Word: das
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MOST OF THE people in line at the Sack Beacon Hill asked for tickets to Das Boot Pronouncing it like what cowboys wear, probably ready to see another complex, harshly intellectual film, as they have come to expect from recent German filmmakers. Once in the dark, however, they discovered that Boot not only means "boat," but is pronounced just like the English word; and, moreover, that this is a good old-fashioned action-packed American-style war movie. Complete with a tough, taciturn captain, young bloom-of-manhood sailors just doing their duty, suspense, explosions, and the general message that...
...Das Boot is one of the highest-grossing films in German history. It provides the audience with its favorite (American) kind of entertainment, while soothing consciences about any collective guilt. These men are good; They are soldiers, not Nazis, Mostly they are dark-haired, Southern-spoken. Only one "overgrows Hitlerjugend," as the captain calls him, shows a tendency toward uniform-worship and blond Aryan arrogance. The tall, chisel-cheeked heroes of Leni Riefenstahl could never fit in the low ceilings and grime of a submarine...
...audience for this movie, moreover, is not entirely accustomed to watching subtitled films--this is being shown at a Sack Theater, not at the Orson Welles. Das Boot is being promoted as a movie that happens to come from Germany, not as a "foreign film," with all the connotations of all-art-and-no-plot that the term carries for American. If the same audiences who like action-packed movies are willing to read subtitles and be depressed, Das Boot will be a hit in America...
...most successful, satisfying effort in months. It is all the more welcome because the season, still somewhat colored by 1980's labor disputes, began in a lackluster fashion. Soprano Renata Scotto was booed in her opening-night performance of Norma, and a Ring semicycle (Das Rheingold and Siegfried) fizzled out in something less than Wagnerian glory. It was in December, with Franco Zeffirelli's lavish cast-of-thousands production of La Bohème, that the company began the return to form...
...Das Boot takes another plunge into the black pool of memory and finds-surprise!-flinty nobility. Actually, no surprise for anyone who feasted on the submarine movies of the 1950s. Here is the dogged captain (Jürgen Prochnow), navigating g the straits of political bureaucracy ""and a bungling high command. Here is the wild-eyed wraith of the engine room (Erwin Leder), who "cracks" during one crisis, then performs heroically in the next. Here are the hide-and-seek battles, the claustrophobic tensions, the respect for a valiant enemy. As with David, the novelty here is getting the inside...