WWII

Allied

Director: Robert Zemeckis (2016) BBFC cert: 15

Brad Pitt is torn between love and duty in this muddled Second World War spy drama.

It can’t decide if it wants to be a noirish thriller, a 007 action or an epic wartime romance. As a result some performances struggle, especially a ponderous Brad Pitt.

The Hollywood heavyweight plays Max, an undercover RAF airman who receives a very warm welcome when he parachutes into Nazi occupied French Morocco. Max has extraordinary skill with a deck of cards and can strangle you in all of two languages.

While on a deadly mission to execute a high ranking Nazi, Max falls in love with a glamorous French spy, Marianne. Well, its more romantic than Tinder at any rate. When she is accused of treason, Max has seventy two hours to prove her innocence, or execute her himself.

Marion Cotillard is fabulous as the beautiful secret agent, giving the script a life it doesn’t deserve and doing all the dramatic heavy lifting.

The problems of the poor script are exacerbated by the woefully miscasting of Pitt in a much younger man’s role. The 52 year old is playing an RAF wing commander. Real life wingco Guy Gibson was 24 when he lead his famous Dam Busters raid.

Max is part James Bond and part Rick Blaine, but Pit is too old for the former and lacks the wearied hinterland of the latter. As Pitt is too old then arguably so is Cotillard, though at 41 at least we have a leading man paired with an almost age appropriate co-star.

Pitt sports some well cut suits and a pained expression. He appears to be aiming for enigmatic but it suggests indigestion instead. Pitt executes his brief action moves with the conviction of Roger Moore in his later Bond films.

Pitt’s contemporary Hugh Grant has responded to being freed by age from the tyranny of physical perfection with a career best performance in Florence Foster Jenkins (2016). But Pitt lacks energy and enthusiasm.

There’s an ambassadors party where chocolates are definitely off the menu. Plus there’s plenty of period cars and planes to keep vintage vehicle enthusiasts happy. Plus there’s an ample supply of camels. Which is nice.

Allied skips between London and Casablanca without taking much humour, action, suspense or interest with it. Key moments are ramped up by environment to the point of parody. Eventually the whole exercise slowly sinks beneath the soggy sands of sentiment and leaves barely any trace of itself on your  memory.

Following the 1942 classic film, it’s a schoolboy error to set a Second World War romance in Casablanca. Even the best modern film struggles to compete with the magic of Bogart and Bergman at their imperious peak, and this is far from being the best film.

Don’t play this again, Sam.

★★☆☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

 

Anthropoid

Director: Sean Ellis (2016) BBFC cert: 15

This agonising account of espionage and assassination makes for a gut wrenching watch.

It’s a handsome dramatisation of Operation Anthropoid, the real life mission to the eliminate Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s third in command and architect of the Final Solution.

As well as being a ferocious entertainment, Anthropoid is a moving testament to the astonishing defiance and sacrifice of the country’s citizens under the rule of the Nazi known as the Butcher of Prague.

Sean Ellis produces, directs and co-writes with confidence and authority. Filming on location, the autumnal palette weathers the lovingly crafted period detail with a sepia tone. It’s use heralds a ferocious finale and recalls the final moments of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969).

Betrayal is a recurring idea, perpetrated on the country and its citizens on an international, local and individual level. The British government is not spared admonishment.

Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan are terrific as patriots Jozef and Jan who risk torture and execution when they return by parachute to their homeland, Czechoslovakia.

Making contact with the pitiful remnants of the resistance, they discover Prague in the winter of 1941 is caught in a blizzard of suspicion and paranoia. There’s little safety in this turbulent world of coded conversations, cyanide capsules and clandestine meetings on park benches.

Anna Geislerova and Charlotte Le Bon are local ladies who soften the boys’ demeanour and raise their personal investment. One soldier becomes less fatalistic and the other learns to lead.

This intimate investment in the characters allows for fleeting humour and desperate romance. We fear the repercussions of the attack on those on the periphery of the plotting as much as for the main conspirators.

Among the remainder of the strong supporting cast, stalwart character actor Toby Jones offers dignified concern.

The sometimes graphic but always purposeful and excellently staged action culminates in the Orthodox Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius, where the bullet holes sustained in the actual fight can still be seen.

★★★★☆

@ChrisHunneysett

 

 

Phoenix

Director: Christian Petzold (2015)

Greed, betrayal and revenge are surgically spliced in this intriguing post-war thriller.

Holocaust survivor Nelly (Nina Hoss) is a former singer rescued from the ‘camps in the East’ and brought to a private asylum to recuperate.

With doctor’s using techniques still in their infancy, Nelly undergoes plastic surgery to rebuild her shattered face.

The motives of her friend and saviour Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) are ambiguous. She is evangelical about escorting Nelly to Palestine and using Nelly’s wealth to help establish a homeland for the Jewish diaspora.

Also her physical intimacy suggests a more emotional, less platonic reason for keeping close to Nelly.

Rejecting Lene’s plans for the future, Nelly haunts the bombed out buildings of Berlin looking for her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) – who may have betrayed her to the Nazi’s.

She’s finds ‘Johannes’ working in The Phoenix cabaret club. He doesn’t recognise her but thinks with a make-over and coaching she could pass as his late wife, enabling him to collect her inheritance.

With brisk deliberation the script questions the truth of relationships and raises issues of identity and trust. With Nelly’s memories as fragile as her skin grafts, everyone’s motivation is suspect.

The involving finale gathers close friends together and the casual way they’re introduced to us suggests entire scenes were trimmed in the edit – but not at the expense of the measured tone, subtle performances and claustrophobic, nightmarish atmosphere.

★★★☆☆

The Decent One

Director: Vanessa Lapa (2015)

This tightly-focused documentary portrait of high-ranking Nazi Heinrich Himmler is all the more gripping for being told in his own mundane words.

It is based on documents belonging to Himmler, his wife Margarete, daughter Gudrun and mistress Hedwig. Their diaries and letters were controversially not handed over to the post-war military authorities but kept hidden for years.

Actors to bring a voice to their words while personal photographs and home-movies provide visual insight.

Tracing Himmler’s life from birth, we’re taken through Himmler’s comfortable middle-class upbringing to his high-ranking Nazi career and eventual capture and suicide at the end of the Second World War.

He was a sickly child and a ‘B’ grade school pupil. His casual anti-semitism and support for a militarised Germany were evident at an early age.

Between the wars at university in Munich, he joins an exclusive Apollo fraternity. They discuss degeneracy in society, the dangers posed by homosexuality and the ‘Jewish question’. He reads Oscar Wilde which puts him in a terrible mood.

An unprepossessing, balding man in round glasses, he is a natural, accomplished bureaucrat and quickly rises in the burgeoning Nazi party.

As Germany goes to war, he rises to the head of the SS and we’re provided with a contrast between the careerists comfortable life and the deadly consequences of his work.

He is supported and encouraged by Margarete and he describes her anti-semitism as charming. She takes great pride in his success and both enjoy the material benefits of his labour.

Beginning as flirtatious love-letters, the focus of their writing changes to the dull routines of his work and her domestic organisation. Their very ordinary concerns and casual bigotry puts the horror of his actions into sharp relief.

In the summer of 1942 he instigates the Final Solution, the systematic extermination of all Jews in German territory. As he father’s a child with his mistress Hedwig, he’s also exploring ways of sterilising all Jewish women.

The director (a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors) manipulates the material to create a well-paced and intelligent work with a strong narrative thread.

The film assumes an audience’s basic knowledge of twentieth century German history and politics. We see footage of the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 but we’re not told the significance of the event or even have described to us what we’re seeing.

Aeroplanes fly in swastika formation and there are book burning rallies. Hitler lurks mostly off-stage and is referred to as ‘the boss’.

As we hear Himmler’s thoughts on homosexuality, we treated to images of squads of healthy semi-naked german beefcakes exercising in the open air. It’s a small touch of humour and possibly the film’s last before it covers the war years. The tacit suggestion is perhaps Himmler protests too much.

There is horrific footage of the concentration camps with naked cadavers thrown into trucks by survivors. With no remorse from Margarete or Gudrun, the postscript is as eye-opening as anything else we witness.

★★★★☆