in Berlin in 1949, before being released into cinemas a year later. The plot tells the story of a crew member of an American airlift plane. The character, who is played by Montgomery Clift, falls in love with a young German woman played by Cornell Borchers. Filming started in June 1949 and used many of the original airlift scenes in Berlin. It received a great deal of practical support from the U.S. Air Force. A number of flight crews who really were deployed in the airlift play themselves in the film. The German-language film had a different title to the English one, released as Es begann mit einem Kuss (It began with a kiss). But that was not all – the dubbing and editing were also very different to the original US version. Today, the film still stands as a unique testimony to the times it was made in.