Movie Review of
“Hitler’s SS: A Portrait in Evil”
fter enduring “Waterfront”
and a half-hour of “A Yank in Libya,” I was
pleasantly surprised by “Hitler’s SS: A Portrait in Evil” (1985). The title is
misleadingly lurid and generic. This is really a
character study rather than an action picture. We see
the rise and fall of Hilter’s Germany from the
point of view of a single German family whose two
brothers are presented with a blend of sympathy and
criticism. “Hitler’s SS” is indeed a
portrait of evil but one that depicts its seductive
glamour as well as its poisoned core.
That would be
dangerous enough for a genre that usually portrays
Nazis as pure monsters rather than complicated or
conflicted humans. Connected to this was the decision
to drill down through the bureaucratic hierarchy of the
Third Reich, concentrating on conflicts involving
second, third and fourth tier figures such as Reinhard
Heydrich, Ernst Röhm, Sepp Dietrich, Heinrich
Himmler, Joseph Biegler, and Theodor Eicke – all
historical personages but, aside from Himmler, names
that will light up the neurons of only serious Nazi
trivia buffs.
The story opens in
1932 in a small German city. At the christening of
Hans, we meet the fictional Hoffman family. His two
older brothers, Karl (John Shea) and Helmut (Bill
Nighy), are close friends. Karl, the younger, is a
jock, and an unemployed auto mechanic.
Helmut is an intellectual, a
student at the university. Hitler has established a
foothold in German politics with his new National
Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei) and its two paramilitary
wings, the SA (Sturmabteilung, “assault
division,” originally formed to protect party
rallies) and the SS (Schutzstaffel, “protection
squadrons,” originally formed as Hitler’s
bodyguard). The former, also known as the Brownshirts,
and numbering in the millions at this time, attracts
Karl with the fiery oratory of its leader, Ernst
Röhm, a sometime ally and sometime rival of
Hitler. The SA appeals to Karl’s excitability and
team spirit. Helmut drifts into the SS (the
Blackshirts) when one of its leaders, Reinhard
Heydrich, spots him at a fencing class. (David Warner
here reprises the superb role he created for the
miniseries “The Holocaust.”) Helmut is
smart but views politics and the Nazis in particular
with apathy and suspicion. Heydrich appeals to his
intellectual vanity and to this very cynicism, and
recruits him as his assistant. Heydrich reports to SS
chief Himmler (played eerily by John Normington), who
reports to Hitler.
Thus was the Third
Reich built, one seduction at a time. Helmut never
loses his moral qualms, even though he overrules them
again and again. Towards the end of the war he finally
deserts, but is caught and executed by other German
soldiers. The movie doesn’t try to absolve him of
responsibility. Indeed, by showing that his actions are
the result of deliberate, if difficult, decisions,
rather than some inherently evil nature, it highlights
his responsibility. It seems to me that the typical
movie portrayal of Nazis as arrogant Huns just doing
what comes naturally somehow lets them off the hook.
Brother Karl’s
journey from infatuation to disillusionment follows a
shorter path, more direct and more painful, but it
eventually takes him to safety and sanity.
Hans, the youngest
brother, having fed on Goebbels’ propaganda all
his life, never acquires any other perspective from
which he might challenge its mythologies. At the end of
the film we see him lying dead, in the uniform of the
Volksturm, the army of children that Hitler formed in
the war’s final days, to round out the
apocalyptic resolution he so evidently craved.
“Hitler’s SS”(1985) was written by
Lukas Heller, a German-born writer often paired with
director Robert Aldritch, who was nearing the end of a
successful Hollywood career whose highlights included
“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962)
and “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte” (1964).
Many of the actors in this movie were also nearing the
end of their careers – and were therefore
presumably more affordable. José Ferrer is the
Jewish professor Ludwig Rosenberg, rescued by the
Hoffman brothers when he is attacked by drunken SA
thugs, but resigned to his fate when they try to
prevent his deportation later to a death camp. Carroll
Baker is the good but rather stolid mother of the
Hoffman children. Tony Randall is Putzi, the gay
comedian/emcee of the cabaret whose star singer Mitzi
is the lover of Helmut and, later, Karl. Ferrer is
polished, as usual, but Randall is a revelation.
The cabaret scenes
are impossible to watch without thinking of the 1972
“Cabaret,” with Liza Minnelli as the singer
and Joel Grey as the comedian/emcee. The cabaret scenes
in both movies are presented, implicitly, as live
versions of the marvelously grotesque paintings and
drawings of German expressionist George Grosz. But, in
the 1972 movie, they acquired a heavy coat of Hollywood
glamour varnish. The 1985 movie strips away the
varnish. Randall’s Putzi is a straightforwardly
grotesque and pathetic figure, devoid of Grey’s
cuteness. When Putzi is taken by the SS for
“questioning,” we see him strapped to a
chair with a blood soaked white shirt. His face has a
similar composition of red on white. When one of his
interrogators hands a set of pliers to Helmut, Putzi
slowly turns his face around in horror to his old
friend, rolls his eyes up into his head and dies. It is
one of the ghastliest shots I’ve ever seen. At
the end of his career, with this parting gesture,
Randall, the gay old dog, utterly confounds and
sandbags the audience.
The movie has some
notable cinematography, as well. In one scene, Mitzi
sits in her darkened apartment during an allied bombing
raid, a routine event we gather from the way she sits
back on the couch with one leg crossed over the other.
Her face is lit up fitfully as the bombs explode
outside. When the doorbell rings, she admits Karl and
they embrace. We watch the color of their skin change
according to the different stages of the conflagration
outside: pink, red, white, blue, orange, black, green.
There is no norm. They simply reflect the turmoil
around them. It’s a startling visual effect and
it resonates on a symbolic level with its dramatization
of the chameleon morality of man.
Shea’s
performance as Karl is a bit shallow and earnest, and
the transfer of this film to DVD is simply dreadful,
giving the colors a blotchy look, alternately garish
and washed-out. While not quite deserving the term
“classic,” this is a not inconsiderable
movie. It gives us a meaty 150 minutes of good drama
and sharp historical detail. Its makers should be
congratulated for taking dramatic risks. Just imagine
the pitch: “This is going to be a family drama
with historical sweep. The two protagonists are
brothers whose ups and downs we follow over the course
of 13 years against a backdrop of civil unrest and war.
One of them is a Brownshirt stormtrooper and the other
is in the SS.” How do you sell that? Though it
was originally made for TV, this atypical drama
deserves a better fate than the bargain bin at
Wal-Mart.
