Films on Sunday: 1917 and Hitler & the Nazis: Evil on Trial
Here is some heat of world wars to cool you down. The beautiful and moving 1917 film is now streaming; Evil on Trial is a new documentary series rich with irony a few days ahead of Biden/Trump debate.
1917 (Netflix, 2019)
The First 9 Minutes of 1917 (in One Unbroken Shot) | Own now on Digital, 3/24 on Blu-fray & DVD ; https:youtu.be/lSoPy316
Two young soldiers, both British lance corporals, are charged with a perilous mission: carry a message from their unit across German booby-trapped No Man’s Land to a forward unit, the 2nd Devons, which is about to embark on a suicide mission in France if not ordered to stand down. The Germans were engaged in a ruse, having pulled back and severed communication lines. But there were aerial views; British military command could see the German side reinforce itself, its army was poised to overwhelm a British attack.
Addiing urgency, one of the two messengers, Tom Blake (Dean Charles Chapman) has an older brother in the 2nd Devons whose life he hopes to save. The other messenger, Will Schofield, is acted by solemn, young George Mackay. The camera tracks his every move for two hours so that we hold him close; Schofield is our stand-in for brother, husband, father, son; his safety and his mission become ours. The dispatch from General Erinmore must reach Colonel Mackenzie before sixteen-hundred lives are risked/lost.
Sam Mendes assembled Britain’s actor luminaries for brief cameos along the trek between camps — parental/authority figures. General Erinmore, who originates the mission, is Colin Firth. Colonel Mackenzie, the message recipient, is Benedict Cumberbatch. In between are Mark Strong, who advises there be witnesses when the message is delivered (some soldiers may be in it for the fight and ignore the stand down order). Andrew Scott appears en route, a jaded lieutenant who grouses to the passers by, and Richard Madden, an officer grieving his brother’s death.
Obstacles multiply. There are dead horses and dead soldiers in the mud. A German-set tripwire is triggered by a rat, setting off an humongous explosion. A German plane is shot down and crashes too close. A bridge blows up, forcing Schofield to climb on its shredded girders to get across the river where he is knocked out. He encounters a young woman caring for an infant who tends his wounds. He empties his backpack of food and a canteen of milk for them but must rush onward — time is about to run out. He jumps into a river to escape rifle shot and rides over a waterfall where he is showered by the blossoms of broken cherry trees, arriving at the 2nd Devons with soldiers gathered while a prayer is being sung (“I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger”). He then forces his way through trenches and runs on open ground (the “Schofield run”) to Colonel Mackenzie’s shelter and delivers the urgent dispatch. Only then does Schofield make his way to a tree where he rests, and takes out photos of his family. Written on one:come back to us. We leave him there.
The film’s reception says one thing but some prestigious critics differ. It dazzled with award nominations and wins. Yet prominent critics were unimpressed, one calling it “preening showmanship”, finding the single long shot of the young men a gimmick.
On the other hand, the camera has made the viewer care deeply, especially about Schofield. He simply belongs to us as victims/protagonists don’t in movies. And all the tiny references to life — they aren’t prominent, but they are felt. In short, a wonderful film.
Its power comes from several sources: director Sam Mendes grandfather’s WW1 stories, the award-winning, mind-boggling cinematography of Roger Deakins, and those fleeting moments of humanity that gave fragments of dignity to a war without meaning — the cherry blossoms, the young woman and child, a song of prayer, the trees you lean against or tower over you in an arbor. A TIME review 12/24/2019 describes the film’s “inherent devotion to life and beauty, individual moments of life grasped and held tight…the only real protection we have against the pointlessness of war.”
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_(2019_film)
Hitler & the Nazis: Evil on Trial (Netflix, 2024)
This six-part series offers nothing new about WW2 but is a rousing true-crime version of how it went. Film has delved into aspects of WW2 (see list at end for favorites); but this 6+ hours is an absorbing and suspenseful record of Germany’s rise and fall. It is almost all framed by the copy and spoken words of reporter/author William Shirer. He covered Hitler’s rise from 1934, left in 1940 facing Nazi threats, and returned to cover the Nuremberg trial, the Nazis defeated.
The work of award-winning producer Joe Berlinger (you’ve seen his films)1 would like to set some people straight. A study found that one in ten think Jews caused the holocaust, 41% of all respondents and 66% of millennials didn’t know what Auschwitz is.2
Berlinger’s colorful doc series differs entirely from the droning b&w originals. He blends reenactments seamlessly with restored, colorized, original film into a true crime format of Hitler’s life (1889-1945) and the trial of the still-living guilty. 3
[The subtext here is the rise and hope-to-bring to account D.J. Trump, it being timely to compare the antics and deterioration (early dementia? )of our own would-be dictator with the dictator who Trump thinks ‘did some good things’.]
Berlinger uses interviews with several historians, never-televised live trial footage, and William Shirer’s own words from his books: Diary, The Nightmare Years, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, shifting between the past and Shirer’s present as he reports Hitler’s rise and demise.
Why Nuremberg? It is where Hitler hurled threats at the world, brought horror to its city folk, and was bombed into ruins by the Allies. This was the first ever international trial of war criminals, writes Shirer: “These butchers of whole people, plunderers of whole states” must now answer for their crimes (estimated between 35 & 60 million lives). A court of American, British, French, and Russian judges was convened; over four-hundred newspersons came; we watch.
[WW2 spoiled] Hitler’s story began in unhappy youth, beatings by his father, failure as an artist (he could draw buildings, not people). But his innate visual sense became his future. He designed spectacle; he recreated himself as a demi-god, wowing women and youth despite his plain looks. (None of Hitler’s close associates resembled the Nazi ideal of blond heroic stature either.)
Conditions following WW1 paved Hitler’s path to destabilize the new Weimar democracy and create an opening for his rise. Humiliating terms of surrender had alienated now out-of-work youth, leading them to Ernst Rohm’s SA, his Brown Shirt movement. Rohm, an army officer devoted to Hitler, mobilized the disaffected into thuggish units. These nasty boys were turned out to rough up or kill Jews, Communists, Socialists, LGBT’s, academics, et al, who flourished during the democratic Weimar 1920’s with the flowering of sexual and social liberation. But Hitler needed chaos to rise; SA mayhem was his on demand.
By 1921, Hitler headed the German Workers, renamed the Nazi party. He had early contempt for the law, wanting to do away with democracy in favor of dictatorship. [Project 2025 of today’s Republican Party has the same end in mind.]
But Hitler went too far, using the Munich Beer Hall putsch, 11/1923, to attempt a coup and declare the Weimar government dead. At his trial, he so impressed the judge that he served less than a year, using it to dictate Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to fellow Nazi prisoner Rudolf Hess. On release Hitler had become a national figure with a new plan to climb within the system. [Trump’s Jan 6 ‘putsch’ did not work either; Republicans are now powering up through school boards, state legislatures, court appointments and private sources.]
The U.S.stock market crash of ‘29 was wind at Hitler’s back, spreading poverty to Germany and worldwide. Hitler used the SA to amplify chaos and misery. [Poor Edith Crawley of Downton Abbey lost her fiancé to the Brown Shirts.]
President Hindenburg won the next election but the octogenarian was out of his depth dealing with SA disorder. Hitler could control it, but Hindenburg thought he was a charleton. Another minister, Franz von Papen, sold Hindenburg that as chancellor, Hitler could tamp disorder down but be manageable as part of a coalition. The coalition cabinet that took office in ‘33 put Hitler in power, but von Papen was duped, Hitler could not be managed.
Hitler’s next moment was a fire in the Reichstag (1933) which he blamed on Communists and Socialists. “We have been stabbed in the back!” he shouted, exulting in victim rhetoric, persuading Hindenburg and parliament to suspend civil rights.
The Reichstad fire decree became a founding Nazi document. Hitler then began to destroy opposition parties. So many were arrested that the first camp was built, Dachau, with SS police as guards under bespectacled Heinrich Himmler. Soon Rohm’s SA was in competition with Himmler’s SS; Himmler and Goering prodded Hitler to back the more dignified SS. Without qualm he staged a 3-day murder siege (6/39-7/2,1934), later renamed the Night of the Long Knives. SS police shot Rohm along with other random opposition leaders on Hitler’s list (85-1000 casualties). Hitler’s clever PR chief, Joseph Goebbels, rolled out a campaign saying that Hitler stopped a coup by the gay Rohm and other gay SA leaders. No problem: Hitler easily gave up the stunned Rohm who had done so much to help him rise; Rohm’s homosexuality was just fine until it wasn’t.
Hindenburg died in 1934 and Hitler declared himself head of government. He was now officially free from constraint and able to plan for war and land acquisition. He began an open economic campaign against Jews, making it law in 1935.
Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago was an estate in the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof, that suited his spare work schedule. He invited subordinates to come up with policies to Nazify the population. Eugenics, the superiority of certain racial characteristics, was new and fashionable; the Nazis studied our Jim Crow for how to suppress the unwanted.
Hitler set about building an energetic society called “Strength through Joy”. And he began to prepare for war; conquest would yield more living space for his industrious, athletic new regime. Hitler did have one very sour moment. The 11th Olympics in Berlin were stolen by U.S. runner Jesse Owens, a black man, a champion. The rage on Hitler’s face is unmistakable.
By 1936 Himmler was building next generation camps to imprison asocials: gay men, alcoholics, petty criminals. Worshipful flatterer Albert Speer built glorious models of the great new Germania with huge noble buildings. Goering, Hitler’s number two, was charged with war-readiness in four years. Austrian iron and other deposits were coveted. The army marched on Austria, annexing it in 1938 to wild acclaim with no opposition.
The German Jewish population was now on the receiving end of escalating abuse. In Nov 1938, the SS, SA, and Hitler youth staged a pogrom, attacking people, shops, synagogues. Kristall- nache, the Night Of Broken Glass, was Hitler’s moment to announce the elimination of the Jews, repeating it five times. Thousands were beaten, imprisoned, forced to give up their property.
And onward through Poland and the murder of 1.5 million with guns, but that took too long. The solution became the final solution; six camps killing on an industrial scale. But Hitler under-estimated polyglot America. The Allies began destroying Germany from the air. The Battle of the Bulge in the wintery Ardennes forest (12/1944-1/1945) was fatal; and the Soviet army, our ally, took out their vengeance on German women.
Speer told Hitler in 1945 it was over; five million plus German men were dead. The liberators told what they saw to the world for the first time. The Russian army had reached Berlin; in Hitler’s Berlin bunker the shellfire was audible. The Fuhrer stormed and shook as much of his hierarchy redeployed in seeming betrayal. On April 28-29, Eva Braun and Hitler married, a wedding breakfast followed, then underground, they suicided. The Goebbles’ killed their six children, then themselves. Himmler, in British custody, also died by suicide.
At the Nuremberg trial, the prime evidence was documented in Nazi files and tapes. Three were acquitted including von Papen. Speer got twenty years. Twelve got death by hanging. One of them, Goering, took cyanide first. Shirer:There was, after all, some sort of rough justice in our world.
Today the lessons of Germany seem lost in a fog; thirty neo-Nazi groups flourish in the U.S. A new film about Trump has been widely picked up abroad, but so far, U.S.distributors are (to date) afraid to touch it. Retribution is threatened. And here we are.
Biden-Harris HQ posted this graphic on X from Politico.com
Notes:
(1)Some Berlinger documentary crime hits:
The Ted Bundy Tapes, Paradise Lost, Metallica, Crude, Under African Skies, Whitey, etc. In 2022, Bloomberg described Berlinger as a “crime hit factory’’ for Netflix whose work had “redefined crime documentaries as a vehicle for social justice.”
(2) A study in 2018 produced for the Conference on Jewish Claims against Germany.
(3) https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-netflixs-new-docuseries-hitler-and-the-nazis-evil-on-trial-aims-to-reach-gen-z/. (movie trailer is embedded )
More WW2 to stream:
https://ew.com/movies/best-world-war-ii-movies/
(22 best WW2 movies of all time; Entertainment, June 2024)
A few favorites of mine:
We were the Lucky Ones (Hulu,2024) A well-to-do Polish family of 7 are forced to disperse world wide but survive and reunite a decade later.
Munich:On the Edge of War (Netflix, 2021) a spy thriller about England’s ceding the Sudetenland and the discovery of Hitler’s far-reaching conquest plans. George Mackay and German actor Jannis Niewohner are former Oxford college mates now diplomats in respective England and Germany, and Jeremy Irons as P.M. Neville Chamberlain, delaying going to war so England could arm itself.
CONSPIRACY (2001, MAX) Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth, Brendan Coyle, etc., is a gripping, powerful depiction of the elegant roundtable at the Wansee estate 1/1942 convened by Reinhard Heydrich to persuade the holdouts into agreeing to Hitler’s final solution, a policy already under execution.
ANTHROPOID ; 2016 film led by Cillian Murphy & Jamie Dornan about their assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
Schindler’s List, (1993), S. Spielberg’s Oscar winning story of a German Industrialist who protected and saved as many of his Jewish factory workers as he could. Spielberg filmed in Shindler’s factory which has been turned into a museum, drawing thousands of visitors and helping to revitalize Krakow’s Jewish population.
Dunkirk (2017) Christopher Nolan chronicles the evacuation/retreat in 1940 of thousands of Allied soldiers from France across the channel to England aided by hundreds of civilian small boats.
Generation War, (2013), Amazon Prime, a German series about five friends on different paths through the war, popular and controversial in Germany.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Netflix) and The Exception (MAX) are very fine adventure/rom-coms related to WW2. The excellent I’ll Find you formerly on Starz can be rented on Prime. World on Fire, after two gripping series on PBS, has unfortunately been cancelled.