After premiering at Cannes in 1989, Jerry Schatzberg’s drama about a close teenage friendship between a German Jew and a gentile cut short due to events in 1930s received a token U.S. release a few years later. To paraphrase its director (who turns 99 in June), the film was in theaters on Friday and out of theaters on Monday. It’s been rarely seen since, but that omission has been rectified with the return of this haunting memory piece.

Those memories of his early life in Germany make American Jewish lawyer Henry Strauss (Jason Robards) return to his hometown of Stuttgart for the first time since leaving as a teenager after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Henry wants to find out what happened to the aristocratic Konradin von Lohenburg (Samuel West), with whom he became unlikely best friends in high school. After young Hans (Christien Anholt) went to America to become Henry and start a new life, he never heard from Konradin again and wants some closure.

Much of this elegantly structured film consists of flashbacks to Stuttgart during the early 1930s, as Hans and Konradin hit it off as friends, going on walks together, discussing politics and philosophy as well as girls. Although the National Socialists are marching nearby with their swastika armbands, no one initially is worried about any harm coming to anyone. Hans’s father (Bert Parnaby) is a respected doctor and his mother (Barbara Jefford) a bourgeois wife. They see their assimilated Jewishness as normal—until the day that it isn’t.

Although Hans’s Jewishness rarely comes up while he’s with Konradin, ominous signs were always there—Hans was never welcome in Konradin’s home. They start appearing more frequently as professors routinely make anti-Semitic statements, and a fellow student, a girl Hans likes, exclaims “But you don’t look it” when she discovers he’s Jewish. When the situation becomes too dangerous, Hans’s father tells him he will be going to the United States to live with his uncle and that his parents will soon follow. Hans’s parting words from Konradin are an acknowledgment that he believes only Hitler can save Germany: “He’s our only hope.”

Such naivety makes the older Henry determined to track down Konradin. When Henry discovers Konradin’s fate, the moment is memorable mostly for its utter lack of melodrama. Here and elsewhere, Robards gives a quietly intense performance of a man trying to hold in the many emotions overtaking him as he looks for answers on what has become a journey of self-discovery.

Working from a sharp script by Harold Pinter, Schatzberg directs in a straightforward style befitting its subject. Early on, the flashbacks to Nazi Germany are seen in jagged, silent black and white. After Henry returns to Stuttgart, his memories become more tangible, and the bulk of the film is taken over by them. Reunion has been photographed in handsome but muted color by Bruno de Keyzer and designed with a superlative eye for detail by Alexandre Trauner that expressively recreates a troubled era that’s trapped between retreating democracy and encroaching fascism.