joncheskin

When I heard one evening that Goebbels and Co. Spent 8 million marks on a big war movie at the beginning of 1945 to convince the German people to go down with the ship, I could not help but be fascinated. Could there be any possibility that the film could have any resonance for me, a 21st century American? The answer ultimately was no, but I have to confess that I found some aspects of the movie compelling.

First of all, this really is a visually stunning movie. Veit Harlan, the director, apparently got use of thousands of soldiers to produce the sort of mass battle scenes that you do not see anymore, and also utilized the actual citizens of Colberg for many of the scenes involving public gatherings and urban siege chaos. Additionally, the costume design and art direction are superb, this movie looks gorgeous and conveys the period beautifully.

On the flip side, I found the writing and much of the acting to be cringy, even separated from the horrifying propagandizing. The love story between Lt. Schill and Maria, which by all accounts is completely made up, is creepy, he being about twice her age. Kristina Soderbaum as Maria is a formidable screen presence, but she overacts a lot and starts to get annoying after a while. Heinrich George is actually pretty good as Nettlebaum, but Horst Caspar is preachy and irritating as Gneisenau. The French are depicted as decadent foppish sadists, and while some of this might be true it seems overplayed to me.

And what a surprise that some aspects are overplayed, ha ha. As a Nazi propaganda movie, would we expect anything less? Mostly the movie is a depiction of one of the most perverse moments in human history, when a proud country is about to get overrun and crushed and they all know it is coming (I am talking here about Germany 1945, not 1807). The vain attempt to talk themselves into a brave face and the worth of sacrifice for the sake of an evil cause ultimately is one of the saddest things I have ever seen. The story behind the story is really much more interesting than the story itself, but this does not make the movie better. Even Goebbels himself tried massive edits, evidence that something was simply amiss.

My son came home from college for Christmas break and told me that he wanted to watch the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I asked if he was out of his mind, I remembered seeing it about 20 years ago and walking out of the theater shaken to the core. He was a big horror fan and heard it was an important movie in the genre, so I decided to do the rewatch.

What surprised me the second time around was how good the movie actually was. The cinematography, musical score, acting, and unpredictable plot all work seamlessly to produce a horror movie that is truly horrifying, difficult to watch but at times simultaneously repulsive and riveting. Furthermore, I always got the impression that what I was watching was actually believable, that there actually are people in the world this depraved and that they would act more or less like what was depicted in the movie.

Viewers should be warned that this movie is no joke--it is actually quite difficult to maintain your safe audience distance when watching, you get drawn in quite effectively just like the poor victims in the film. If you can stand it, however, a very well constructed symphony of sadism will unfold before you and provoke equal measures of disgust, fear and admiration.

I know that I am going against the critical grain with this review, but this movie unfortunately is not nearly as good as everyone thinks. I decided to rewatch it after not seeing it for about 30 years, and was completely surprised to find that this movie engaged in numerous awkward instances of stereotyping and historical inaccuracy. It was not the way I remembered it. I made it about half-way through before I could not watch the rest.

The movie begins with several hundred British prisoners being marched to a Japanese prison camp to build a bridge over the River Kwai, a plot line based on a real historical event. The first main conflict involves the Japanese trying to get the British officers to do forced labor with the enlisted men, they refuse because it is beneath their rank. The Japanese stick the officers in solitary confinement.

All well and good, except that it is well known that the Japanese treated officers more leniently than enlisted men. Sanitized in the movie is the brutal treatment of the enlisted, which mainly featured beatings, sometimes to death. The movie is rated PG, no chance that real life would be with respect to the violence inflicted.

The Japanese in this movie are also displayed as incompetent at bridge building and at managing their slave labor, the bridge does not get done. There is no historical evidence for this, brutal tactics by the Japanese were by all counts highly effective at producing productive work. The British are also shown in a collaborationist mode with the Japanese, there is no evidence for this either. Survivors attest that Colonel Philip Tousey, who was the inspiration for Alec Guinness's character, never collaborated with the Japanese in the manner depicted in the movie.

Survivors of the actual event attested that both the movie and the novel upon which it was based were wildly inaccurate. They were not happy about it. Fine to make an entertaining movie, but if it is based on a real event, the history deserves to be remembered accurately, so that the event can really be put in proper perspective. This movie does not do that.