It's time to view one of my favourite genre. Romanticised History. Pacifically romanticises figures in history. The Great King is a supposedly historically accurate film based on Frederick the Great.
If this movie was made under any other state, at any other time, it would just be that. A fairly straightforward dramatised film about Frederick and his various military conflicts.
Maybe they throw in a little bit of his personal life and the more liberal amongst us might examine some of his homosexuality.
But for the most part we could get away with a pretty base film. But because this movie was made in Germany in the early 40s it takes on a few other meanings.
It hyper romanticises the early day conflicts of Frederick. Giving him this Underdog Motif as he fights against the entirety of Europe. Also altering Frederick's personality so that he acts a little bit more how you say ''Adolfrian''.
And as you can imagine a film of this caliber promotes a lot of German unity and nationalism. And not just any form of nationalism, but Prussian Centric nationalism.
Which is something that's almost completely fabricated. No German living in those days thought of themselves as one big unified community. They may have looked at other ''Germans'' and thought; ''There's a Kinsman who speaks the same language, but he doesn't Hail to the same King and his living standards are different from my own.''
There was the Holy Roman Empire. But that was less a unification of Germans and more of a loosely associated cabal of city-states, Duchies, Counties, Kingdoms and any other chunk of territory that existed within Central Europe. All proclaiming a loyalty to one king but ultimately never really serving said King. At least in it's later days. The entirety of the Holy Roman Empire is too confusing an entity to try and discuss here. I would waste paragraph after paragraph on it and then ultimately just end up with somebody saying; 'You got that wrong'. And they probably be right.
So despite all the nationalistic ideals and the propaganda is the film any good on its own?
It's okay. Some of the battle choreography and set designs make for some interesting visuals and the acting of Otto Gebühr betrayal of Frederick is quite well done. The overall tone is consistent. The whole movie has this sense of misery to it. The idea of War; Both failing and succeeding is a dirty affair.
Frederick despite all his achievements is still left something of a broken man.
All of his close allies died, his favourite nephew dies, he's left knowing that nobody else in the country can really keep it going the way he does. And he still has a lot of enemies surrounding him. A fair bit of the last third of the movie focuses on a Russian plot to invade the country via a fake Alliance.
Which is an obvious reference to the real life fake Alliance that the Soviets and the Nazis had with one another when they were invading Poland.
The film goes on for a little too long and I think some of that could be blamed on the secondary plot involving this peasant girl and a man who get married and whose Affairs a revolving around the entire War as they travel from one battle to the next. However without this secondary story we wouldn't have any break up between one Frederick the great scene and the next. Which would just make everything seem really stagnant.
Conclusion:
As I mentioned at the top of this blog, I love historical dramas. Even ones like this that have been mythicized to such an account that you're not really dealing with real people anymore.
The movies only real problem is that it's a bit too long. They could have cut about 20 minutes out of this and I think it would have benefited.
The real problem with this movie is external. No matter how you look at this film you'll never be able to divorce the Führerprinzip routes from it.
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