Steven Soderbergh‘s The Good German (Warner Bros., early-mid fall ’06) is set in 1945, not 1947…and it’s been described by Soderbergh not as a risky romance drama but as “a real murder mystery.” (Reader Joshua Flower, responding to the Dakr Horizons plot description I posted yesterday, says it “sounds like a bit of a gloss on The Third Man.”) Plus it’s been shot in black and white, and that settles it — I’m in love. Why monochrome? “I’m incorporating archival footage into the movie and there’s just no other way to make it match,” Soderbergh told Suicide Girls correspondent Daniel Robert Epstein. (Pete Hammond tells me he was casually praising Clooney at a party last weekend for keeping the monochrome tradition alive with this and Good Night, and Good Luck, and Clooney answered, “Yeah, well, I think after The Good German that’s about it for the black-and-white thing.”) “Will it premiere at Cannes this year?” Epstein asks Soderbergh. “I hope so,” comes the reply.