Volume 46, Number 4 · March 4, 1999
Screentime for Hitler
By J.S. Marcus
The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company 1918-1945
by Klaus Kreimeier, translated by Robert Kimber, by Rita Kimber
Hill and Wang, 451 pp., $35.00
The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife
by Eric Rentschler
Harvard University Press, 456 pp., $25.00 (paper)
Der Bewegte Mann (Maybe…Maybe Not) (1994)
a film by Sönke Wortmann
Laurenfilm, $95.95
The scene is almost familiar. The time is the Second World War, and a beautiful singer with a deep voice has come to entertain the troops; she has been quarreling with her boyfriend, a dashing air force pilot away at the front, and during her concert she will try to boost her own morale along with everyone else's. Her first number begins somberly, with a verse written in a minor key, vaguely Hebraic, like the German jazz-age numbers Marlene Dietrich sang in The Blue Angel, or like some American torch songs from the late Thirties and early Forties. The chorus is rousing, waltzlike. The camera moves back and forth between the singer, her conductor (who is secretly in love with her), and the soldiers, who eventually lock arms and sway, joining in the choruses.
Review, 5249 words
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