HITLER: THE LAST TEN DAYS [PG]
review by Robert Newton
You’ve seen it before. The neighborhood video store gives up the ghost, unable to compete in a world dominated by Netflix, digital downloads and brick-and-mortar dinosaurs like Lackluster and Follywood. Those guys you see vulturing the aisles with a laundry list of movie titles (while the forlorn owner looks on in anguish) are one of two things: avid collectors or eBay speculators. Up until the long out-of-print (or “OOP”) 1973 title Hitler: The Last Ten Days was announced recently by Paramount pimp Legend Films, it would have been on that list, trading for final auction bids in excess of $50.00, a marvel considering that VHS is now an ex-parrot.
In the World War II drama, a pre-Star Wars Alec Guinness plays the self-aggrandizing syphilitic psychopath Adolf Hitler with all the nutty bluster one might expect of a pedigreed thesp like Guinness taking on such a monumental role. The action takes place in his Berlin bunker during the ten days at the end of the war in Europe in which the British and Americans advanced from the west and the Soviets from the east. Hitler had holed up with the bulk of his sycophantic ring, all of which enabled his megalomania until the end, despite the harsh reality that all was lost.
The film is based on Wehrmacht officer Gerhardt Boldt’s book, “The Last Days Of The Chancellery,” an eyewitness account of most of these last ten days. While historical fidelity is important for historians and teachers, it is a detriment when that is all there is. Because this is so much Guinness’s show, writer-director Ennio De Concini, best known for writing Divorce Italian Style, fails to explore the personalities and stories of any of Hitler’s elite.
Even the history is treated perfunctorily, with a forced introduction and intermittent cutaways to actual still photos and newsreel footage. The inclusion of these elements, like Mischa Spoliansky’s moody rendition of the German national anthem on what sounds like a bouzouki, are meant to be ironic. When Hitler announces that the impending Russian invasion of the city is a major bungle, the swastika on the Reichstag explodes; a Nazi bunker feast is juxtaposed with footage of a man shaving a piece of meat off the flank of a dead horse; and so on until we cry Onkel.
The cast is an odd lot, a mixture of British and Italian actors. TV vet John Bennett is a ringer for propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, though the late, prolific Adolfo Celi (Emilio Largo from Thunderball) looks very out-of-place (and while the dubbing of his voice is credited to Italian ADR guy Robert Reitty, it sounds suspiciously like Christopher Lee). Other familiar faces include the storied Joss Ackland, whom audiences will recognize as the heavy from modern movies like Lethal Weapon 2 and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, in a too-small part as Gen. Wilhelm Burgdorf, and the lovely Phyllida Law (Emma Thompson’s mother) as bunker cook Fräulein Manzialy.
The film is worth looking at for Guinness’s layered performance alone (Anthony Hopkins’s turn in The Bunker is also worth watching), but for the best depiction of the Thousand Year Reich’s twelfth year bellyflop, get yourself a copy of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 staggering powerhouse, Downfall.
*SPECIAL FEATURES: None (but hey — at least it, like longtime Paramount holdouts Student Bodies and Jekyll & Hyde…Together Again, are finally on DVD, thanks to Legend Films).
