The Vintagent Trailers: A preview of our favorite feature films out there.
MISSILE FROM THE EAST (2021)
Run Time: 1:30:00
Producer: HLA Productions, Night Train Media, Salon Pictures
Director: Justin Stokes
Writer: Ray Battersby (based on the book ‘Codeword Berlin’), Justin Stokes (story)
Key Cast: James G. Nunn, Alan Wai, Aliona Baranova
FILM MAKERS
Ten years in the making, the film is the work of director Justin Stokes a TV commercials director and school friend of the son of the main Suzuki man Jimmy Matsumiya, and producer Mike Wells. Missile from the East premiered on Sky Documentaries in the UK, and is now available on streaming in some countries. Premiering exactly sixty years after MZ racer Ernst Degner defected to the West this new drama documentary was a collaboration between HLA, Nighttrain Media and Salon Pictures the producers of 2018 doc McQueen on the late British fashion designer Alexander McQueen.
SUMMARY
Missile from the East follows the true story of Ernst Degner, a champion East German motorcycle racer who risked his and his family’s life to escape from behind the Iron Curtain, taking ground-breaking engine technology with him that helped Japanese manufacturer Suzuki win its first Grand Prix championship.
Trivia: An iconic MZ works 125cc GP bike designed by Walter Kaaden was used in some of the recreation shots – on loan from The Sammy Miller Museum.
RELATED MEDIA
Watch the fULL FILM on TV+, Amazon and NOWTV.
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Found the movie streaming on PlexTV. Don’t buy the Amazon disc they sell as it won’t play on US machines.
If you are a 2-stroke geek you will find the movie worth watching. That said it was disappointing in that the focus was almost entirely on MZ rider Degner and his escape to the west. Little was said of the genius behind the MZ bikes Walter Kaaden other than he was purported to be a Stasi plant. Kaaden took Degner under his wing and together they developed the bike into a winner. The expansion chamber, rotary valve and boost port were all Kaaden’s ideas. Degner ripped off his mentor and sold the info to Suzuki. His escape probably would not have happened had it not been what he was giving Suzuki.
I suggest that anyone interested in these bikes read Mat Oxley’s book “Stealing Speed”. It gives a significantly different story of the escape and theft from Kaaden, a man who considered Degner a second son. How his family escaped is totally different between the two accounts as one example. I suspect that somewhere in between is where the truth lies.
this documentary is significantly more thoroughly researched than the book “stealing speed”, the documentary is based on research by Ray Battersby who has been researching the story for 25years. The Stasi Files in the documentary are verbatim pieces of testament that the book never got hold of. Furthermore, the author of Stealing Speed never managed to talk to people like Jimmy Matsumiya who was an eye witness to the story from Suzuki’s perspective.
Thank you for that clarification: important history needs thorough research, which is seemingly never finished…
Correction. I meant the expansion chamber, rotary valve and boost port were ideas Kaaden and Degner developed into a integrated whole that resulted in the first ever 200bhp/litre internal combustion naturally aspirated engine. Daniel Zimmerman invented and patented the rotary valve although Albert Roder had used one at Ziro motorcycles in the early 1920s. Eric Wolfe at DKW invented the expansion chamber. Richard Kuechen at Zundapp developed the boost port as a get around of the Schnurle porting patent.