Word: hitleritis
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Downfall is a German film--epic in scale, painstaking in detail, superbly acted--that recounts the last days of Adolf Hitler and his circle of associate monsters in the spring of 1945. The locale is ruined Berlin, encircled by the implacably advancing Russians as its population descends into anarchy. Belowstairs, Hitler (toweringly played by Bruno Ganz) spirals deeper into unreality. Hunched over his maps, he orders imaginary armies to attack, while his toadies, in their spiffy uniforms, look nervously at one another. Who's going to risk his rage by telling him the truth...
...creepier when he succumbs to whispery-voiced, almost catatonic self-pity as he tries to relate to courtiers. Half of them are (as he is) contemplating suicide, while the rest are plotting desperate escapes. There has been some criticism of director Oliver Hirschbiegel's Oscar-nominated film for humanizing Hitler and his gang, but that's nonsense. Because, of course, they were human. The world has since known dictators just as insane. And we can be sure their acolytes exhibited the same range of ugly behavior (denial, cynicism, narcissism) shown in this film. The inclusion of a few innocents...
...have been his greatest advantage as an editor that he was an insider (he counted as friends everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Henry Kissinger) who began as an outsider. Henry arrived in the U.S. in 1938 with his parents, Jewish refugees from Hitler's Anschluss of their native Austria. He would write about it much later in his memoir, One Man's America. "I love America," he wrote, "because it took me in from the madness of wartime Europe and allowed me to make it my country." Love was the key word. All his life, he approached America with...
After World War II the great names of prewar manufacture, including some that were tainted by cordial service to Hitler and Mussolini, came back with cars that were shorter, lower to the ground and faster. These include the two-seat 1950 Jaguar XK120, a mass-production car that was capable of going 130 m.p.h., faster than many prewar racers. But the ultimate examples were the Ferraris. With their enameled red surfaces, their voluptuous lines and their plain debt to jet- aircraft styling, they practically say "Lick me." In a show that's pure ice cream, you may be tempted...
...perfectly mustachioed Führer awaits in Berlin—where, though he is significantly less plausible than Bruno Ganz in the Academy Award-nominated Downfall (or even the toga-clad Heinz Schubert in the 1978 film Our Hitler), he delivers a spluttering invective against the “low races,” and proceeds to bestow upon Bose a toy model of the boat that will carry the latter around Africa “like Vasco da Gama”—and furnish ample opportunity, in turn, to bond with the spice-starved German crew over...