In Germany, a Hitler Comedy Goes Over With a Thud
Perhaps it was inevitable that the first German-made film comedy about Hitler would get a mixed reception in Germany — a country still haunted, six decades after the fall of the Third Reich, by the mystery of how this strange madman once held it in thrall.
What is more surprising and revealing, perhaps, is the nature of the critiques, which have lambasted the movie but not the idea that Hitler could be the subject of a comedy.
The advance buzz about “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” which opens here Thursday, has been almost uniformly negative, with German critics and commentators proclaiming the film naïve, bizarre, vulgar and — most damning of all — not funny.
“One laughs about two and a half times during the film,” Michael Althen, a critic for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote, comparing it unfavorably to classic Nazi satires like Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” or Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”
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What is more surprising and revealing, perhaps, is the nature of the critiques, which have lambasted the movie but not the idea that Hitler could be the subject of a comedy.
The advance buzz about “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” which opens here Thursday, has been almost uniformly negative, with German critics and commentators proclaiming the film naïve, bizarre, vulgar and — most damning of all — not funny.
“One laughs about two and a half times during the film,” Michael Althen, a critic for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote, comparing it unfavorably to classic Nazi satires like Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” or Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”