Hitler: The Last Ten Days

1895-1999
Post Reply
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19319
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Post by Big Magilla »

I never saw it, but the film and Guinness' performance in it are well regarded. According to a more scholarly than usual user comment on imdb, Guinness considered this one of his five greatest screen performances and his most challenging role until Little Dorrit fifteen years later. I would think the other three would be the characters he played in Oliver Twist, Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Bridge on the River Kwai, but I could be wrong.
dws1982
Emeritus
Posts: 3791
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 9:28 pm
Location: AL
Contact:

Post by dws1982 »

Has anyone else watched this movie? I watched it in a History class yesterday (we look at World War II through films). We were going to watch Downfall, but since A) It's subtitled, B) It's dialogue heavy, and C) We're supposed to take notes on the movie, the teacher decided to show us this instead.

The movie...does not look like a classic waiting to be rediscovered. According to Wikipedia, Guiness considered this his best film performance, which is odd, considering some of the other movies he was in. He does look more like Hitler than Bruno Ganz or Anthoyn Hopkins did when th ey played him, but Guiness's is a really bizarre performance: Part tragic, as Hitler realizes the Third Reich is falling, and decides that he has to commit suicide, and it's part Wacky-Sitcom-Character, as Hitler goes into comic rants at generals who disobey orders, or at the councilman brought in to perform his wedding, or as he jokes about how much whipped cream they have (to put on cakes) in the bunker while everyone calmly discusses suicide plans.

The movie itself is half black comedy, half tragedy too: They make General Von Greim's wound into almost a running gag, as Hitler orders him to fly from Munich to Berlin, and as servants carry him from room to room. Joseph and Magda Goebbels get into a few of those marital arguments that you see on Everybody Loves Raymond. And the most obvious example of its odd sense of humor is this: They make a big thing early in the film about how Hitler won't allow smoking anywhere near him, and so at the end, when they confirm that Hitler is dead, the first thing that everyone (gathered in the room outside of Hitler's quarters) does is to take out their cigarettes and light up.

The scenes outside of the bunker are all shot in black & white; I guess that this is because they use a lot of stock footage for the outside scenes, and it was already in black & white, so they shot the new footage that way in order to maintain consistency. Even though it uses some stock footage, that's mostly from Triumph of the Will or films about the destruction of Berlin, there's hardly any reference to the Holocaust. An uninformed viewer might not realize that Hitler was responsible for millions upon millions of deaths. The stock footage makes for some interesting cutaways at times, but overall there isn't much worth seeing about it, unless it's the truly bizarre lead performance and the strange use of comedy.
Post Reply

Return to “The First Century”