[Originally published in Movietone News 33, July 1974]
No one can accuse Maximilian Schell of being unaware of the possibilities of visual form in the cinema—or rather, that visual form can have something to do with discovering and elucidating Truth. His earnest direction of The Pedestrian comes much nearer some sort of expressiveness than Rolf Nölte’s treatment of The Castle, which Schell co-adapted and -produced with Nölte, and starred in, a few years ago. Close, but kein Zigarr. For The Pedestrian is more portentous than profound, framing between two episodes of soft-focus—or lost-focus—scrutiny of hazily symbolical fossils an attempt at moral self-scrutiny, of a powerful German industrialist and, by not very tentative extension, his country.