Hollywood's Losing Battle: Creating a Nicer Nazi
Some viewers may find the trailer for "Valkyrie" -- in which an eyepatch-wearing Tom Cruise plays would-be-Fuhrer-assassin Claus von Stauffenberg -- to be the funniest thing since "Springtime for Hitler." That would be unfair. "Valkyrie," from what we can tell, looks far funnier than "Springtime for Hitler."
This World War II thriller isn't meant to amuse, of course. But what can the viewer do? Confronted by the piratical-looking Cruise, waxing faux-Teutonic, one is simply overcome by involuntary hysteria. Which inadvertently proves something that needn't be proved at all: Mel Brooks is a genius.
What Brooks has always known is that the only foolproof way to put Nazis on screen is as the butt of jokes. Laugh at them, and steal their power. He did it with the "Springtime" number in "The Producers" (the original of which featured Kenneth Mars's hilariously unrepentant Nazi playwright, Franz Liebkind). He had drunken, helmet-wearing Germans singing cabaret songs with Lili Von Shtupp in "Blazing Saddles." He was, in a way, following the example of director Ernst Lubitsch, that great, Berlin-born, Hollywood-arriviste Jew, who in "To Be or Not to Be" (1942) gave us Sig Ruman, as the Third Reich's Col. Ehrhardt. "So -- they call me 'Concentration Camp' Ehrhardt!" the colonel says repeatedly and with great satisfaction.
The evil that had taken up residence in Lubitsch's birthplace could never accurately be captured in serious-minded fiction, not then. And seldom now. Better to render it an object of ridicule and, one hopes, impotent. (As if to make sure the corpse was really dead, Brooks later remade "To Be or Not to Be.")
Certainly, cinema can do some justice to the Holocaust, but it's usually when the victims get to speak for themselves ("Night and Fog," "Shoah," "The Diary of Anne Frank"). When we refer to certain events as "unspeakable" it's because words -- even screenplays -- fail us. And if we do speak about these things, it should be in the most cautious, considered terms. Certainly not for the purpose of popular entertainment, much less the enhancement of the careers of Messrs. Cruise and Bryan Singer, the director. The dangers include a trivializing of the Holocaust, a distorting of history and a humanizing of the bestial.
And yet, and yet . . . the film biz never learns, despite the lessons from Brooks, Lubitsch and a few others. (Two expat Austrians -- Otto Preminger acting, Billy Wilder writing and directing -- were responsible for the highly starched Col. von Scherbach in "Stalag 17," who couldn't help but be funny.) For all we know, Cruise may win an Oscar for playing von Stauffenberg, and God knows the Motion Picture Academy would love to give him one. Anyone who's made that much money for the industry is automatically deemed statue-worthy. But the figurative bronzing of a German officer -- even one who was highborn, devoutly Roman Catholic and opposed to the Nazi "creed" -- seems morally dicey, even for Hollywood. (Never mind that von Stauffenberg is most famous for failing to do the thing he set out to do.)
Read entire article at WaPo
This World War II thriller isn't meant to amuse, of course. But what can the viewer do? Confronted by the piratical-looking Cruise, waxing faux-Teutonic, one is simply overcome by involuntary hysteria. Which inadvertently proves something that needn't be proved at all: Mel Brooks is a genius.
What Brooks has always known is that the only foolproof way to put Nazis on screen is as the butt of jokes. Laugh at them, and steal their power. He did it with the "Springtime" number in "The Producers" (the original of which featured Kenneth Mars's hilariously unrepentant Nazi playwright, Franz Liebkind). He had drunken, helmet-wearing Germans singing cabaret songs with Lili Von Shtupp in "Blazing Saddles." He was, in a way, following the example of director Ernst Lubitsch, that great, Berlin-born, Hollywood-arriviste Jew, who in "To Be or Not to Be" (1942) gave us Sig Ruman, as the Third Reich's Col. Ehrhardt. "So -- they call me 'Concentration Camp' Ehrhardt!" the colonel says repeatedly and with great satisfaction.
The evil that had taken up residence in Lubitsch's birthplace could never accurately be captured in serious-minded fiction, not then. And seldom now. Better to render it an object of ridicule and, one hopes, impotent. (As if to make sure the corpse was really dead, Brooks later remade "To Be or Not to Be.")
Certainly, cinema can do some justice to the Holocaust, but it's usually when the victims get to speak for themselves ("Night and Fog," "Shoah," "The Diary of Anne Frank"). When we refer to certain events as "unspeakable" it's because words -- even screenplays -- fail us. And if we do speak about these things, it should be in the most cautious, considered terms. Certainly not for the purpose of popular entertainment, much less the enhancement of the careers of Messrs. Cruise and Bryan Singer, the director. The dangers include a trivializing of the Holocaust, a distorting of history and a humanizing of the bestial.
And yet, and yet . . . the film biz never learns, despite the lessons from Brooks, Lubitsch and a few others. (Two expat Austrians -- Otto Preminger acting, Billy Wilder writing and directing -- were responsible for the highly starched Col. von Scherbach in "Stalag 17," who couldn't help but be funny.) For all we know, Cruise may win an Oscar for playing von Stauffenberg, and God knows the Motion Picture Academy would love to give him one. Anyone who's made that much money for the industry is automatically deemed statue-worthy. But the figurative bronzing of a German officer -- even one who was highborn, devoutly Roman Catholic and opposed to the Nazi "creed" -- seems morally dicey, even for Hollywood. (Never mind that von Stauffenberg is most famous for failing to do the thing he set out to do.)