Category: Nazi Germany

Woman in Gold (2015)

Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds stumble through bland Philomena rip-off Woman in Gold

Director: Simon Curtis

Cast: Helen Mirren (Maria Altmann), Ryan Reynolds (Randy Schoenberg), Daniel Brühl (Hubertus Czernin), Katie Holmes (Pam Schoenberg), Tatiana Maslany (Young Maria), Max Irons (Fritz Altmann), Charles Dance (Sherman), Elizabeth McGovern (Judge Cooper), Jonathan Pryce (Chief Justice Renhquist), Antje Traue (Adele Bloch-Bauer), Allan Corduner (Gustav), Henry Goodman (Ferdinand)

The Nazi regime across Europe was a criminal one in every sense of the word. Along with the hideous acts of murder and warmongering, Woman in Gold uses its story to remind us their leaders were also little better than common thieves.

Maria Altmann was a young Jewish woman from a wealthy family, living in Vienna in the 1930s. She escaped from Austria to the US in 1939 with her husband, but had to leave the rest of her family behind. Their fine possessions, including several paintings by Klimt, were stolen by the Nazis.

Decades later, Maria (Helen Mirren) recruits struggling lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to help her reclaim the paintings, now owned by the Austrian government. The government are predictably dismissive of any claims on their heritage, and are particularly unwilling to give up Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (or Woman in Gold), a portrait of Altmann’s aunt, proudly displayed as a jewel of Austrian culture. So begins a case that will go, via the American supreme court, to the very heart of Austria’s uncomfortable relationship with its past. In parallel, Maria remembers her younger self (Tatiana Maslany) and her escape from Vienna.

I think it’s fair to say Maria is a role Helen Mirren could play standing on her head. It’s a cliché – the feisty, imperious elderly woman who cows all around her, but has a heart of (forgive me) gold. Ryan Reynolds Schoenberg is similarly predictably: a young, naïve, slightly bumbling do-gooder revealed to have hidden depths of strength, and ends up connecting with his own heritage in a “very personal” journey. In fact, every character in the “present day” plotline is a hopeless cliché. Katie Holmes has perhaps the worst role as Schoenberg’s wife – as The Wife always does in these things, she spends the first half of the film asking her husband to drop his time-consuming crusade, but come the second half she’s making the inevitable “you’ve come too far to give up now” speech.

Every bit of the modern day story is predictable, reheated slop from other, much better movies – you literally recognise every beat of every courtroom scene. Most conversations are essentially the actors spooling plot at each other, explaining everything from art history to Austrian mediation procedures. The moments where the dialogue allows the actors to focus on character land with a hamfisted heaviness, with all the subtly of Oscar “for your consideration” scenes.

Periodically the story abandons logical evolution altogether and leaps from A to B without explanation: Maria will never go back to Vienna, less than five minutes of screentime later oh no actually she will (explained by a timely, on-the-nose flashback), no she definitely won’t go back a second time, ta-da there she is. She wants to fight, then she wants to give up, then she wants to fight again. Whether these events were real or not, the film makes them feel like humdrum screenplay hokum.

You keep waiting for this to spring to life and do something fresh, but it never does. Even its odd-couple pairing is essentially Philomena reheated – but without the wit and warmth of that film’s script. It manages to turn what should have been an interesting story into something drier and duller than a documentary would have been.

The film takes wing a little more in the flashbacks to the 1930s. Again, there’s nothing new here, but the performances in are infused with a warmth, emotion and humanity missing from the other storyline – Allan Corduner is particularly good as Maria’s loving father. The sense of peril from the Nazis also gives the film a clear and unequivocal antagonist: the sequence where Maria and her husband flee Vienna is more engaging and tense than anything else in the film.

The weight of these flashbacks, however, only serves to contrast poorly with the strange, odd-couple comedy of the rest of the film. It’s literally two different films sitting uncomfortably together, neither doing either any service.

Woman in Gold is a confused film, that drags down what could have been a fascinating story into a safe, Sunday-afternoon film that never wants to say anything too controversial (even its potshots at the Austrians for overlooking their Nazi past is balanced by “good” Austrians). It reduces its characters to plot-spouting clichés, wrapped in a dry story. Although its flashback scenes carry some emotional heft, they can’t save the main plotline which spirals on and on, never engaging the viewer’s interest. It’s not gold, it’s very base metal.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

Brian Donley on the run in Fritz Lang’s Nazi occupation thriller

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (Reinhard Heydrich), Brian Donlevy (Dr Franticek Svoboda), Walter Brennan (Professor Stephen Novotny), Anna Lee (Mascha Novotny), Gene Lockhart (Emil Czaka), Dennis O’Keefe (Jan Horak), Nana Bryant (Hellie Novotny), Margaret Wycherly (Ludmilla Novotny), Tonio Selwart (Chief of Gestapo Kurt Haas), Alexander Granach (Inspector Alois Gruber), Reinhold Schünzel (Inspector Ritter), Jonathan Hale (Dedic)

Film dramas “ripped from the headlines” have a mixed track record. Making a drama about an event that happened so recently the dust has hardly settled leaves you open to making decisions in your film that could later be exposed as mistakes. Few films in history are more headline-ripping though than Hangmen Must Die!, a film about the assassination of Heydrich, the planning of which must have started almost immediately after the news broke.

Dr Svoboda (Brian Donlevy) is on the run in Prague after shooting dead Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s deputy in occupied Czechoslovakia. After a chance meeting, he pleads with Mascha Novotny (Anna Lee) for shelter – but this only serves to endanger her family, particularly her father Professor Novotny (Walter Brennan), in the affair. Meanwhile the Gestapo, led by Alois Gruber (Alexander Granach) investigates and the Nazis take hundreds of Czech notables, including Novotny, into custody as hostages. The Germans promise to execute hostages until the assassin is handed over.

First things first: unlike 2016’s Anthropoid, this film is a complete work of fiction. It is first and foremost a film made by European exiles in the middle of World War II to sing the praises of those defying the march of fascism. Heydrich only appears at the start of the film, played with a sinister, mincing campness by von Twardowski (a notable German socialist exile). Despite this, the arrogance and cruelty of Heydrich is hammered home, with his lines delivered in a bullying, untranslated German. The film uses a dark humour to stress his villainy, Heydrich nonchalantly strolls down a crowded meeting room, forcing those in attendance to remain saluting, swivelling to follow Heydrich, until he finally settles and returns the salute allowing them to relax. It’s a neat little joke and perhaps one of the clear signs of the hand of co-writer Bertolt Brecht. Take a look at the sequence (and rest of the movie as well!) here:

That’s one of the film’s other claims to fame: noted director Fritz Lang worked with fellow exile Brecht to craft the script. As such, the film is a slightly unusual mix between the left-wing, idealist politics of Brecht and the film noir style of Lang. The primary aim is to serve as a propaganda tool, and the courage and bravery of the Czech people is repeatedly stressed. With a few key exceptions, the Czechs are loyal, honest and willing to make huge sacrifices. Lang films this with a stirring simplicity, low angle shots, skilful use of light, and dynamically involving crowd scenes, bringing this courage visually to life. Brechtian touches, such as a crowd of Prague locals confronting Mascha (with increasing menace) when she considers betraying the assassin to save her father’s life, are perfectly complemented by Lang’s skilful film making. The film’s final tribute to the heroes of Europe, with the people of Prague joining together to sing a hymn to the fallen hostages, surges with a left-wing Brechtian political outrage.

What’s most unusual about the film – and one of its problems – is the curious mixture of tones. Perhaps because of its film noir styles, perhaps because of the American accents of many of the Czech characters (interestingly, the exiles overwhelmingly play villainous Germans), this film becomes a sort of behind-the-lines 1930s hard boiled gangster thriller – with the difference that the cops are the baddies. The Gestapo go about their jobs like gangster gumshoes from Hollywood movies. The Czech people, for all their gumption, look and act like streetwise New Yorkers. It’s an odd tone that takes some getting used to.

On top of that, the film shows several hostages (including characters we get to know) shot due to the refusal to hand over the assassin. I can’t watch this without thinking about how little it gets near the true horror of Nazism. The Gestapo here are relative pussycats, compared to the brutal lengths they went to in real life: the Gestapo chief even prudishly talks about a need for evidence. Compared to the thousands of civilians killed in real life, this is nothing. The Germans even essentially “give up” in a coda and accept a defeat. This makes terrific propaganda of course, but it just ties into the sense that this film doesn’t even begin to touch the villainy of the occupation. It makes for better entertainment, but it’s strange to watch today.

Finally, the last problem with the film is the rather mixed performers. Put simply, Brian Donlevy is totally miscast as the assassin, a B-movie actor who is far too American for the part, and incapable of giving the role the depth it needs. Svobada just isn’t interesting or sympathetic. Anna Lee is similarly bland, while the less said about O’Keefe as her fiancée, the better. Not one of the American actors is completely convincing in their role, although Walter Brennan is close to an exception, effectively gentle and wise as the brave Novotny. The best performances are from the exiles, with Graucher in particular excellent as a shrewd, soulless, corrupt detective, with no guilt about the means he uses.

The film culminates in a rather hard-to-follow and far-fetched attempt by the resistance to frame a collaborator (played with weaselly self-importance by Gene Lockhart) for the crime. This plot tends to meander, but there are several very good scenes showing the Czech resistance, including a wonderful sequence in a restaurant that goes from a sit-down, to an unveiling, to a shootout. Lang skilfully builds the tension throughout, and the creeping relentlessness of hostage executions and Svoboda’s attempts to run from the Gestapo are very well done. Sequences such as Svobda ducking into a movie cinema, only to find a keen collaborator inside, sizzle with excitement.

In fact there are many excellent moments in the film. It is beautifully filmed, with a gorgeous use of expressionist shadow and camera angles to create a claustrophobic, doom laden world. Lang’s strength of plotting by-and-large works very well. Though it can’t bring across the full horror of Nazi occupation, the dread of the Gestapo is clear in the movie. “Enhanced interrogation” is underplayed, but it is sinisterly embodied in the fate that befalls an arthritic shopkeeper. We see him exhausted, but not broken, in a prison cell, forced to constantly pick up a chair under interrogation with her weakened hands. Later, a character throws himself out of a window rather than risk being interrogated to reveal information about the resistance. The hostages are brutally dispatched, with the level of panic, fear, collaboration or defiance having no impact on their fates.

It’s a fractured film, overlong but very well filmed, which creates a brilliant tribute to the strength of the Czech people. Trim 20 minutes off it and I think this could have been a great thriller. It’s a strange mix of acting styles, but the marriage of Brecht and Lang works very well (it’s a real shame Brecht never made another film) and the drama of the film carries it over the strange bumps in the road. Brecht, by the way, spent the rest of his life rubbishing Lang, as he couldn’t understand why Lang put all the plot and character into a movie Brecht saw as being purely political.

It’s in many ways a strange historical monument – perhaps its makers couldn’t imagine the depths of Nazi atrocities, perhaps Hollywood wasn’t willing to bring such horrors to the screen. It’s not perfect, but in its own way, it’s a piece of cinematic history.

Good (2008)

Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs are conflicted brothers in arms in this all too familiar (in every sense) Nazi Germany story

Director: Vincente Amorim

Cast: Viggo Mortensen (John Halder), Jason Isaacs (Maurice Israel Glückstein), Jodie Whittaker (Anne), Steven Mackintosh (Freddie), Mark Strong (Philipp Bouhler), Gemma Jones (Halder’s Mother), Anastasia Hille (Helen Halder), Steven Elder (Adolf Eichmann)

Is there a more overused quote than Edmund Burke’s “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”? It’s virtually become a cliché and can be heard spouted with chin-stroking smugness in everything from Law & Order episodes, opening title cards to crappy action films to the message-boards of the internet. If Good can have any claim to history (and it probably can’t), it can say that it’s the film of the phrase.

Our Good Man is John Halder (Viggo Mortensen). Our Evil is Nazism. Halder is a literature professor in 1930s Germany. He’s written a novel in support of euthanasia: this brings him to the attention of the party authorities, who need intellectual support for their own plans. Halder accepts an honorary rank in the SS – and from there it’s compromise after compromise that leads to the Holocaust. His good and bad angels are his new young wife Anne (Jodie Whittaker), who loves the advantages party membership brings, and his Jewish best friend Maurice (Jason Isaacs), whose situation goes from bad to worse.

It’s a very, very earnest film which wears its heart on its sleeve. Which is the main problem – the film-makers were clearly desperate to “tell it right” and stay true to the original play – but the whole idea comes across slightly outdated, obvious and far too familiar. Whatever point the play had to make when first staged in 1981, has now been said and done to exhaustion. Despite the care and attention, there now isn’t much originality or freshness. As such, it never really rouses any feelings.

The story it tells of its lead’s reluctant seduction into being an active Nazi can probably be charted fairly accurately without watching the film. The plot device of the Jewish friend feels too on the nose and obvious (compelling as Jason Isaacs is in the role), and the betrayals by inaction follow well-established patterns. The few moments of interest are shied away from – when Halder first puts on his SS uniform (to take grudging part in Kristallnacht) his wife is so aroused she performs oral sex on him: it could have been an interesting point about the sexual seduction of power and the brilliant design of Nazi regalia, but the film rushes over it.

I was also not sure about the device of Halder haunted by visions of various figures he encounters lip-synching to scratchy recordings of Mahler songs. You can guess where this going when you see the film, but it’s a device that is a little unclear. It’s meant to signpost moments of Halder’s moral disintegration (Halder flirts with his new-wife-to-be? The music. He accepts SS rank? The music. Congratulations from Goebbels? The music. He abandons his friend? The music.). It’s final reveal, an echo from Halder’s future trip to Auschwitz is interesting but not exactly profound or revealing – and the device is heavy handed in its use in any case. It’s clear Halder is a failed man and this device doesn’t tell us anything about that.

Despite the film’s predictability and lecturing, it does have good moments. Many of the scenes of Nazi brutality are shot with an affecting simplicity (I admired the cold, POV shooting of Halder’s visit to the arrival point of a camp implied to be Auschwitz), and much of the acting is on form. Mortensen holds the film together well as the deluded moral weakling blown by every wind; he avoids any temptation for histrionics and is happy to make his character detestable in his weakness (this is a film that challenges us to accept that we would probably be as cowardly as Halder is). This in turn gives more freedom for fireworks from Isaacs, who delivers a passionate and intense performance of angry powerlessness. Whittaker is impressive in a shallowly written part as Halder’s ambitious young wife. Mark Strong’s cameo as a suave party big-wig is great, as is Steven Mackintosh’s role as a genial SS officer, moaning about his career.

It’s got its moments but this is a stagy, talky film that tells a familiar old story without panache or originality. It settles for making the same point over and over again. It bravely offers no possible redemption for Halder at all, but his general story is so familiar it never engages as much as it should. Essentially the film’s script could just as easily have had its characters endlessly repeat Burke’s famous phrase – in fact, the one surprise in the film is that neither the quote nor Edmund Burke ever gets name checked. Very, very, very noble but lacks life.