Black Fox: The True Story of Adolf Hitler

I rented this movie years ago and it was the first time I had seen any of the old archive footage of the atrocities of Adolf Hitler. The scenes of the ovens, the starving masses and the Allied soldiers helping the survivors and bulldozing the hundreds and hundreds of emancipated corpses, made me burst into tears. It may not be the quintessential "Holocaust" movie (Schindler's List perhaps?), but it is worth seeing. Even though it is painful to watch. While not for young children, curious older teens should only watch this with their parents so it can be discussed and their questions answered. This kind of movie makes us all witnesses and jurors to this horrid time in history, and keepers of the truth so that it will never happen again.

~Learn the lessons from History, lest we be doomed to repeat~

In this age of A&E's Biography, and cable channels devoted to documentaries, sometimes it's eye-opening and entertaining to go back and watch one made "in the past" when theatrical showings were the only outlet.

Then again, sometimes it's not.

Black Fox actually seems older than it is- I'm surprised when I see that it was filmed in 1962, because it comes across as a heavy-handed propaganda piece concurrent with Hitler's reign.

It's almost embarrassing to watch, as the "documentary" actually has very little to say, and Marlene Dietrich gives her all to give it some kind of meaning. The film switches back and forth between Hitler's machinations and doings, and an odd, old folk-tale of a "black fox" and his dealings with his fellow animals. The folk-tale is illustrated with static woodcuts- you half expect a picture of Vlad Tepes somewhere along the way. It's as if the directors were either trying to put the whole WW2/Europe story into something acceptable for children, or were trying to emulate George Orwell's Animal Farm, and turn history into an anthropomorphic parable.

The film is very heavy-handed, and the parable just bogs the whole thing down. I admit I write this with a view of the modern documentary in mind... but Black Fox isn't entertaining, isn't educational, and was a waste of a purchase.

I watched this documentary for one reason--it won the Oscar. However, my perspective on this film is a bit different from most people, as I am a history teacher and actually took a class entitled "Adolf Hitler"--and studied the man in great depth and read thousands of pages of biographies, commentaries and even "Mein Kampf". Needless to say, I probably will be more of a stickler than most when it comes to the quality of the film.

The movie is narrated by Marlene Dietrich--an ardent anti-Nazi who was forced to leave her homeland because of her hatred of Hitler and his regime--so she was a good choice for this role. It's just a shame that the stuff she had to read was at times pretty poor--with a storybook section that just seemed stupid and trivialized the evil of Hitler. As for the rest of the film, I was disappointed--as the film had way too many photos (some very grainy), irrelevant engravings and filler and not nearly enough actual period film footage. I agree wholeheartedly with another reviewer that said that the History Channel and A&E have spoiled us for such documentaries as they simply are better and feature nothing but film footage and interviews--excellent ones at that.

So why, if the film isn't a great documentary about Hitler, did it win the Oscar? Well, perhaps at the time it was among the best films about him or perhaps the AMPAS members just liked the idea of an anti-Nazi film (hardly a risky decision on their part!). Regardless there are today so many better films that I could recommend (such as "Hitler and Stalin: Roots of Evil"--oddly not listed on IMDb) that this one is easy to skip.

Fascinating and disturbing especially in it's parable like comparison of Hitler's rise and fall with the old germanic folktale of Reynard the Fox. M.Dietrich's voice/narration is at times haunting and the use of photos and woodcuts is visually stimulating. The film almost seems as if it's geared towards children which only highlights the grim horrors it depicts. In today's world of our own country engaging in criminal wars of conquest in the middle east and our govt. being run by illegitimately elected "officials", our own Reichstag fire (9-11) the patriot act and the fraudulent "war on terror" it seems we've learned nothing from watching films like this.

Two years after she played the widow of a German general in Judgement At Nuremberg, Marlene Dietrich took up the task of narrating the documentary The Black Fox. Dietrich who certainly saw in her life the beginnings of Adolph Hitler's rise to power. Fortunately she had the good sense to leave Germany. She visited there post World War II on a few occasions, but Dietrich was never really welcomed back. She died in 1991 in Paris and only then did she come back to Germany to be buried.

What's different here is the use of a German folk tale The Black Fox with accompanying art work, interpolated into the film between scenes of the usual newsreel footage. Dietrich reads part of the tale which was adapted by Goethe and it's entertaining with a new perspective. Especially for German audiences brought up Goethe's literature.

I also noticed that the story Dietrich narrated was encapsulated in many ways by Burt Lancaster's speech acknowledging his guilt in Judgement At Nuremberg. Run that after The Black Fox and you'll see what I mean.

It's a story that cannot be told often enough and The Black Fox won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1962. Quite deserved.