Heil You-Know-Who!

Looks like Rodger Debris' Hitler from "The Producers" but he's not...

Recently I was able to watch this German movie (with subtitles.)  Controversial, its one of the first time that a movie made in Germany and in the German language has portrayed Hitler and the Nazis.  This is very controversial stuff in Germany where swastikas and even talking about The Third Reich is literally illegal.

The movie is supposedly a comedy, but European comedy is not like American comedy.  Don't expect a happy ending.  Well, not that you would with a movie about Hitler, but even for the Jewish "speech therapist", there's no happy ending even though this was supposed to be a lighthearted romp.

The movie has also been compared to "The King's Speech" (which I have also seen) in that Hitler is a broken mess and Goebbels sends for a famous actor to teach him to give a great speech during the final dark days of the war.  The actor turns out to be a Jew who's languishing in a concentration camp. 

Okay, the movie is no "Producers."  The main problem is that the movie doesn't really know what it wants to be.  The Jewish family and their subplot are played straight.  They are taken from a concentration camp... a real concentration camp with tortures and threats.  The Jewish characters are all played straight, this is not a Mel Brooks world of thumb-to-nose silliness.   The Nazis are nasty and evil, just as they should be, but not the "bwahahaha" type of villainy where they rub their hands together but the nasty racist "torture you to death in hideous ways rather than look at you" way that most of the inner elite of the Nazi party truly were.

I think that was one of the worst problems with the movie, for me.  I know European tastes are vastly different than standard American tastes, especially in comedy.  But this isn't even a "dark comedy", its just a twisted drama with a couple of attempts at cheap laughs thrown in. 

The subject matter is very limiting as well.  We know that Hitler was ultimate evil, so its just not possible to have character development (although he gets it anyway) or some sort of "realization" or heel-face turn.  There's not even come-uppance as the end of the movie doesn't end with him blowing his brains out.  It ends with someone else getting their brains blown out.  No, the Jewish family doesn't get away on a stolen U-Boat or steal a plane and escape to Switzerland.  No happy endings in European comedies, remember?

There's a couple of other very disturbing moments in the film as well.  Hitler himself is portrayed as a neurotic mess.  But he's a mess because of his abusive father and sucky childhood.  Hitler cries.  He wets the bed, not because he's crazy, but because his father beat him so much.  He whimpers.  

Oh, and he confides in his Jewish instructor that he never really wanted to exterminate the Jews, that was Himmler's idea.  Hitler just wanted to send them away to Madagascar or somewhere to live with the penguins.   This line in itself might not be too bad, but its one of the opening lines of holocaust deniers and neo-nazis like David Icke and others.  I'm even suprised they got away with putting the line in the movie.  Maybe no one noticed.

Other scenes may have been amusing to the German audience, but are old jokes to US and British audiences.  There's the obligatory "Heil Hitler" scene at the beginning where one guy says "Heil Hitler" and the others have to say it too.  On and on, repeating, until they finally run out of 'heils' and calm down... then someone runs up and says 'heil hiter' again sending them all off again.  This joke couldn't have been shown in German cinema until recently but US and British audiences have seen it since Hogan's Heros and Monty Python and its old.  Fingernails on chalkboard old.

To give the movie its due, the acting is very very good though.  The doomed and anguished Jewish actor is played superbly with pathos.   Hitler is played so well that you might forget who this is that you are meant to be feeling sorry for.  Goebbels, while not humorous at all, is played with such sickeningly accurate evil that this actor should have got an award for it.