Banality of Evil, Part I

The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term "banality of evil" to account for Adolf Eichmann, the fugitive Nazi bureaucrat captured in Argentina and brought to Israel for a trial Arendt covered for the New Yorker magazine. Veteran director Margarethe von Trotta had the gutsy notion that Arendt's formulation of the concept and the anger it provoked were the stuff of cinematic drama, though the association of the concept with the Holocaust probably made the notion seem bankably gutsy. Von Trotta is an elder stateswoman of German cinema, a survivor of the New German Cinema movement that flourished in the 1970s. But Hannah Arendt (2012) may remind film buffs of another German director: William Dieterle, the biopic specialist for Warner Bros. in the 1930s. Arendt is just the latest of von Trotta's biopics, her previous subjects including the martyred Communist Rosa Luxemburg and the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen. This latest biopic comes closest to the Dieterle-Warners model: a brilliant underdog comes up with some innovative and controversial idea and must defend it with a big speech against skeptics and haters.

Why is the "banality of evil" idea so controversial? The answer seems to be that most people misunderstood it. Arendt, born and educated in Germany, was fluent enough in English (the film is practically bilingual and star Barbara Sukowa is impressive in both languages) that her meaning should not have been mistaken. She described the banality of evil, but people reacted as if she had denied the existence of evil. Arendt felt challenged to account for the evil deeds of Eichmann, a figure who seemed not just unthreatening but utterly average in his defendant's cage during the trial in Jerusalem. Von Trotta jarringly but wisely decides that there would be no substitute for the real Eichmann if she hoped to make this point; instead of casting an actor to play him, she shows us black and white news footage of the real man while Arendt observes in color. Eichmann in Jerusalem was a sniffly, smirky, stupid figure, and Arendt is surprised by the absence in him of any of the qualities usually identified with evil. Yet he was responsible for the transportation of multitudes to the death camps. What did Arendt, Jewish herself, expect? A raving Hitler-type, foaming at the mouth at the thought of Jews? Eichmann seemed nothing of the sort. Hearing his testimony, Arendt grew convinced that Eichmann had not been motivated primarily by anti-semitism or any personal malevolance.

The "banality" of evil is the absence of malice, seflish ambition, etc. Instead, Arendt deduced, Eichmann was an institutional creature conditioned to do his job without questioning it. This sort of institutional conditioning seemed to make the greatest evils possible in the 20th century. More offensive yet than Arendt's "defense" of Eichmann was her suggestion that a similar sort of institutional mentality, a deference to authority, left the Jews of Occupied Europe too ready to comply with authorities dedicated to their destruction. Had they been less orderly, she argued, fewer may have died. So in her critics' eyes not only was she defending Eichmann (by refusing, supposedly, to label him "evil") but she was blaming Jews for being complicit in their own destruction. For this, she is shunned by many of her academic and social peers until she makes a stand with the big speech in her classroom.

The great fault of Eichmann and anyone else who succumbs to the banality of evil, Arendt decides, is a failure to think. In turn, in von Trotta's film, she is attacked by people who respond emotionally or in partisan fashion to history rather than think objectively about it. In the film, this goes to the extreme of a carload of Mossad agents menacing our heroine and warning her against publishing her book in Israel. For von Trotta, the problem seems to be that people want to particularize evil in a way that minimizes their own susceptibility to it. The Holocaust, for instance, must be seen exclusively as a war against the Jews that can be accounted for entirely with reference to anti-semitism, instead of as something that could have happened to any group of people under the right institutional circumstances. The film's Arendt speaks for the broader, less comforting viewpoint, though von Trotta leaves room for viewers to speculate that behind Arendt's interest in Eichmann is a need to account for the Nazi sympathies of her onetime mentor and lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who likewise shows no sign of archetypal evil. Overall, Heidegger is a minor figure in the film compared to the Americans and Israelis who lash out at Arendt. They come across as no different than the hidebound traditionalists and reactionaries who plagued Dieterle's heroes back in the golden age of Hollywood, and the cliched presentation of their opposition, the ironically unthinking presumption of von Trotta that their opposition is essentially unthinking, makes the picture seem hackneyed at times. It doesn't help that von Trotta wants to use Arendt's real-life American BFF Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) -- an intellectual in her own right but not in Arendt's league as a thinker -- as a kind of Eve Arden type snarky sidekick who ends up looking silly attending parties where almost everyone but her speaks German. Arendt's American exile is part of the story -- note how the German poster above shows the Chrysler Building to symbolize the U.S., while the film itself announces its title against a shot of the Manhattan skyline, as if to emphasize a deceptive distance from which the heroine observes recent history. It's as if von Trotta is conscious of having made a more "American" film than usual. Hannah Arendt too often seems too old fashioned in a Hollywood way for a director identified with a "New" (albeit now old) school of filmmaking. Despite that, Sukowa carries the film on her back heroically with what may be one of the best bilingual performances ever, and for the most part von Trotta does justice to Arendt's enduring ability to provoke thought. Because of her intellectual ambition, I'm willing to be indulgent toward von Trotta's dramatic flaws. More films should be this ambitious -- and relevant.

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Eichmann's trial took place in the same year as Hollywood's big fictional prosecution of Nazis, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg. Germany's own Maximilian Schell (Austria's, actually)won the Oscar for Best Actor portraying the defense attorney for the film's judicial war criminals, and I've coincidentally heard the news of Schell's death at age 83 while I wrote this review. Schell had been the earliest surviving Best Actor winner, a status now inherited by Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field, 1963), and is the first of the famously long-lived Class of 1961 to pass on. Schell's acting career (in English, at least) never lived up to that early promise, and his best-known film after Nuremberg is probably Marlene, the Dietrich interview-documentary he directed about twenty years later. Still, he was an international star of a sort for half a century and his death is worth noting here.

 

 

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In Banality of Evil, Part II we'll look at an Oscar-nominated documentary that attempts to give the concept a new meaning that even Hannah Arendt might have to strain to recognize, while begging the question whether the true banality of evil is in the eye of the beholder. Stay tuned.

DVR Diary: VERBOTEN! (1959)

Samuel Fuller is sometimes described as a cinematic primitive. What that means is that he is often unsubtle in his writing or direction, but also willing to try anything for an effect. Another way of looking at it is that Fuller could wallow in camp nearly as often as he achieved heights of insight. Verboten! is camp Fuller. Like proper camp it's written and filmed -- and in this case produced -- in earnest. Fuller simply knows no other way to address his subject than with rhetorical howitzers. The subject is the occupation of Germany by the Americans at the end of World War II. It opens with Fuller on safe ground: gritty war action on a budget with touches of authenticity based on Fuller's own experiences. Then the opening credits roll and we get the Love Theme from Verboten! Town Without Pity this isn't.

We have a love theme from Verboten! because Verboten! is a love story. G.I. David Brent (James Best) is wounded while fighting to take a German town but is rescued by Helga (Susan Cummings), one of the local frauleins, despite the hostility of her younger brother, a Hitler Youth who has already lost an arm in the war. After the surrender, David marries Helga and takes a job as a civilian administrator for the occupation. That puts Helga in a lucky position and however sincere her feelings for David may be, she can't help but be a little smug and cynical about her luck when a family friend, Bruno (Tom Pittman, who died in a car wreck before the film's release), returns from demobilization. She persuades David to vouch for Bruno so the German can get a job as a policeman. Part of his job is to ferret out Nazis, but Bruno has a secret agenda. He's part of the Werwolf, the vaunted resistance organization that the Nazis predicted would rise from their ashes. Now he's in a position to recruit Werwolves, steal supplies and arms, and build forces for an uprising against the Americans. Fuller apparently took the Werwolf more seriously than history justifies; Verboten! would have been a comfort to those who wanted to argue a decade ago that there was so resistance to the Allied occupation, so that the resistance in Iraq didn't look so damning by comparison.

The main problem with Verboten! is that the romantic plot and the Werwolf plot don't fit so well together. As Bruno stirs things up behind the scenes while continuing to play the loyal stooge of the occupiers, David's marriage threatens to fall apart when the American loses his job for provoking a riot. Bruno has informed David of Helga's cynical comments about David being a "goldmine" to her, and now the American sees her urging him to find work back in the U.S. as a way to dump him. Meanwhile, Helga's brother has joined the Werwolf but has second thoughts once the group starts hijacking medical shipments. He has third thoughts after seeing Bruno execute a man for criticizing the hijackings. He has fourth thoughts after he and Helga take a day trip to the Nuremberg trial. Large parts of Verboten! are filmed in glorious StockFootageScope, so we see the celebrity Nazis take their seats in the dock of the historic courtroom before we see Helga and her brother take their seats in what looks like a separate, more spartanly furnished venue, where they get to see a digest version of the evidence against the Nazis as narrated by Fuller. How coincidental that this presentation of the evidence quotes Nazi leaders using some of the exact phrases Bruno does in his pep-talks to the Werwolf. That, and the films from the death camps, turns the brother against the Nazis for good. Repentant, he rushes to rat Bruno out to a still-sulky David, but it's up to the one-armed kid himself to fight Bruno to a finish in a burning railroad car before David finally comes to the rescue and the film basically comes to a stop.

James Best, who continues to work in his eighties, will have the dubious honor of going to his grave remembered most (if not best) as Roscoe P. Coltrane, the hapless sheriff on The Dukes of Hazzard. For a generation before that show, Best had built himself up into a dependable character actor and a welcome presence in western films and TV shows. He's the best thing (sorry!) about Verboten!, and his best moment (sorry again!!) comes when David has to face down a small mob protesting food shortages. This scene boasts Fuller's liveliest writing, expressing the auteur's own ambivalence about Germany. When a protester mocks America's claim to have liberated Germany, David blows his top. You're damn right we're not liberators, he roars; "We're conquerors and don't you forget it!" At moments like this Verboten! becomes an authentic document of a moment when Americans were torn between the imperative to reconcile (a Cold War context is only hinted at) and lingering outrage over Germany's crimes against humanity. The postwar international family can only be restored when the Germans recognize and repudiate their country's crimes; then they can be forgiven in time for the happy ending. That's a historic burden Fuller's plot can't quite bear, given the flimsiness of the soapbox it stands on. His heart was in the right place but his skills mostly eluded him this time.

Now Playing: APRIL 5, 1962

Now it can be told in Wilmington, NC:

Read that poster dialogue. How can I hope to top that? Only with this clip of an intimately awkward moment for the troubled future Fuehrer, uploaded by HotBooksVideo.



Who could be more menacing than Hitler? How about Alec Guinness? Charleston has been warned.

Guinness, last seen by 1962 audiences attempting to turn Japanese in A Majority of One, here reappears in a ten-year old Ronald Neame movie originally called The Card. I suspect it's not nearly as salacious as that admittedly humorous warning suggests. With Hitler, though, it looks like you had better lock up your daughters, nieces, cousins, etc. That man is scary!

But how about something less threatening, opening in Prescott AZ?

Who cares about outer space? Let the original trailer make the case for "inner space." LonChaneySr uploaded it to YouTube -- and I thought he was dead!



Look for more movie visions this weekend!

IRON SKY: the movie event of the year?

It opened at the Berlin Film Festival this week and the trailer speaks for itself. MovieclipsCOMINGSOON uploaded it, with comments from the director, to YouTube.



From Dark Knight to Django, 2012 could be an awesome year already. Now it could be just that much more awesome, thanks to Finno-Germano-Australian efficiency and vision. Bring it on, Fritz!

On the Big Screen: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (2011)

Earlier this month, Marvel Comics published Captain America #1. Every so often the big comic-book publishers feel that the public gets intimidated by the high issue numbers of long-running comics. Especially when today's comic-book writers can't help telling a never-ending, infinitely convoluting story instead of the self-contained tales of the "Golden Age," a reader may well feel that there's too much information you'd have to know before you could hope to figure out what goes on in a typical monthly comic. So while at times the publishers like to boast of how long their characters have been running -- Marvel published a 70th Anniversary issue for Captain America a few months ago -- they're now increasingly willing to hide their history the better to offer a new reader a jumping-on point. Marvel hasn't "rebooted" Cap this time, but the idea is that someone possibly inspired by Joe Johnston's film to buy a Captain America comic won't feel that he'd need to have read every Cap comic published in the five or so years since Ed Brubaker started his mostly-admirable run as writer in order to figure out what goes on.

In fact, there's a kind of cruel hook for moviegoers in the latest Captain America #1. It features the funeral of Peggy Carter, a long-established figure in Steve Rogers's comic-book history and a prominent character in Johnston's film. Dead of natural causes at age 91, Peggy is survived by her niece Sharon -- who, in a twist moviegoers may find icky, is Steve Rogers's current love interest and partner in action. At her funeral is the "real" Nick Fury, a man who fought at Cap's side in World War II but somehow also attained extended youth and vitality, and an eyepatch, as the head of SHIELD. Moviegoers will recognize the red moustache and derby hat of Dum-Dum Dugan, Fury's right-hand man from the days of the Howling Commandos to the present, also unnaturally well preserved. No matter what number you slap on the cover, there's no escaping history in a Captain America comic, though you can sometimes avoid excessive continuity in getting to the heart of things. Cap is always going to be about history, and the people at Marvel Entertainment know this. That's why they set their story during Cap's glory days of World War II, except for present-day bookends and a dull thud of an ending that mars what otherwise may be the best of the "Avengers" series so far.

With The First Avenger (as the film is known in countries where "Captain America" isn't necessarily welcome on the marquee) you begin to see the cumulative benefit of Marvel's mythos-building. There's a little thrill that an old comics fan may feel more than others at seeing pieces of a puzzle connect, especially in a movie set decades prior to all the other Avengers films. The early invocation of Norse mythology makes Thor relevant to the project in a way the movie from earlier this year barely managed on its own. More significant and appealing is the large role given to Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), Tony's dad who was seen in film clips and flashbacks in Iron Man 2 and who here is the spitting image of how Tony Stark himself was drawn in the original Iron Man comics. This is an innovation of the moviemakers, since neither Howard nor Tony Stark existed in the minds of Jack Kirby or Joe Simon (the latter still living as the last major creative figure from the Golden Age) when they invented Cap in 1941. Captain America is the rug that really pulls the room full of Marvel movies together and gives the Marvel movie universe a history distinct from official Marvel history, however often rebooted, or the "Ultimate" variant that has influenced much of the movies' environment, most notably (or regrettably) in the casting of Samuel L. Jackson as the insufferable Nick Fury. The First Avenger actually missed an opportunity to build more mythos by linking Jackson's Fury to a "historical" Nick Fury whom Cap should have encountered with the rest of the Howling Commandos in a Hydra prison camp.

Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely dramatically redefine Captain America in a way that makes the super soldier more heroic and more sympathetic for modern audiences. As always, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) starts as the proverbial 90-pound weakling yearning to join the military, albeit with more urgency than the original, since here he doesn't become a super soldier until after Pearl Harbor, while Simon and Kirby launched Cap in 1941 to fight Fifth Columnists and saboteurs while America prepared for a war that still might not come to this country. In a tremendous reversal of comics lore, Bucky Barnes, who in the comics was a juvenile Army mascot who became Cap's Robin-like sidekick, is here Steve Rogers's more manly pal, practically his idol, who makes it into the army when Steve can't. In the 1941 origin story Steve is his original sickly self for no more than a page or two, but in the movie he pays his dues in feeble form for nearly an hour, earning our respect for his grit, his enmity toward bullies of all types, his desperate eagerness to serve his country, his bravery (he's the first to throw himself on a grenade in a test) and his intelligence (he figures out how to capture a flag in the most practical way after fellow recruits fail to shinny up the flagpole). All these things impress emigre German scientist Dr. Erskine (a warm Stanley Tucci), who decides that Steve is most qualified to take the super soldier serum because he is not a bully like many of his fellow recruits, because despite his eagerness to enlist he can't answer Erskine's question, "Do you want to kill Nazis?" with a simple yes. Steve doesn't want to kill anyone -- but he'll do it if he has to because he won't let the bullies win.

Steve undergoes the transformation in traditional style, and after the successful experiment Dr. Erskine is killed by a Nazi agent as he was in the original comic. That episode always left me wondering why the saboteur waited until after Erskine created a super-soldier to pull his gun out. Wouldn't you want to stop that from happening? But maybe he had instructions like Moe Berg, the baseball catcher turned spy, had when he was sent to hear Werner Heisenberg lecture in a neutral country. According to legend, Berg was to kill the German scientist only if he inferred from the lecture that Heisenberg was close to solving the riddle of the atom bomb. Why take chances, I'd ask, but I suppose that's why I'm not a super hero. Anyway, in another major diversion from Golden Age lore, the Army takes the creation of a single super soldier as a failure of Erskine's project, and even after Roges makes headlines capturing the Nazi after an exhilarating chase through Brooklyn, Col. Phillips (an effortlessly entertaining Tommy Lee Jones) assigns Steve to tests in New Mexico, only to be overruled by a Senator who sends "Captain America" (so named for the first time) on a War Bonds tour. The picture suddenly becomes a delirious amalgam of Flags of Our Fathers and Tucker: The Man and His Dream as Rogers is compelled to be a musical-comedy superhero fake slugging a fake Hitler in a stage revue as chorus girls cheer him on in song. He goes over big with the civilians, but dogfaces in Europe are far less impressed when the Captain goes on a morale-boosting tour. He'll soon get a chance to change their minds.

Cap is finally in a position to confront his Nazi counterpart, the disfigured occultist Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) who had been Erskine's first experiment, at Hitler's command. Schmidt proved Erskine's theory that the super soldier serum makes good men great and bad men worse by becoming a bald, noseless, red-faced lunatic. In short, he becomes the Red Skull, but the writers are strangely reluctant to so label him. If I remember right, the name is used just once in the entire picture. Otherwise, and even after the Skull gives up wearing his Hugo Weaving mask, he remains "Johann Schmidt" to his enemies. I'm not complaining; I just find it a little odd. Also odd is the movie's contribution to Marvel Comics's overall dehistoricization of World War II. Schmidt is the head (and mind you, there's really just one) of Hydra, the Third Reich's special occult research unit. In Marvel Comics, Hydra was invented in the 1960s as a collective antagonist for The Avengers and SHIELD. There were always former Nazis involved with this group, but Marvel has over time retconned World War II to make Hydra a kind of power behind the Nazi throne. In their current Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes cartoon, an apparent aversion to invoking Nazism in animation results in an extreme rewriting of history in which Hydra itself is the principal aggressor in the war. Captain America doesn't go that far, but it does indulge in the whimsy that Hydra is worse than Hitler because of Schmidt's interest in marrying occult power sources to super-modern technology in a manner much inspired, I suspect, by Mike Mignola's Hellboy mythos. Schmidt soon relegates Nazism to the background as Cap and his new army buddies (including Bucky) have to stop a Hydra-initiated attack from destroying not just the major allied cities, but Berlin as well. By that point I'd imagine that Cap would get some support from the Wehrmacht and the SS, but Hitler suddenly seems to be powerless in his own land, as if the movie, like the cartoon, is uncomfortable with Nazism, or the writers are afraid that Claude Lanzmann or Jean-Luc Godard will take them to task for trivializing the Shoah or something.

So it's all action from that point on, and Johnston deserves a ton of credit for directing it with a clarity and an eye for the dramatic or iconic pulp image that eludes so many other action-spectacle directors these days. The director of The Rocketeer clearly revels in a return to an era he clearly loves, and both cinematographer Shelly Johnson and production designer Rick Heinrichs clearly share the love. The art direction is more of a special effect than the film's modest 3D conversion, and the retro-spectacle of it all should attract movie fans who are otherwise wary of superhero films. The greatest effect of all is the by now familiar and pretty much seamless process that grafts Chris Evans's head onto Steve Rogers's original puny body. Working only with his face, Evans makes the illusion believable, and the actor really is a revelation here. Like Thor, Captain America has to sell its star as someone who can share the screen with Robert Downey next year and not be reduced to wallpaper. Chris Hemsworth more or less passed the test this spring, and Evans passes with flying colors. He is the Steve Rogers of the comics, only more so. With the ordeal of his media exploitation and humiliation following the ordeal of his years of weakness, Evans expresses a frustration with his wasted potential that everyone can identify with in some way while remaining a sensitive soul who's still inexperienced (though not cartoonishly naive) in many ways. His power fantasy comes with constant disillusionment and loss, but neither the power nor the losses compromise his goodness and idealism. It's still an open question how Evans will do alongside Downey, but now it's a question I'm interested in seeing answered -- even if that proves my only reason to see The Avengers next year.

Captain America may have the best ensemble cast of any Avengers film to date. Hayley Atwell gives a star-making turn as the kick-ass glamorous Agent Carter, and Dominic Cooper (the second actor to play Howard Stark) helps energize every scene he's in. All the battle-happy joes of the precociously multicultural Howling Commandos are engaging and likable. Toby Jones bids to be the modern Peter Lorre as Arnim Zola, the Red Skull's chief assistant who's doomed to become a TV-headed cyborg in 1970s comics. Tommy Lee Jones presumably is in this movie for the same reason Anthony Hopkins was in Thor: prestige. But if this movie proves anything, it's that Jones can't phone in a performance. While Hopkins (under a Shakespearean's direction) does little more than yell, Jones plays his lines like curmudgeonly music, and you hang on his every word. Jones may not be the greater actor (though he certainly is now), this star turn may show that he's a greater star, that a "Tommy Lee Jones" part is inherently superior to an "Anthony Hopkins" part. I suppose that if they traded parts we'd really see who's better. But Jones helps make Captain America vastly superior to Thor, as does just about everyone involved in the new film. The First Avenger arrives at a moment of talk about "superhero fatigue," but it'd be a shame if that fatigue causes people to miss one of the most exhilarating expressions of that beleaguered genre.

KILL OR BE KILLED (1977-80)

Netflix is tricky sometimes. I'm sure they don't mean it, but sometimes they offer you one thing and give you another. That's what happened to me last night when I was browsing through their new arrivals. Something seemed funny about that 1950 film noir they were advertising as a free stream. The thumbnail art didn't look right. It looked like a long-haired guy screaming -- definitely not 1950 material. And wouldn't you know? Two reviewers on the actual page for the movie said it wasn't a noir at all. It didn't even have Laurence Tierney in it. Instead, it was a Seventies karate movie with a Nazi and a dwarf. Then the title rang a bell. Memories flooded back of a heavy-duty ad campaign that saturated TV when I was still a kid. They really put that film over as an event, and my curiosity was stoked, but I didn't have a chance to see it back then. But now I did.

Maybe those of you of my age remember the ad campaign. If so, maybe you remember further back to the Berlin Olympiad of 1941. Designed as a show of Axis solidarity and superiority, it ended in controversy surrounding the karate tournament. Baron Von Rudloff, captain of the silver-medal German team, accused the captain of the Japanese gold medalists, Mr. Miyagi (soft g, please) of bribing his compatriots into throwing their matches with diamonds. Unfortunately for the Baron, der Fuehrer wasn't interested in excuses. Rudloff was kicked off the team, stripped of his rank and dishonorably discharged. For more than thirty years afterward, the German nursed his grudge.

"Don't make me come down there!" Norman Coombes presides over the school of hard knocks in Kill or Be Killed.

Sometime in the 1970s, Rudloff reigns over a karate school in the middle of a South African desert from the vantage of the tower of his toylike castle -- the thing looks like it's made of Styrofoam. His most trusted lieutenant and confidant is Chico the dwarf, whom the Baron rescued from the humiliations of circus life. Now he's humiliated by the karate students, especially when he takes out his old circus hand puppet and reminisces about the past. But he humors the Baron's dream of staging a new Karate Olympiad in his own stadium, an exact reproduction of the surprisingly spartan venue Albert Speer designed for the 1941 extravaganza, and avenging his own humiliation at the hands and diamonds of the dread Miyagi.

"We were just sparring, Herr Baron." Chico (Daniel DuPlessis, right) and friend.

One of the Baron's students isn't quite with the program. Steve (James Ryan) apparently didn't have a problem with learning martial arts from a strutting, ranting uniformed Nazi originally, but he's starting to grow impatient and disgruntled with the situation. He wants to know what they're training for, but his attitude only gets him into fights with more loyal students. Steve's feelings for Rudloff's one female student, Olga, are the only thing keeping him in the desert. But once the Baron at last announces the purpose of their training, having lured Miyagi into accepting the challenge with smuggled diamonds, and then tells Olga that she can't be on the team and has to leave, Steve wants to go with her. They manage to flee together, with some sneaky help from a sympathetic Chico, in a battered Volkswagen. But Steve's car fu proves very poor, and the karate couple find themselves stranded in the desert. Their solution: dismantle the car, raise a big, fortunately available hunk of canvas on a mast attached to the chassis and sail to civilization.

Meanwhile, the Baron doesn't yet have a full 20-man team fit to fight Miyagi's picked squad. He sends Chico around the world to recruit the best remaining karate men. The dwarf's journey is filmed with magazine and book illustrations of London, just as Rudloff's hysterical flashback of World War II earlier in the picture was portrayed with cutouts and recordings of Hitler rants. Chico goes straight to the nearest karate school, but the teacher rebuffs him with proverbs. That forces him to recruit more creatively. We find him in a junkyard, where he's ready to make an offer to a dude who happens to be sitting in a jalopy with his pals and can bust a cinder block with his head. Turns out he'd already signed with Miyagi. This happens to Chico a lot, even in New York, when he makes an offer to an acrobatic mugger. Strangely, his quest for the kings of karate never takes him to Japan, but when you consider that he's only offering $5,000 ("plus expenses")to each prospect, his budget, like the movie's, was obviously limited.

At the same time, Rudloff still wants Steve on his side. Once the fact of Steve's attachment to Olga finally sinks in on the old Nazi, he regrets expelling her from his school. A repentant Rudloff now orders one of his goons to kidnap her. The goon surprises Olga in the middle of a lesson from her new, personal, private, female karate instructor -- she'd shooed Steve away for some reason. There ensues perhaps the most gratuitously destructive episode of fight-scene vandalism since the Jonathan Winters-Arnold Stang gas-station battle in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as the goon smashes a piano, a guitar, statuary, a TV set, etc in a protracted effort to subdue Olga. Eventually he succeeds, leaving Steve to discover an empty, devastated house. Rudloff's strategy works -- sort of. Steve enters the tournament, but on Miyagi's team, the Japanese having somehow convinced Steve that it'd be easier to infiltrate the Baron's dungeon and free his girl if he joins the enemy side.

"We were just sparring, whoever you are." Olga (Charlotte Michelle, left) and friend. Below, the Baron's goon perpares to El Kabong himself in an intimidating display of stupidity.

Once the tournament gets under way, after a round of feasting and dwarf entertainment, and proves quite an even affair, with fighters on both sides equally willing to cheat, the Baron decides to make the best of a bad situation. Determined to restore his honor by winning at all costs, he tells Steve to throw his fights if he hopes to see Olga again. Steve is too proud to do that, but Rudloff's prize specimen, the hulking Luke, seems quite capable of beating our hero anyway. Since these are supposed to be death matches -- a detail the film occasionally loses track of -- the Baron would just as soon see Steve die. But Chico, still remembering Steve and Olga's kindness, convinces his master to spare Steve so he can "suffer" more later.

"Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, we accept you..."

Eventually, the tournament gets out of the Baron's control as more fighters on both sides object to his, well, Nazi-like dominance. Tiring of it all himself, Rudloff has his Foreign Legion-outfitted guards herd all the karate men into two adjoining cells. And here he made his great mistake, and an inconceivable one for one so devoted to the power of the open hand. Put a few dozen guys whose hands and feet are deadly weapons in two cells separated by a wall and what are they going to do? They're going to punch and kick that wall into oblivion, of course, and then they're going to combine their strength into approximately one Hercules-unit of power, enough to bend the cell bars so they can all escape. So remember: the next time you stage a karate tournament, make sure your dungeon has solitary confinement for everyone.

The movie won't end this easily...

Seeing a rebellion break out, Rudloff, Chico and Luke pack Olga into their car and flee into the desert. Steve commandeers a vehicle to pursue him, but his car-fu is as bad as ever. In an automotive answer to drunken boxing, however, he turns obstacles into shortcuts, flipping and barrel-rolling his wreck until he blocks the Baron's escape route. Somehow he's capable of crawling out and engaging Luke in a final battle as the Baron watches and Chico holds a gun on the Baron. Strangely, the story ends with the Nazi and the dwarf, with Rudloff given the choice between revenge on his betrayers and the Spellbound finish....

According to Wikipedia, director Ivan Hall filmed Kill or Be Killed in South Africa in 1977 -- belying the ad assertion that it was "The Greatest Hollywood Martial Arts Film Ever Made," --but the film wasn't released for another three years. Then, on the strength of the U.S. ad campaign, the movie went over big enough to justify a sequel, Kill and Kill Again. Having watched it, I can understand why someone might have thought the film unreleasable. Most of what little budget Hall had went to hiring fighters; the castle looks like the sort of thing you rent for birthday parties. The "location" work is worse than a joke. The writing is witless, especially when it aspires to wit.

Rudloff: It seems that Asians never age...
Miyagi: Only today, now, is important.
Rudloff: But my letter reached you in the past.
Miyagi: To be answered by the present person...

There's also something slightly offensive in the idea that two teams combining the best karate men on earth, one of them coached by a Japanese person (played by a Chinese person who looks just a little like Dana Carvey), don't appear to have a single Asian between them. They manage to have a black man, after all, and this is apartheid South Africa -- one of the few places, I imagine, where unrepentant Nazis could parade about more or less openly. But apart from the black guy, the fact that so many of the fighters look alike confuses the film a bit. It's hard to tell all the shirtless dudes with similar hairstyles apart. On the other hand, they're all legitimate karate men, and they strongly enhance the movie's entertainment value by beating the crap out of one another with gusto. The violence is on a strictly PG level (by 1980 standards), but it looks convincingly brutal when perpetrated by guys who probably beat one another up on a daily basis. The fights are constructed more through editing than choreography, and the editing is often pretty choppy, but the action is consistently energetic enough to keep you watching.

James Ryan is a wiry, acrobatic, intense and loud performer. His accent seems right when you're used to hearing martial artists talk in vaguely Anglo tones, and his amplified battle cries (they often sound like, "YEAHHHH!!!") are almost unsettlingly enthusiastic. He's perhaps too fond of his signature move of leaping, flipping and boxing his opponent's ears, but that does make a cool visual. While Kill or Be Killed was meant to make him a star, Ryan is inevitably overshadowed by the Nazi and the dwarf. Chico is Daniel DuPlessis's only film role, if we can trust IMDB, and he makes the most of it. But he and everyone else is eclipsed by Norman Coombes's instinctively berserk performance as Baron von Rudloff.

The only fault I can find with this sort of exploitation star turn is that Coombes's big scene comes way too early in the picture, as the camera does a 360 around him as he sieg-heils and rants about his past humiliations ("I vas DISHONORABLY DISCHARGED!!!") in a still weed-covered stadium. Looking somewhat like Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October and sporting a range of costumes from Gestapo chic to suspenders over bared chest for desert training, Coombes is all bonus for a project like this one. You can even forgive the fact that this karate fanatic never actually fights in the picture, so that there's never a proper showdown between villain and hero. Without Coombes, Kill or Be Killed is just another tournament movie, with less variety of fighting styles than most. With him, it's on another heroically weird level, and those who travel the wild world of cinema seeking fresh frissons of weirdness may find some in the White Castle in the desert of Ivan Hall's imagination.

The only vestige of the TV ad campaign I could find online was this 9-second spot uploaded to YouTube by robatsea2009. Maybe it'll jog some memories.

Quickies: THE NIGHT OF THE GENERALS (1967)

From what I saw in Anatole Litvak's film version, Hans Hellmut Kirst's Edgar-winning wartime mystery has material for a good or possibly great film in it. The detective is a German army officer (Omar Sharif) investigating the murder in Warsaw of a Polish prostitute who happened to be a Gestapo informant. The most witnesses can tell him is that a man fleeing the scene had a red stripe on his pants, a feature exclusive to a general's uniform. Three generals in town lack alibis for the night in question. They are played by Charles Gray, Peter O'Toole and Donald Pleasance. All three are plausible, O'Toole being possibly least so because to this point audiences had seen him mostly in heroic roles. Sharif's investigation is aborted when he's kicked upstairs, with a promotion to Colonel, and reassigned to Paris. When all three generals turn up in Paris in July 1944 Sharif revives his inquiry, which is complicated (as was his original investigation, in all likelihood) by the fact that at least one of the generals is a conspirator in the plot to assassinate Hitler.

So far, so interesting. I was intrigued by the potential for Sharif's character to miss the forest for the trees, obsessing over a petty murder while the fate of his country and the world may be decided under his nose. The story doesn't quite play out this way in the Litvak film, in which Sharif seems well aware of the conspiracy but, as a character meant to be sympathetic, he practically condones it. It might have complicated the moral dilemmas of the story were the murdering general also one of the anti-Hitler conspirators, but I presume that Kirst himself decided against that in the novel. From him, I also presume, comes the movie's deadening emphasis on the social life of the aristocratic officers and a subplot concerning a young officer (Tom Courtenay) who falls in love with the daughter of one of the generals, becomes a flunky for another, and ends up framed for a fresh murder in Paris. I don't know whether to blame Kirst, Litvak, or the screenwriters for the two-year gap in the story that rather undercuts our sense of Sharif's obsession with solving the crime. But I think I can blame Litvak for sucker-punching us several reels in with the revelation that what we're watching are flashbacks based on interviews taken twenty years later by an Interpol investigator (Philippe Noiret) with his own tie to the story. He knocks us for a loop again at a point when we presume the film is over, when the flash-forward interviews are finally explained as an investigation of a present-day murder that means that the movie has another half-hour to go. The Interpol man goes through the motions of interviewing the generals, all of whom (including the July 20 conspirator!) survived the war, when by this point the audience knows perfectly well who the murderer was and is. This present-day mystery should have been established as the framing device immediately; instead, it just appears tacked on and makes the whole story look sloppy.

Litvak does direct some handsome and huge scenes, particularly the destruction of a resistance neighborhood by tank fire and flamethrowers actually filmed in Warsaw -- maybe the Commies found it a convenient way to get some necessary demolition done. Omar Sharif is at the peak of his trans-ethnic chameleonic versatility, his performance as a Nazi officer undercut only by the director surrounding him with Brits. The three generals all acquit themselves well, however, with O'Toole the standout in a long sequence as a fearsomely repressed man forced to find some way to enjoy himself away from war. There's a lot of good stuff in this film, but it ends up looking as if the novel Night of the Generals got into a bad accident and wasn't quite put back together correctly. I can't say it was a good film if I wanted a remake as soon as it was over, but if I want a remake at all, without having read the novel, there was at least potential in the Litvak version that may seem more fully realized to other viewers. Maybe I should recommend the book instead, but I'd have to find a copy and read it first.

NORTH FACE (Nordwand, 2008)

The mountain film is a German film genre whose heyday was in the late Weimar Republic era -- the late 1920s and early 1930s. If any person symbolizes the genre it would probably be Leni Riefenstahl, who starred in several directed (or co-directed) by Dr. Arnold Fanck before directing her own mountain film, The Blue Light prior to her career as a documentarian. The mountain films aspired mostly to express something romantic about the German character, but Philipp Stoelzl's film, though set around the right period, feels more like an American film of the 1930s in many ways, and to the extent that it is a mountain film it aspires to be an antithesis of the old films.

Nordwand is based on a 1936 attempt to ascend the north face of the Eiger, the Swiss mountain heretofore identified cinematically with Clint Eastwood. A prior German attempt, a newsreel tells us, ended in the deaths of the two climbers. The government is encouraging climbers to conquer "the last problem of the Alps" (thus achieving the "final solution" to the Alps problem?) during the year when Germany hosts the Winter and Summer Olympics, as further proof of Aryan athletic superiority and overall national character. The Nazi regime in Nordwand plays pretty much the role of an aggressive newspaper publisher or editor in an American film -- somewhere between Walter Burns and D. B. Norton. The film focuses initially on a newspaper that's just received the directive from Berlin to promote the conquest of the Nordwand, and on Luise, a go-getting young photojournalist (Johanna Wokalek), who thinks she has two likely candidates for the climb: her hometown pals from Berchtesgarden, Toni Kurz (Benno Furmann) and Andi Hinterstoitter (Florian Lukas), whom we first see assigned to toilet detail at their military barracks. They win our sympathy instantly because they suck as soldiers, preferring to goof off on the nearby mountains. As extreme sportsmen of their time they know their stuff, and Toni knows their limitations enough to initially turn down Luise's suggestion that he and Andi try the Nordwand. They don't call it "the death wall" for nothing, he thinks. On top of that, he doesn't like the idea of climbing as a publicity stunt, even with a patriotic spin. "I climb for myself," he says, but when he sees that Andi wants to give it a go, he allows that friendship is also a sufficient motive. Without fanfare, our heroes quit the service and join rival teams from Germany and elsewhere at the foot of the Eiger, eventually falling in with a hapless pair of Austrian Nazis who prove more hindrance than help on their quest.

To tell much more is to spoil the film. It's enough to say that most expectations inspired by North Face's affinities with both German mountain films and U.S. newspaper or "Cinderella Man" movies will be dealt with harshly. I don't know if it was Stoelzl's conscious strategy, but the screenplay he co-wrote with three other scribes seems determined to use genre conventions to refute generic thinking. For Toni, Andi and finally for Luise, the climb has no meaning other than suceeding or surviving the experience. Patriotism doesn't come into it -- and not because our heroes are any kind of dissidents; this is a surprisingly apolitical film given the era in which it's set. While our climbers don't want to be heroes, Luise grapples with the temptation, embodied by her editor (Ulrich Tukur), to turn the climb into a career-making news story. There's a feeling that this film could turn into Ace in the Hole at any moment but for Luise's hardening integrity. She takes heroic risks over the course of the story, but as a friend concerned with people's lives, not as the archetypal intrepid reporter. When she quits Germany at the end of the movie, it's once again not an explicit rejection of Nazism but a rebellion against any system that exploits individual endeavor by imposing political, cultural or commercial meaning on it.

Her decision clarifies the nature of the film she appears in. Stoelzl found an interesting subject that happened to be embedded in a controversial setting to which the essential story is nearly irrelevant. If his challenge was to make a meaningful movie about that story without turning it into a commentary on Nazi Germany, he met it and succeeded. While watching it, I wondered whether it was going to amount to more than a suspenseful film about a mountain climb. It didn't -- and in a way it did.

Here's the U.S. trailer, uploaded to YouTube by the distributor, Music Box Films:

MEIN FUEHRER (2007)

The title of Dani Levy's film refers to Adolf Hitler, of course, but in true mismatched buddy movie fashion it also comes to refer to Hitler's mismatched buddy. The Nazi leader uses the term, not without irony, in homage to Adolf Israel Gruenbaum, his acting instructor, as he goes to make a speech he hopes will turn the tide of World War II back in his favor. It's January 1945, but as 1944 was dying Hitler had lost his gift, his spark, his mojo. He hadn't fully recovered from the Valkyrie assassination plot, though he had been smart enough that same year to send a double to attend the ill-fated premier of Nation's Pride, not being a fan of the director. But as Germany's military fortunes waned, the Leader grew demoralized. He wasn't out there whipping the Volk into their customary frenzy. It fell to Dr. Josef Goebbels, the propaganda minister, to take drastic action to kickstart his master and, through him, the war effort. He recruited Gruenbaum, one of Germany's leading actors and acting teachers, from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His choice scandalizes Goebbels's colleagues in the Nazi leadership, and perplexes Hitler himself at first, but the Reichsminister has a crucial insight: a Jewish instructor will evoke something crucial from the Fuehrer that his Aryan peers probably couldn't: hatred.

This is the set up for a film that Levy claims was inspired more by Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful than by Mel Brooks's The Producers. Nevertheless, it gets pitched to American audiences as a German counterpart to Brooks's masterpiece. It's not quite that. Levy's comedy is different, built more around the essential absurdity of the situation than the collisions of clowns. The Jewish characters (i.e. Gruenbaum's family) are played straight, unless you find Gruenbaum's acting exercises amusing. Gruenbaum endures real suffering. While Goebbels indulges him, other Nazis beat him up regularly, and Goebbels himself orders the Gruenbaums back to Sachsenhausen when the actor makes too many demands, only to be countermanded by Hitler, who enjoys the opportunity to open up emotionally and remember his past under the professor's instruction. Hitler (Helge Schneider) is really the only clownish figure in the picture, unless you count a Himmler who arrives in Berlin worse for battle, with his arm in a brace locked in the Hitler salute. Strangely, though, Schneider's performance is meant to illustrate a serious thesis Levy has about Hitler. The director buys into the notion that Hitler picked on those weaker than he because he was consistently abused as a child by his father. This approach renders Hitler a pathetic figure in the contemptible sense of the word, but also a figure of pathos as the film reveals how completely dysfunctional (he can't get it up for Eva Braun) and lonely he is. Despite his prejudices, Hitler forms emotional bonds with Gruenbaum, and to an extent with his family, out of sheer neediness. But he remains a bigoted idiot and, so the film suggests, needs to stay that way.

"And in this scene, Herr Hitler, you face the final guardian, Kareem Abdul Jabbar. He is very tall."
Ulrich Muhe and a track-suited Helge Schneider in Mein Fuehrer.

Gruenbaum is one of the last performances of Ulrich Muhe, who the world knows as the star of one of the late decade's great films, The Lives of Others. Regrettably, he doesn't really have much to do here because of Levy's refusal to render his hero comical. There are some nice moments of physical comedy, as when Gruenbaum accidentally KOs a taunting Hitler who challenges him to box, and a nicely timed sequence in which the actor closes in to kill the Fuehrer with a gold bar as Nazi officials watch through a two-way mirror in horror (and Goebbels disregards the whole scene) until Hitler makes an emotional breakthrough that stays Gruenbaum's hand. There are also framing scenes that hint that Gruenbaum is telling a bit of a tall tale (the film's subtitle translates as "the really truest truth about Adolf Hitler"), but Muhe's performance and the film itself are inevitably handicapped by an understandable reluctance to make much fun of or with a character in constant peril of death in a gas chamber.

While making a Hitler comedy is still going to look blasphemous to many people, Levy's reluctance to be very outrageous beyond the original transgression puts Mein Fuehrer out of contention with The Producers, but Mel Brooks himself might stop short at the camp gate, after all. In the end, however, Levy has an arguably funny point to make about Hitler's role in Germany's defeat, but before I elaborate on the other side of the screen cap, I'll warn you of spoilers in case you plan to see the film sometime.

* * *

Above, Gruenbaum gets Hitler to play a dog most convincingly. Below, Hitler threatens to develop a doglike devotion to his teacher.

* * *

When Goebbels says he needs a Jew to stoke Hitler's hatred, he's being disingenuous. He really needs a Jew to restoke Germany's hatred. As he confides to Himmler, Goebbels's true plan is to kill Hitler by exploding a bomb underneath the podium during the big New Year's speech. Gruenbaum is supposed to be the fall guy, reigniting German anti-semitism along with the war effort. Albert Speer overhears part of this conversation and rushes to Hitler to denounce Gruenbaum. Hitler is incredulous and seems to forget about the whole affair, but we can assume that our hero's deduced what's really up.

Things get more complicated for the Fuehrer and his fuehrer when Hitler suddenly loses his voice in the middle of an angry scolding of a barber who lops off half his moustache. While another man's moustache can be requisitioned in a pinch, Hitler's vocal situation proves hopeless. Anticipating Singing in the Rain, however, Hitler has a solution: Gruenbaum can be placed beneath the podium and impersonate him while the Leader himself mouths the words of his speech. At gunpoint, Gruenbaum is compelled to read Hitler's banalities and bigotries until he can't stands no more. He starts improvising, making Hitler denounce himself as an impotent bedwetter, until he's shot down. Hitler flees the scene in dismay moments before Goebbels's bomb goes off.

Why did Gruenbaum throw his life away? In simplest plot terms, he has nothing to lose now that the Nazis have agreed to his final request and freed his wife and children. With them presumably safely away, he can now show the courage to say what he really thinks of Hitler, at whatever cost to himself. But it's also possible to believe that Gruenbaum sacrifices himself in order to save Hitler's life, in an ironic reversal of the moral pressure he's felt throughout the picture to kill him. This may be simply because he's come to pity his pupil despite his evil career. It may also be because he's intuited what Goebbels believes: that Hitler is now only useful to the war effort as a dead victim -- that Germany's only chance to pull victory from the jaws of defeat will come if Hitler dies. Since Hitler himself tells Gruenbaum that he didn't come up with the Final Solution all by himself, our hero most likely understands that the war is bigger than Hitler alone, and that the best way to ensure that Germany loses and the Shoah ceases as soon as possible is to keep Hitler in power. The irony of that realization, if you think about it, may be the most amusing thing in Levy's erratic little experiment in historical irreverence.

No subtitles on this German trailer uploaded by muhmachtdiemama, but you should get the idea anyway.