HITLER: THE LAST TEN DAYS
Directed by Ennio de Concini
Written by Ennio de Concini, Maria Pia Fusco, Wolfgang Reinhardt
Starring Alec Guinness
Released in 1973
Directed by Ennio de Concini
Written by Ennio de Concini, Maria Pia Fusco, Wolfgang Reinhardt
Starring Alec Guinness
Released in 1973
If you took the Velvet Underground, mixed them with the Marquis de Sade, laced them with Lord Byron, stirred in some Idi Amin, blended it up with the more closeted aspects of 19th century English bourgeois sophistication and added the party cast from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, you still would not approximate the extreme decadence of Adolf Hitler and company during their last hurrah in the infamous bunker just before the Third Reich was crushed by the Allies. Strangled up inside due to massive doses of amphetamines and hose cement, the Fuhrer and his party of Captain Hoffman, General Krebs, Hanna Reitsch, Eva Braun, Josef Goebbels, Martin Bormann and the others all coalesced in a suicide party of degenerate, absurd, psychotic, racist, delusional, cruel and jolly activities that sharply contrasted with the holocaust and world war raging on above them.
The 1973 film, Hitler: The Last Ten Days, is about this time in the bunker with Adolf, although we are given the occasional relief from the claustrophobic enclave with brief shots of the masses shouting "Zeig Heil!" and with the uninterred bodies of the Reich's millions of victims and as such it would seem that this was an important movie to be made as well as to view.
Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Alec Guinness gives us an Adolf Hitler with all the deranged intensity we've come to expect and Simon Ward does fine as Captain Hoffman, the man whose notes became the book that became the Ennio De Concini screenplay. Diane Cilenta (aka Mrs. Sean Connery) scares the hell out of us as Hanna Reitsch and Doris Kunstmann as Eva Braun is satisfactorily pathetic. We get a strong sense of the humored confusion these people exercise as Hitler barks out one psychotic order after another and at one point even admits that he knew Germany was defeated two years before it actually happened. No, the acting is fine, the staging is adequate, the claustrophobia works, the horror of the evil comes across as intended.
The problem with De Concini's movie--he also directed--is that there is no character development and hence the decomposition of those characters becomes ultimately meaningless.
I'm going to just sit here patiently until you come up with what's bothering you about that last sentence. Take your time.
Aha! It was Hitler! you scream. We all know about him so there wasn't any need for character development and besides the movie was almost two hours long as it was.
Actually this film was sorely in need of character development because whether or not one possesses the historical knowledge to grasp the complexities of these people, because this really is a movie and because the audience cannot help but be aware of that--as opposed to something that is happening in "real time," stock footage of Hitler's victims is somehow inadequate to forming an appreciation for the magnitude of the man's degeneracy.
Here was a man who took corporate backing, who came to power under the auspices of democracy, and who was nothing more or less than a failed artist of moderate intelligence, and he made himself into the most profligate mass murderer of all time. Here was a man who embraced cruelty for its own sake, a man many thought of as a messiah, and a man whose name is synonymous with evil, and his devolution during the last ten days of his life has no historic context whatsoever because we are given no motivation for the actions of the Soviets and the Americans, just as we cannot understand the lust Hitler's admirers had for him.
Whether through the use of flashbacks, dream sequences or masturbatory fantasies, this film needs some means of establishing who these people were so that we can properly despise them for what they have become. After all, if "I am he as you are he as you are me" really is true--as I believe it is--then the so-called defeat of the Axis forces by the Allies led inevitably to the transmogrifying of the Allies into the Axis. It therefore behooves us all to understand the nature of this evil in order to diagnose and remove it from our own systems, both personal and public.
What this movie does get right, however, is our sense of disgust at the unimaginable hypocrisy of these German bastards. We very much get it when, near the end, Hitler marries Braun and the cleric who performs the cloistered ceremony is required by German law to ask Hitler if his ancestry is pure and if he has contracted any social diseases. Here is a bunker full of people who dismissed as bourgeois--as in "petty" bourgeois--notions of marriage and other middle class conventions giving into those demands once it is apparent to even the dumbest among them that the end is near. In other words, certain aspects of this film are very effective despite the entirety of the movie being a failure due to the lack of dimensions to the characters. And that's too bad because this is exactly the kind of subject that our contemporary society--with its plethora of parasites ranging from Gingrich to Koch to Romney to Paul and the fetus-worshipping Santorum all vying to be the next Adolf in the sense of luring corporate backers and then taking them over--needs to learn about so we can fathom the present stench of evil the Newts and Mitts spew forth. Hitler: The Last Ten Days should have been that film. That it was not opens the opportunity for you to make your own.
The 1973 film, Hitler: The Last Ten Days, is about this time in the bunker with Adolf, although we are given the occasional relief from the claustrophobic enclave with brief shots of the masses shouting "Zeig Heil!" and with the uninterred bodies of the Reich's millions of victims and as such it would seem that this was an important movie to be made as well as to view.
Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Alec Guinness gives us an Adolf Hitler with all the deranged intensity we've come to expect and Simon Ward does fine as Captain Hoffman, the man whose notes became the book that became the Ennio De Concini screenplay. Diane Cilenta (aka Mrs. Sean Connery) scares the hell out of us as Hanna Reitsch and Doris Kunstmann as Eva Braun is satisfactorily pathetic. We get a strong sense of the humored confusion these people exercise as Hitler barks out one psychotic order after another and at one point even admits that he knew Germany was defeated two years before it actually happened. No, the acting is fine, the staging is adequate, the claustrophobia works, the horror of the evil comes across as intended.
The problem with De Concini's movie--he also directed--is that there is no character development and hence the decomposition of those characters becomes ultimately meaningless.
I'm going to just sit here patiently until you come up with what's bothering you about that last sentence. Take your time.
Aha! It was Hitler! you scream. We all know about him so there wasn't any need for character development and besides the movie was almost two hours long as it was.
Actually this film was sorely in need of character development because whether or not one possesses the historical knowledge to grasp the complexities of these people, because this really is a movie and because the audience cannot help but be aware of that--as opposed to something that is happening in "real time," stock footage of Hitler's victims is somehow inadequate to forming an appreciation for the magnitude of the man's degeneracy.
Here was a man who took corporate backing, who came to power under the auspices of democracy, and who was nothing more or less than a failed artist of moderate intelligence, and he made himself into the most profligate mass murderer of all time. Here was a man who embraced cruelty for its own sake, a man many thought of as a messiah, and a man whose name is synonymous with evil, and his devolution during the last ten days of his life has no historic context whatsoever because we are given no motivation for the actions of the Soviets and the Americans, just as we cannot understand the lust Hitler's admirers had for him.
Whether through the use of flashbacks, dream sequences or masturbatory fantasies, this film needs some means of establishing who these people were so that we can properly despise them for what they have become. After all, if "I am he as you are he as you are me" really is true--as I believe it is--then the so-called defeat of the Axis forces by the Allies led inevitably to the transmogrifying of the Allies into the Axis. It therefore behooves us all to understand the nature of this evil in order to diagnose and remove it from our own systems, both personal and public.
What this movie does get right, however, is our sense of disgust at the unimaginable hypocrisy of these German bastards. We very much get it when, near the end, Hitler marries Braun and the cleric who performs the cloistered ceremony is required by German law to ask Hitler if his ancestry is pure and if he has contracted any social diseases. Here is a bunker full of people who dismissed as bourgeois--as in "petty" bourgeois--notions of marriage and other middle class conventions giving into those demands once it is apparent to even the dumbest among them that the end is near. In other words, certain aspects of this film are very effective despite the entirety of the movie being a failure due to the lack of dimensions to the characters. And that's too bad because this is exactly the kind of subject that our contemporary society--with its plethora of parasites ranging from Gingrich to Koch to Romney to Paul and the fetus-worshipping Santorum all vying to be the next Adolf in the sense of luring corporate backers and then taking them over--needs to learn about so we can fathom the present stench of evil the Newts and Mitts spew forth. Hitler: The Last Ten Days should have been that film. That it was not opens the opportunity for you to make your own.
