Walter Hewel: Why do you want to live on?
Prof. Dr. Ernst-Günter Schenck: And you? Why do you absolutely want to die?
Walter Hewel: You see this?
[shows him a cyanide cap]
Walter Hewel: The Führer personally gave it to me!
Prof. Dr. Ernst-Günter Schenck: [bitter] As last honor?
Walter Hewel: ...maybe.
There have been a lot of films about World War II but only a handful become part of the public consciousness. Mention the submarine warfare and most people will probably think of DAS BOAT. Mention D-Day and people will remember images from THE LONGEST DAY. DOWNFALL is certainly a very good film. Whether it will stand with the handful of great war films like DAS BOOT remains to be seen. This is probably by a wide margin the best film that examines Adolf Hitler and his close associates during the fall of the Third Reich. This is not the first time the story has been told. In 1981 Anthony Hopkins played Hitler in THE BUNKER and Alec Guinness played the role in HITLER: THE LAST TEN DAYS. In DOWNFALL it is Bruno Ganz as Hitler. But what sets this version apart is the detail, much of which was gleaned from the testimony of Hitler's personal secretary. The script is based on the 2002 documentary BLIND SPOT: HITLER'S SECRETARY.
The plot is no surprise to anyone who is familiar with WWII history. As the Russian troops inevitably close in on the city, Hitler will not allow himself to be evacuated from Berlin. Nor will he surrender. His feeling is now that it is the German people who have most betrayed him. Der Fuehrer considers those who will be survivors as traitors, people who sacrificed his dream for their own petty lives. To him the weak deserve to die. He gives impossible orders to troops hoping they will either miraculously prevail or be slaughtered. Either way he feels good will have been done. And still when he is not raging he is torn by self-doubts and conflicting emotions. The film generates a real excitement as it builds to its inevitable and harrowing end.
If the film has a weakness it is that it concentrates too much on what is happening in the bunker. Perhaps for budgetary reasons this film shows us too little of what is happening on the battlefield that is quickly becoming Berlin. We are told what is happening there rather than being shown it. Ironically at two and a half hours, the film is frustratingly short. There should have been another hour dramatizing the collapsing military situation and the futile defenses of the German people, military and civilian. That certainly would have made this one of the great war films on a subject that has not been sufficiently covered.
Director Oliver Hirschbiegel previously directed THE EXPERIMENT. That was a film with a very interesting premise, but it fell into being a more traditional action film in the second half. This time he has a much more important subject and he manages to make it intriguing throughout. I rate the film a +3 on the -4 to +4 scale or 9/10.
By : Mark R. Leeper
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 4
How much detail do you remember from your first years in elementary school? I can't recall much of what went by decades ago, but one such detail became fixed in my memory only years after I graduated from P.S. 103. In my fourth grade class, the teacher assigned me to clean the litter from the floor, much like the ushers at the cineplexes whose jobs depend on how many slobs are in the audience. At the rear of the third row, there was an old copy of the New York Daily News dated May 1st, 1945. The headline, as bold as you can get, said "Hitler Dead." History lessons notwithstanding, I could not grasp the full meaning of this. My knowledge of World War II could be evoked by a question I recall asking my father: "Dad, What's a Nazi" and "Are all Germans Nazis?" The answer was too complicated for this seven-year-old kid to understand.
Along comes Oliver Hirschbeigel with quite a lot of detail about what went on in Berlin just before Hitler bit the cyanide tablet and for good measure shot himself during the 3-second window that he had after sinking his teeth into the capsule. And what an answer! His "Downfall," ("Der untergang" in its original German), has just one minor fault that European films seems to share: the white subtitles are virtually unreadable when against a bright, white background. Ninety-five percent of the time, however, no problem. "Downfall," which has a script by Bernd Eichinger, whose understanding of and scholarship about the last ten days of Hitler's life is based on two books: Joachim Fest's "Inside Hitler's Bunker," and "Until the Final Hour," written by Hitler's personal secretary, Traudl Junge–who ought to know since she probably spent more time with the creep than anyone else.
Cinematographer Rainer Klausmann takes his camera inside Hitler's bunker located in Berlin deep below the chancellery. The crew uses a Munich studio to represent the bomb shelter, and is so infatuated with the literal corridors of power that everybody has a grand time spending most of the film's 155 minutes there. From time to time, the cast and crew meet just outside the offices where Russian artillery is hammering the environs around the bunker, the fighting being all one-sided. Russians fire, German officers and their helpers wonder what to do as the war is winding to an end with the Soviets just hundred of meters away. The decision to concentrate on the bunker is a good one. Given that far more World War II movies are catalogued in Leonard Maltin's annual Movie and Video Guide than you can count on the bacteria of your left thumb, Hirschbeigel wisely zeroes in this one aspect of the war: the fate of the German honchos when the jig is up, the die is cast.
The decision is such a good one, in fact, that "Downfall" is not only Germany's entry to the Oscars to be awarded for films that opened in 2004 but it was selected by the 5,800 lucky folks in the Academy who recently chose it as one of the top five list for best foreign language film. In fact if the film were shown to awards groups in '04 before they (including the distinguished members of New York Film Critics Online) voted, Bruno Ganz would be right up there for best actor, given the Swiss-born actor's strong performance as Adolf Hitler–and thanks to Waldemar Pokromski and Margrit Neufink's make-up, he looks every bit the part. (This makes us wonder: if Bruno Ganz could pass for Hitler, couldn't Hitler have been made up to look like Bruno Ganz and make his escape?)
In a brief introduction before the focus on the last ten days, Hirschbeigel takes us to East Prussia in 1942, where Hitler is interviewing women who want to be his secretary. He chooses Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) in seconds, partly because of her good looks and also because he has a soft spot in his heart for women from Munich.
Cut to the chancellery bunker on April 20, 1945. We find Hitler, of course, and also some hangers-on both high level right down to the cook, receptionist, and children of the big shots. While Eva Braun (Juliane Kohler) is preparing the celebration of Der Fuhrer's fifty-sixth birthday, the Nazi honchos including Interior Minister Heinrich Himmler (Ulrich Noethen), Eva's brother-in-law Herman Fegelein (Thomas Krestchmann), Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels (Ulrich Mathes), and architect Albert Speer (Heino Ferch) urge Hitler to bolt for the south and perhaps blend in with the masses. Hitler won't consider this but orders Speer to burn Germany. Speer refuses. Now the Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! but while director Hirschbeigel shows the turmoil outside, he is not interested in making another "The Longest Day," but is more into re-creating a "Das Boot" kind of atmosphere if you will.
The scariest scene belongs not to Hitler, since Hitler is Hitler, and not to the Russians, whom we see only at the end, drinking vodka and dancing in the streets, but to Frau Goebbels, cold as ice, determined to murder her own five or six children with cyanide. This is not because she fears that they will be tortured or imprisoned by the Russians but because she cannot imagine their wanting to live under any system but National Socialism. Now that's a true believer!
As for any in the audience who believe that Hitler's anti- Semitism was simply a ploy to hitch onto the general anti- Jewish history of parts of Europe including Germany, forget it. As his secretary, Tradul Junge, presumably quotes, Hitler on at least one occasion states that his own death does not matter: that he will go down in history as "eradicating the Jewish poison from our system."
As Eric Hansen of "The Hollywood Reporter," has stated in his own review, this could be "the most important movie made about World War II." I dunno about that, though, remember, he's not saying the best movie about the war but simply the most important. The film will not necessarily engage a potential audience who want to see massive bloodshed, mushroom clouds, or people yelling "banzai banzai" but given an incredibly good performance by Bruno Ganz–posing as Hitler the dog lover, Hitler the vegetarian, Hitler the shouter, Hitler the off-the- wall insane (we're reminded that he wants to execute Himmler for attempting what he considers a coup and that he doesn't give a fig about the German civilians "who brought this on themselves." (Huh?).
Stay in your seats after Hitler bites the cyanide. The film is only about two-thirds over. Some of the best is yet to come especially the scene that will cause nightmares to anyone with a gram of sensitivity–the administration of poison to the five or six Goebbels kids by their own mutter dear.
