WWII

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: immune from shame

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SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. Courtesy of Vanessa Lapa.

In her absorbing documentary Speer Goes to Hollywood, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.

Speer, the highest ranking Nazi to escape execution at the Nuremberg Trials, was the master of the Nazis’ wartime production efforts. A trained architect, any ability Speer had to design structures was surpassed by his genius in logistics. In Speer Goes to Hollywood, Speer displays an ever greater gift for dissembling.

After being released from prison in the mid 1960’s, Speer published a bestselling (and self-serving) memoir, Inside the Third Reich, to perpetuate what is known as The Speer Myth. Speer would have us believe that the worst crimes in history occurred – right under his nose and to his benefit – without any participation on his part. Speer’s defense was essentially, “Hey, it was the OTHER Nazis“.

(Note: not even a liar as bald-faced as Speer denied that the Holocaust happened.)

To supply the German war machine, Speer exploited the nearly limitless pool of those conquered, persecuted and to be exterminated by the Nazis. Powering his production with forced labor, Speer enslaved 12.5 million victims and worked many of them to death, all to perpetrate a war of aggression.

In the tapes, we hear Speer collaborating with Andrew Birkin, a Stanley Kubrick protege, on the script for a film to further Speer’s version of history. In the face of damning evidence, Speer never wavered in his deflections, dodges and denials. Speer Goes to Hollywood reveals Albert Speer to stay on message with unmatched relentlessness, discipline and audacity.

Andrew Birkin was trying to cash in on the popularity of Inside the Thrd Reich. The tapes show Birkin to be stunningly enabling in the attempted whitewash. Once Birkin slips and blames a kerfuffle on “the Jewish machine”.

Another Birkin mentor, Carol Reed is the truth teller. Reed, the director of The Third Man, gives Birkin a reality check – this IS a whitewash, pure and simple.

A prime example of the banality of evil, Speer doesn’t seem to be a fanatic hater, but an amoral grasper/climber, willing to swallow even genocide as an acceptable price for getting ahead. He does display an ingrained antisemitism, once tossing off “Of course, we resented the Jews“, as if, who wouldn’t?

Here’s a tantalizing nugget from Speer Goes to Hollywood. We hear Speer claim to have written the top Nuremberg prosecutor, American Robert Jackson, to claim important knowledge of Germany’s neurological warfare research, using it as leverage to avoid being turned over to the Soviets. Speer hints at an implied quid pro quo, but given Speer’s credibility, who knows if any of it is true.

The ever-watchable Speer Going to Hollywood chronicles unashamedness on a mass scale.

APOCALYPSE ’45: I never visualized hell being that bad

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APOCALYPSE ’45

The powerful documentary Apocalypse ’45 takes never-before-seen footage of WWII action and blends it into an experience that brings new insights to familiar history.

Apocalypse ’45 takes on the war in the Pacific in 1944 and 1945; the Japanese military knew that its defeat was inevitable, and their strategy was to avoid unconditional surrender by making its price to the Americans too painful. What happened was horrible, and filmmaker Erik Nelson helps us appreciate that with his spare construction – Apocalypse ’45 is essentially three elements – the film itself, the voice over by survivors and starkly evocative titles.

First, Nelson selected from 700 reels of archival film from the National Archive, digitally restored in 4K. It’s in color, and that makes a huge difference to those of us who have to be reminded that WWII was not fought in black and white.

The color and the 4K restoration makes these events look like we were living through them, too, and humanizes the people in the film, making them more relatable. The feeling for the audience is similar to what Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old did for those who fought WWI. The somber fatalism of Marines in landing craft and the joyous relief of sailors and Marines in victory parades are palpable.

The shipboard footage of kamikaze attacks and the pilot’s eye views of strafing missions are breathtaking. The footage of a morass with a movie clapboard “Route 1 Okinawa Mud” helps us understand the challenges of moving an army through muck, even without enemy fire.

A few nonagenarians and centenarians have still survived WWII, and Nelson adds their memories in voice overs. Their reflections are unvarnished, and some of the Marines’ views of the Japanese adversaries are hard to hear. But the overall effect is an understanding of how awful this was:

  • About the planned invasion of Japan: “We didn’t think that the war would end before 1949.”
  • About the use of flamethrowers: “The smell was terrible…They could run (on fire) about 20 yards and that was it.”
  • “War is hell, but I never visualized hell being that bad.”
  • In the amazing account of a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor: “That’s when everything blew up.”

Nelson ties together the footage and the testimonies with stark white-on-black titles, all the more chilling by their matter of factness. About the liberation of the Philippines): “100,000 civilians and the entire defending Japanese Army were killed” (and, indeed, 93% of the 350,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors died). About the fire bombing of Tokyo: 100,000 Japanese civilians were incinerated.

Nelson’s titles tell how the US manufactured enough Purple Heart medals for the invasion of Japan, based on American casualties in the conquest of Okinawa. After the surrender, those Purple Heart medals were warehoused – and the stockpile has been sufficient to supply every American conflict since 1945.

As Apocalypse ’45 begins, it may seem like a regular WW II documentary with some new imagery, but it becomes more and more powerful as the images, personal testimonies and narrative titles have their effect.

Apocalypse ’45 is now streaming on Virtual Cinema and eventive; I watched it at the Pruneyard Cinemas. It will premiere on the Discovery Channel on Labor Day weekend.

THE CATCHER WAS A SPY: why couldn’t this have been a good movie?

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Paul Rudd in THE CATCHER WAS A SPY

The fact that Moe Berg’s is the only baseball card displayed at CIA headquarters tells us that he was a candidate for The Most Interesting Man in the World. Berg was a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law who played 15 years in the Major Leagues, one of the few Jews in pre-war baseball.  While a pro player in the early 1930s, he visited Japan twice, learned Japanese and surreptitiously photographed Tokyo for US intelligence. During World War II, he performed secret missions in Europe for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.

That’s quite a life. Unfortunately, The Catcher Was a Spy drains the interest out of it by trying to portray that most cerebral of real-life characters, Moe Berg, in kind of an actiony movie. The climax is a will-he-or-won’t-he decision that Berg has to make on a secret mission. If you are still awake by then…

Most of The Catcher Was a Spy is Paul Rudd as Moe Berg being watchful. Berg was an enigma and notoriously closed-mouthed – so we see him being enigmatic and silent. Not very cinematic.

The cast is remarkably talented: Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Tom Wilkinson, Guy Pearce and Paul Giamatti, Connie Nielson, and Shea Whigham. Strong has a pivotal role, but we only glimpse the others, and I still can’t place who Connie Nielsen played; it must have been that other female character…

If you’re a history geek like me, you might stream this. But don’t expect an espionage thriller.

DVD/Stream of the Week: HACKSAW RIDGE – unimaginable bravery disconnected from acts of violence

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Andrew Garfield in HACKSAW RIDGE
Andrew Garfield in HACKSAW RIDGE

My video pick for Memorial Day Week is Mel Gibson’s powerful Hacksaw Ridge.  Just before the 2017 Oscars, The Wife and I finally got around to watching Hacksaw Ridge, which had been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Before you see this movie, you need to know that it’s a true story – otherwise you wouldn’t believe it. It’s the story of American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss who single-handedly rescued 75 fellow soldiers at the Battle of Okinawa and became the first Conscientious Objector in American history to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Hacksaw Ridge shows Doss (Andrew Garfield) growing up in rural Virginia as a devout Seventh Day Adventist.  After Pearl Harbor, Doss feels compelled to serve his country but, as a religious pacifist, he can’t sign up for combat.  So he enlists as a conscientious objector to become a combat medic.  He’s thrown into a combat unit for training and endures bullying from both his officers and his fellow troops.

Doss and his unit are ordered into the Battle of Okinawa. They must climb a 350-foot cliff on cargo netting,   The Americans can carry up radios, bazookas, machine guns and flamethrowers but not anything heavier than that.   The Japanese are not contesting the climb up because they have set up a killing field on the ridge-top, which they have fortified with concrete pill-boxes.  The Japanese have also constructed a network of tunnels, in which they can wait out the US naval artillery bombardments.

It’s a blood bath.  Historically, this was an extraordinarily brutal battle – even by War in the Pacific standards.  And so director Mel Gibson, who never shies away from violence, graphically depicts that violence.  Of course, being Mel, he can’t resist a few completely gratuitous moments, including a hara-kiri and the very cool-looking slo-mo ejection of casings from an automatic weapon.  But, generally, the movie violence is proportionate to the real-life violence.

Nevertheless, the real focus is on the bravery of the US troops, of which Doss’ is extraordinary.  Their and his courage to climb the cliff a SECOND time – after learning what it is like on top –  is unimaginable.

Andrew Garfield is superb as Doss, playing him with a goofy and infectious grin, whose niceness and sweetness masks formidable strong will.  I’ve never see him as Spider-Man, but Garfield’s work in Red Riding, The Social Network, 99 Homes and now Hacksaw Ridge has been very impressive.

There isn’t a bad, or even mediocre performance in Hacksaw Ridge.  You can’t tell that Aussies Teresa Palmer, Hugo Weaving and Rachel Griffiths (Brenda in Six Feet Under) aren’t from Blue Ridge Virginia.  Sam Worthington and Vince Vaughn are especially good as Doss’ commanders.

I’ve been a fan of Hugo Weaving since he so compellingly played a blind man in the 1991 Proof (also our first look at a very young Russell Crowe). Since then, Weaving has earned iconic roles in the Matrix movies and V for Vendetta and is usually the most interesting performer in big budget movies.  Here Weaving plays Doss’ father, not just as the mean drunk who terrorizes his family, but as a vet still reeling from the PTSD of his own WWI combat experience.

Hacksaw Ridge deservedly won Oscars for both film editing and sound mixing. Gibson’s directing is excellent, as is the work of cinematographer Simon Duggan (who shot Baz Luhrman’s otherwise dreadful but great-looking The Great Gatsby).

Make sure that you watch through the epilogue and closing credits to see and hear the real life folks portrayed in the film.

You can rent Hacksaw Ridge on DVD from Netflix and Redbox or stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play and DirecTV.

[SPOILER ALERT: I have also read on the Internet about something that is NOT in the movie. Reportedly, when Doss was being evacuated by stretcher after being wounded by the grenade, he ROLLED OFF the stretcher when he passed another wounded soldier and demanded that the stretcher bearers take the other guy. Doss then CRAWLED the final 300 yards to the cargo netting to rescue himself. Again reportedly, Mel Gibson kept this out of the movie because he thought the audience just couldn’t be expected to believe that it really happened.]