By Dennis Harvey

JUST AS POPULAR culture attunes itself to wartime patriotism (exhibit: Ladder 49), so it inevitably caters to the psychological cravings peculiar to post-war recovery. Witness the emergence of a unique genre whose fairly brief life span is recalled in "Heimat: German Heimatfilms of the '50s," an eight-week series at the Goethe-Institut. Heimat (or homeland) films had roots in the "mountain films" of the Weimar era, which raised man-amid-nature lyricism to grandiose heights worthy of master-race ideology. (Not surprisingly, Hitler's fave, Leni Reifenstahl, started out acting in mountain films, then directed her own following Triumph of the Will.) After that concept ingloriously died amid 1945's rubble, such bucolic cinema lost its fascistic undertow and lightened up for audiences in need of guilt-free fun and nostalgia minus pain.

The transition was smooth – partly because many of the same directors who'd flourished through the Nazi era (when Germany's film industry was still one of the world's most expansive) continued to thrive during this rehabilitative period. Stereotypical Heimat entertainment finds slumming urban sophisticates enchanted by country ways – and by a country lass or lad. Songs, pastoral scenery, and traditional-dress spectacle glorify the virtues of the simple life. The city folk make faux pas. The proud country cousins are pure-hearted yet stubborn and tetchy.

In 1956's The Fisher Girl of Lake Constance, which boasts no less than four full-costume balls and festivals, über-blond milkmaid Marianne Hold is such a bitter pill you wonder why her Prince Charming persists. But he does, and thanks to plot mechanizations that include mistaken-identity incest(!), she yields big-time.

The creamy marzipan-colored early genre hit Black Forest Girl (1950) offers similar outdoor high jinks bordering on old-school operetta. Lower in terms of musical interludes but high on "ah, wilderness!" John Denver-esque moments are titles like 1954's Echo of the Mountains, an Austrian feature that started as a nature documentary, then got padded to commercial-narrative length. Comparatively serious dramas – 1956's The Farmer's Perjury, 1958's Girl of the Moors, and the same year's peerlessly titled Lady Country Doctor – also underline the moral superiority of a wholesome, agri-centric milieu.

At its quintessential best, however, the Heimat genre anticipates Bollywood by suggesting there's no good reason every movie can't be a musical. Dizzy and delightful, 1957's High up on the Mountain finds the Tyrolean hills alive with the sound of quaking hormones – plus boogie-woogie organ, beer-hall sing-alongs, and something called "rumba-cha-cha." Its yodeling nature boy hero ("And I yodel higher till the people all are thrilled!" he sings – no idle brag, either) is distracted from a local lovely by a va-voom pop chanteuse who crashes her own plane (so modern! a lady pilot!) on a nearby mountaintop. Of course he returns to Heidi-ho but not before wowing the masses via televised concert. This gleefully cheesy pre-rock hit parade also features percussive utensils, thigh slapping, and anvil striking, not to mention terribly homoerotic Alpine leg wrestling.

In retrospect, the Heimat films (like most examples of truly popular filmmaking) reveal more about their era than do overtly analytical statements about the same subject matter. The distrust of "outsiders" their rural characters sport – and then get over – reflects a nation's nervous yet conciliatory, even grateful, reentry onto the international playing field. Gender roles rocked by wartime are gently updated via independent country-lass and city-careerist heroines. Nor should one overlook the social insights afforded by each flick's inclusion of a problem drinker or three, however comically presented.

These films aren't great art. But they're pretty good escapism. Especially after you've hoisted a few steins.

'Heimat: German Heimatfilms of the '50s' runs through Nov. 16. Tuesdays, 7:30 p.m. (also Oct. 29, 6 p.m.), Goethe-Institut, Auditorium, 530 Bush, S.F. $5. (415) 263-8760. For more information see Rep Clock, or go to www.goethe.de/uk/saf/enindex.htm.