If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

"Buddenbrooks - 1. Teil" is a West German black-and-white film from 1959, so this one is almost 60 years old. It is probably the second earliest take on the famous work by writer Thomas Mann (after a 1923 film). More should follow in the future and the most recent is probably from 2008. But lets take a look at this one here. The director is Alfred Weidenmann, for whom it is neither among his earliest or latest career efforts (somewhere in the middle) and this is the first of two films actually. It seems to be really difficult to fit this one into one movie of 2 hours max actually. The cast includes many pretty well-known names of German actors from back in the day such as Pulver, Felmy, Dagover, Knuth, Hartmann or Leibelt. The cast was okay for the most part I guess, but honestly I never really gained much interest in the characters as I hoped I would. This film is slightly shorter than the sequel from the same year, but still runs for over 90 minutes. Compared to the second film, there is more focus in this one here on the romance aspect of the Buddenbrook daughter, and (naturally) more focus on the old Jean Buddenbrook, even if I still wish there could have been more focus on him still. He never felt like the memorable patriarch the way they wanted him to be, but still, I expected even less from the second film after his demise because the children (with an occasional exception of Tony) never really got me involved in their fates either. I have not read the work by Mann, but if it is quality-wise on par with this movie here, I also don't have a great deal of interest. Thumbs down from me. Not recommended as it drags quite a bit on several moments, even if it also has decent moments and is certainly not a failure.