Posts Tagged ‘Nazism’

Desperate Journey (2024)

Dir: Annabel Jankel | War Biopic | UK/Hungarian

Reviewed by Peter Herbert

Viewers with long memories may recall the 1942 Raoul Walsh/Errol Flynn film Desperate Journey in which the crew of a doomed British bomber escape from Nazi captors out of Germany.

A new film with the same title directed by Annabel Jankel has a plot line that also appears not a million miles removed from standard film tropes of war time set films. Both films are polished studio entertainments with above average budgets and production values, inspired by factual incidents from the WW2 era, providing a degree of fact to underline dramatic fiction.

The source of the latest Desperate Journey is the true story of Freddy Knoller who as a teenage boy was separated from his Jewish family in 1938 during the rise of Nazi fascism and managed against the odds to survive before arriving in England where he lived to the age of 100 and was able to tell his story of courage and resilience.

The story is described as a flashback as to how he disguised his Jewish origins, worked as a form of youthful bouncer pimp in a nightclub frequented by Nazis, made enough money to pay for fake identity papers and had a romantic liaison which bought about his capture by Nazis. The drama is framed by what happened to him during the final violent liberation of Germany from the Nazi reign of terror.

The film is sensitively acted by Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen as Freddy Knoller with well-observed cameos from a range of actors including Niamh Cusack and Steven Berkoff who bring to life scenes with a moral awareness of what anyone will do, to survive trauma.

Set designs for the production filmed in Hungary are convincing with well observed details including a Hitchcockian sequence demonstrating how difficult it can be to kill a person. Stylish and beautiful cabaret numbers at times appear too polished (the director is noted for Talking Heads/Max Headroom music videos) although the script is also deceptive.

Desperate Journey benefits from the writing skills of Michael Radford who directed Another Time Another Place in 1986 which sensitively observed the integration of a refugee into a hostile foreign country during WW2.

Desperate Journey has a cinema film scale and scope beyond most current Television / streaming based WW2 dramas and Jankel manages to escape most of the melodramatic sentimentality of Steve McQueen’s Blitz. This is largely achieved through the sensitive handling of performances, effective edits and impressive camerawork by the Hungarian cameraman Gergely Poharnok.

The true facts of the story as revealed during the final credit titles provide underlying resonance for a film finely balancing fact and fiction for essentially an entertainment with a message aimed at a contemporary mainstream audience. Pbh v

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS

Riefenstahl (2024)

Dir: Andres Veiel | Germany Doc 115′

The Holocaust is once again revisited in this new documentary about the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), one of the 20th century’s most controversial women filmmakers (along with Liliana Cavani).

Simply called Riefenstahl it focuses on her relationship with Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler rather than her artistic output and technical skills and the image she had created for herself in post war Germany, as seen in the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl .

When Germans became mesmerised by the power of Hitler to make their country great again after the mass destruction of the First World War, Leni Riefenstahl was one of them. She remained a true believer in the party throughout her career and, according to seasoned documentarian Andreas Veiel (Bueys), may have contributed to at least one mass slaughter of Jews.

Andres Veiel (Beuys) uses evidence that has recently come to light in debunking Riefenstahl’s claim to be merely ‘a naive artist taken over by events’ during Hitler’s regime that provided much finance and commissioned her propagandist films (as it did for other creatives, such as the architect Albert Speer).

Veiel further claims Riefenstahl may have played a part in the September 1939 massacre of Polish Jews in Konskie during the German invasion of Poland when she was making a film commissioned by Hitler. Twenty two Polish were killed in the village but Riefenstahl later stated that her order to “get rid of the Jews’ simply referred to an instruction to move them off the set during filming.

Packed with fascinating insight and archive footage of Riefenstahl’s personal life and her interactions with key Nazis (only made public after the death of her husband in 2016), Riefenstahl also contains an interview from her 100th birthday, where she states that The Blue Light (1932) was her favourite film. The impressive film pictures the lissome director and actor scaling a rock face in search of the mysterious blue light that purportedly only appeared at full moon. The Blue Light was part of the Berg or Mountain films sub-genre popular at the time.

So quite apart from her talent as a filmmaker, Riefenstahl was clearly a feisty go-getter whose physical allure attracted the likes of Hitler who considered her an ideal example of Aryan womanhood. Riefenstahl herself describes rejecting the amorous advances of many a Nazi figure, and tells how Goebbels became obsessed with her. The Hungarian writer Krisztian Nyary also suggests she became close to her co-director Bela Balazs while they were working on The Blue Light. So clearly Riefenstahl was a vivacious woman who inflamed the curiosity – and potentially the envy – of both men and women. In this way any negative claim is more likely to stick to her in the era of ‘fake news’ where the past is being debated and re-examined with fresh, critical and often sceptical standpoint. In response to this Riefenstahl, simply states “I filmed the truth as it was then. Nothing more.”

Indeed Riefenstahl was fascinated by the human body and its potential for athleticism that translated into the ‘rhythm and movement’ style that was idiosyncratic of her sporting films such as Triumph and Olympia. Archive footage sees her visiting Africa’s Nuba tribe famous for their physical prowess in her early seventies where she honed her skills as a photographer and made the 1973 film The Last of the Nuba on location. Although the Nuba were clearly not blond and blue-eyed Aryans this all carries forward the Nazi ideal of peak fitness in the ideal of eradicating human deformities of all kinds to create a perfect race of Germans. But without naturally killing people isn’t this an ideal we should all be pursuing in an age where the health services are overburdened by the grossly obese?.

2025 marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War so films like this that question and re-examine the past and the role of propaganda on the international stage are once again becoming particularly relevant but we should also consider the past carefully and not try to view it merely from an uniquely 21st century perspective.

RIEFENSTAHL is released in UK & Irish cinemas 9th May 2025

 

Reunion (1989)

Dir: Jerry Schatzberg | Cast: Jason Robards, Christien Anholt, Samuel West, Francoise Fabian, Maureen Kerwin | Thriller 110’

Obviously deeply felt by both writer (Harold Pinter from a novel by Fred Uhlman) and director, immaculately designed on what seems to be a lavish budget by veteran Alexander Trauner (who appears early on playing the caretaker) and photographed in widescreen suffused in a nostalgiac glow by cameraman Bruno De Keyzer.

The leisurely pace at which Reunion unfolds conveys something of the gradualness with which the appalling reality overwhelms its characters, although the slow-burning first hour is disrupted by jarringly emphatic black & white inserts to keep reminding the audience of the calamity about to strike (as if they needed such nudging). Konradin’s credulous willingness to give a demagogic snake-oil salesman like Hitler the benefit of the doubt – “He really impressed me. He is totally sincere. He has such… he has true passion. I think he can save our country. He is our only hope.” – however remains depressingly familiar today.

But for the final, very abrupt, ‘surprise’ ending to work, the audience is assumed not to be able to recognise the ferrety face of Roland Freisler, occasionally seen although never identified by name (and ironically – as played by Roland Schäfer looking remarkably like John Malkovich in heavy eye-liner – relatively restrained compared to the actual bellowing maniac preserved for posterity in newsreels). And would it really have taken over forty years and a trip all the way back to the very school in Stuttgart were they were originally pupils for Henry to only now learn Konradin’s fate? @RichardChatten

Speer Goes to Hollywood (2020)

Dir/Wri: Vanessa Lapa | Doc 97′

Vanessa Lapa follows her expose on the life of Heinrich Himmler The Decent One with another illuminating Nazi portrait, this time of ‘Hitler’s architect’, ally and facilitator Albert Speer.

The Israeli filmmaker’s project came into existence via a chance meeting in a hotel which, on further examination, uncovered an eye-watering treasure trove of archive news footage, audio sources and photographs most of which have never seen the light of day until the present day.

In Lapa’s film Albert Speer (1905-1981) comes across as a cultured but rather narcissistic character who enjoyed a glamorous and comfortable existence as the Third Reich’s Minister of Armaments and War Production in the final years of the Second World War (1942-45). Hitler had wanted to be an architect himself but hadn’t the talents that Speer clearly possessed, so he used the charming and debonair designer as a conduit for his own ideas in constructing the built environment of his Nazi regime. Speer’s subtle charisma saw him through the Nuremberg Trials, convicted but bizarrely escaping the death sentence, this high-ranking official is pictured on the steps of the prison, after serving a two decade sentence, without a shred of remorse but with the victorious words: “See, I’m still good-looking after 20 years”.

During his confinement Speer re-imagined his life and re-wrote his own story claiming not to have been responsible for the overseeing of the gas chambers that led to Third Reich’s worst horrors. He also penned his 1970 best-selling memoir ‘Inside The Third Reich’ which captured the imagination of Hollywood. But on later scrutiny his self-whitewashed story emerged as ‘fake news’, according to the indomitable Lapa who sets out to debunk his version of events in this sleek, compelling and utterly fascinating film.

And not before time. Speer’s specious story is clearly ripe for re-examination. This suave and sinister man still remains unchallenged nearly forty years after his death. Lapa choses a buzzy and effective narrative device to showcase her study: Speer’s 1971 meetings with Jane Birkin’s brother, the scriptwriter Andrew Birkin (apparently a protégé of Stanley Kubrick) who was selected by Paramount to scope out the narrative for a putative film which was later abandoned, largely due to British director Carol Reed’s dubiety. Their informal discussions add subtle but sensational context to the photos and archives, as do the ‘fireside chats’ with Reed who offers his own critique on Speer’s version of the events as the two British film pros plough through 40 hours of Birkin’s recordings with the Nazi, in preparation for his script.

Reed is clearly sceptical, pouring scorn on Speer’s glib technique of painting himself as another ‘decent one’ despite his nefarious Nazi activities that led to the deaths of millions, not to mention the slave labour of the concentration camp victims who were used and abused in Hitler’s efforts to rebuild Berlin. On an equally sinister note, it also emerges that many of these high-ranking officials slipped off the radar and were re-deployed in other parts of the world where their specialist knowledge gleaned in the field of forced euthanasia (Aktion T4) became invaluable.

The film flips between the mind-boggling discussions between Birkin, Speer and Reed; the extraordinary recordings inside the courtrooms of the Nuremberg Trials; the archive footage on parade with the Nazis featuring Hitler and his henchmen, not to mention Albert Speer at leisure with his wife Margarete Weber in their soigné country villa. MT

PREMIERED AT BERLINALE 2020

 

 

 

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