Hey folks, Harry here with the latest from our chief NY man, he's every man's man. That's right, Mr. Sheldrake. He causes hearts to pitter and to patter and the sweet nothings he'll be whispering against our earlobes today will concern HITLER and a little bunker he went boom in. We've been hearing a lot about this film from our European spies for quite some time, but now the film is trying to win Foreign Oscar cred by screening throughout NY and L.A. for Academy voters. Sounds good according to Shelly here...
DER UNTERGANG
The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich (USA)
directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
written by Bernd Eichinger
original book by Hitler’s stenographer Traudl Junge
Sheldake reporting from midtown in New York, Times Square, the Forty Deuce in the city that will soon have a West Side stadium that nobody wants except the Jets, Real Estate Developers and the Mayor.
Tonight I caught a sneak of Der Untergang, the movie coming out of Germany about Adolph Hitler’s last days in the bunker with Eva Braun. Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) stars in this movie as the Fuhrer. The movie’s based on the memoirs of Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) and tries to show what happened as realistically as possible, especially in the details of how they lived out their last days in the bunker. It’s a depressing place to be because the war is over, they lost and they know it.
Bruno Ganz gives a good nuanced performance of a character that must be difficult to play, with all the history and movie history behind him. Hitler in this movie has three modes: raving loony, scary evil and grandfatherly. The first two modes serve to make sure that the third doesn’t humanize him. He does crazy things like try to call on Steiner’s troops for help (they don’t exist anymore) or order his generals to make impossible maneuvers or promise the new head of his (destroyed) air force a thousand new planes that don’t exist. Best crazy moment: when he and Speer (who looks great, waddya expect?) are mourning over the tabletop model of the city they’ll never build. Most scary moment: when Speer begs him to save the German people, and Hitler tells him, hey, they lost, they’ll get what they deserve. He doesn’t say it, but we think: and so will you, you son of a bitch.
Eva Braun, as shown in the film, is a woman who is desperately trying to distract herself from the doom that’s coming and whose character is in no way in touch with the gravity of her situation. She parties like its 1999 until the last possible moment, which makes as much sense as engaging in careful discussion about how to off yourself, which is what many of the other characters are doing in the meantime.
Trudle Junge, whose memoirs made the movie possible, is played as a 22 year old girl head over heels, in an creepy uncle sort of way, for the Fuhrer. She sticks with him until the last possible moment. In an interesting moment in the movie, after Hitler and Eva have killed themselves, when people go in to look we never see the bodies—a tacit acknowledgment that there were no admitted witnesses. But Trudle goes in afterwards and sees the blood and other evidence, and sees two bodies carted out covered by blankets – and we know that her testimony is the closest we’ll ever get to knowing (at least until DNA testing is done).
Funniest Catch22 moment in the film – a general reports to the bunker? “Why are you here?” he’s asked. “I’ve been ordered to report to be shot.” Then he’s placed in charge of the defense of Berlin. Most monstrous and tragic moment in the film: when Mrs. Goebbles tucks in the children for bed for the last time. The movie tracks several lesser characters in the hellish streets outside Berlin, too. Two of the most effective of these stories are that of a ten year old boy, fighting beside his dying comrades for the defense of a city about to fall,. for a Reich that he will never see survive. The other story is of a bureaucrat responsible for the care and feeding of the troops and, indirectly, of the civilians, a duty he stick to until the last.
The street scenes outside in the streets of a demolished Berlin are apocalyptic and truly frightening. This movie gave me the same feeling I’ve had during screenings of On The Beach: sadly waiting for a stupid doom that never had to happen. The movie is structured like a TV film with A, B and C stories, and it isn’t great cinema. It’s fitting in a way that it’s not. It’s just attempting to function for us as Trudle functioned for the readers of her book, as a simple, unadorned witness to history. Great cinema would have distracted from the simplicity of its historical record. It just shows us what happened, without ever becoming sentimental or compassionate over the miserable fate of those its depicting. We know they don’t deserve it, and so, it’s a relief to report, does the movie.
Mr. Sheldrake
New York, New York
