Adolf und Marlene

Charlie Chaplin made a really great and funny and dangerous film about Nazi Germany, but Ulli Lommel's ADOLF AND MARLENE is nothing less of a masterpiece. This film needs to be discovered, it is as good if not better as the best Fassbinder films, I should add maybe that Rainer Werner Fassbinder produced this film and also has a starring role. Lommel himself appears as propaganda minister Joesph Goebbels and Margot Carstensen, the superstar of many great Fassbinder films, plays Marlene Dietrich, who has several scenes with Hitler, performed beautifully by Kurt Raab, in which she gives the Fuhrer hell. Michael Ballshaus did the camera work. Ballhaus later went to Hollywood and worked with Coppola, Mike Nichols and other greats. He also shot many awesome Fassbinder films, such as Chinese ROULETTE, in which Lommel plays a leading role and the newly restored WORLD ON A WIRE (also with Ulli Lommel as an investigative journalist). It's very hard to get a DVD of this gem, but I saw it in Paris recently at the Cinemateque Francaise, and the 35mm print was pristine.

This extraordinary film feels like an homage to Ernst Lubitsch, great German director who immigrated to the United States to escape Nazi Germany. Lubitsch made the unforgettable TO BE OR NOT TO BE, also a dark rendition on the Nazi theme and Adolf Hitler. In ADOLF AND MARLENE, the superb Kurt Raab plays Hitler (without a mustache!). Just last week I saw Kurt Raab in another Ulli Lommel film, TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES, also a real treat. Both movies were produced by the late genius Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a guarantor for top quality and a mentor of Lommel, who worked with Fassbinder on over twenty productions in Germany during the 60s and 70s. ADOLF AND MARLENE is fairly unknown, but looks like one of the best films ever dealing with such a dark and disturbing subject matter. The camera work is astonishing (Michael Ballhaus, also a Fassbinder collaborator who went to Hollywood and made a huge career) if not brilliant. The screenplay by Lommel is hilarious and highly subversive and funny as hell. A clear ten!

I'll have to agree with Mary Bogens, who reviewed this film: It's a masterpiece. Fassbinder (who produced and starred in the film) and Michael Ballhaus (the Director of Photography of great films such as Coppola's Dracula and Scorcese's LAST TEMPTATION )F Christ) have assisted Lommel in making a movie classic, that really needs some serious distribution now and DVDs so anyone who's interested in true magic on the screen will be able to view it. Shot entirely on location in Germany in 1976, six years before the untimely death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and one year before Ulli Lommel went to America to work with Andy Warhol, this great motion picture team rose to the occasion and came up with an unbelievable inspired film, a film noir about Hitler's obsession with bringing Marlene Dietrich back to Nazi Germany (a plot that fails dismally and hilariously funny. Kurt Raab in the lead role of Adolf Hitler is awesome and in a class by himself.