Here's a film that spends 95% of its time in a small dingy bunker located under the city of Berlin.
At a time when the city was being besieged by on all sides by the Soviet forces and the war was for all intensive purposes lost from the German point of view.
And sitting within this bunker is a borderline crazy man still sending out orders, still talking of grand proclamations and still maintaining that his time has not yet passed. A man whose fanaticism has gotten to the point of deification as he starts to compare himself to Jesus Christ.
And who is this man?
Why it's no one else than Adolf Hitler the most famous person of the 20th century. the nutsball of Europe, a man whose unfortunate ideology has becomes so fundamentally understood and misunderstood by everyone around him that it is still a lingering problem to this day.
With Alec Guinness of all people playing Hitler and doing an 'interesting' job of it.
I honestly don't think Alec Guinness is a good choice as Hitler.
Their mannerisms are very different, their overall presentation couldn't be further from one another.
I've always seen Alec Guinness to be a more calm and collected sort of man (or at least on screen). As opposed to Hitler's more rambunctious overly, exaggerated body movement.
Which does give us this neat character interaction as a man who's known for playing quiet sophistication has to go off the deep end to try and imitate one of history's most fanatical wackjobs.
And in that regard I give Alec Guinness a lot of props. He really does pull off Hitlers awkward disillusioned spirit and we even got to a few points where I forgot that he was Alec Guinness he was able to make me believe as if this man really was Adolf Hitler: Starter of world wars, killer of millions and general jerk to his own girlfriend.
There's this point towards the end of the movie when Hitler and his girlfriend are about to commit suicide and they get into this massive argument where Hitler tells her off for being an 'idiot girl' who doesn't know a goddamn thing about anything and more or less says that he has no real interest in her.
And it makes for a neat little piece of drama especially when she decides to kill herself not out of love for Hitler but simply because she wants to get away from the man.
But I feel like it's disingenuous to how it probably was in real life. From what I understand Ava Brown was a pretty fond of Hitler and never really gave a damn about all the horrible atrocities he committed.
Much like the man himself she is also tainted with bad ideas and an overall disgusting outlook on life. But hey you never know maybe she was just that ignorant. But I doubt it.
If I was smart I would have talked about this film yesterday when I actually watched it. At the time when I had a more gut reaction to everything as it made it more compelling to talk about.
Once you remove the gut reaction you're just left with a fairly decent historical drama that takes place all the way within one location.
It is quite good from that perspective it's just kind of weird given that Alec Guinness still doesn't feel like the right guy to be playing Hitler.
And really there's nothing all that fascinating about the movie
The Story of Hitler's last days in the bunker has been done before and will be done after this to. So unfortunately this movie gets kind of stuck as the middle child of one of the strangest genres of film. That being ''Hitler death'' I guess.
Though if nothing else it at least doesn't get accused of being a promoter of Nazism or trying to show anybody in a good light.
Everyone in this movie is either miserable, awful or just kind of confused. Especially a lot of the army general in general working staff who want to get the heck out of the bunker so they might have a chance at survival.
And there is something to be said for the weird death cult personality everybody starts to take on as the film progresses. It makes everything feel like you're in Jonestown except it's on a smaller scale and you're not bothered with half the people that want to kill themselves.
And then at the very end of the movie when only a few people actually themselves and everybody else just decide to stand around in the middle of the bunker lighting up cigarettes because they were prohibited to do so beforehand.
and then at the very end of the movie when only a few of them actually do it and everybody else just decide to stand around in the middle of the bunker lighting up cigarettes because they were prohibited to do so beforehand.
There's something almost oddly comedic and calming about that scene.
Like everybody realises the utter stupidity of it all and decides ''smoke em if you got-em'' cuz it's all over now.
On a slightly unrelated note John Bennett looks way too much like Josef Goebbels in this film. It's borderline uncanny and if you took the real Goebbels and replaced him with this guy back in the forties I don't think anybody would be able to tell the difference. At least until he opens his mouth
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