When I first saw this movie, back in the early/mid-90's, on HBO, I found it to be lacking somewhere and/or something. Perhaps I didn't understand the war, Nazi Germany, or something else, all of those things, or some combination of them ...but, I didn't quite see the significance of the meaning of this film. I didn't
appreciate the characters, nor the obstacles that they faced throughout the story. Since then I have taken it upon myself to become better acquainted with history, reading books, watching movies, documentaries, talking to ppl and I understand this film better than I did many years ago.Most ppl that I know, that I have talked to about this subject, agree that Hitler was drunk with power. He was drunk on the idea(s) and the ideal(s) that he had envisioned for himself and his place in the world. (At least some of that might have to do with the fact that he was a vegetarian, who inevitably suffered from stunted growth due to a lack of proteins and an amphetamine addict, who was also familiar with cocaine!) And if he had had the opportunity to do so, he would have taken the opportunity to conquer the entire world. The Hitler depicted in this film and the Hitler that we know really existed have at least one, at least, mostly unseen quality in common: they never had that opportunity so, they took what they could get for as long as they could get it! I suspect that I didn't understand and/or appreciate much back when I first saw this film; this is a movie that has gotten better with age, which is extremely rare, for ANY movie...I found this to be a realistic depiction of what WWII, Europe, the US, Asia and Germany, could have turned into/turned out to be like in the years after the war.
April 5, 2011
