Word: holocaust
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...therapeutic to be reminded of the small stories of heroism, brutality and survival that restore dimension to the century's signature satanic event, the Nazi extermination of European Jewry. What is unusual is that in this holiday season, no fewer than three Hollywood films deal with the Holocaust. Triumph of the Spirit tells the true tale of a Greek-Jewish boxer, Salamo Arouch, who literally fights for his life at Auschwitz. Music Box fictionalizes the 1988 trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. who was convicted of war crimes. And Enemies, a Love Story adapts Isaac Bashevis...
There are many reasons, aside from the personal commitment of Jewish filmmakers, for Hollywood's preoccupation with the Holocaust. It is one act of state terrorism that has been exhaustively detailed. The first images of gas chambers and mass graves in 1945 sickened the world, not just with their charnel power but also with an awareness that the villains were once torchbearers of Western civilization. Hitler upended the cradle that had rocked Beethoven and Goethe, and hell fell out. His murder of millions of people for the crime of being born Jewish is an act worth pondering and mourning...
...here is a maxim worth remembering: good motives do not always make good movies. Too often Hollywood finds in the Holocaust a familiar, convenient parable of sanctified martyrdom and slavering sadism. Thorny issues are begged, compelling stories avoided. The dark psychology of the death-camp administrator, himself captive in a twisted chain of command, is rarely investigated. Neither is the prisoner's natural impulse to survive at any cost, which gave rise to "the Jewish members of the GPU, the Capos, the thieves, speculators, informers," as Singer describes them in Enemies, a Love Story. Instead, characters are as reductive...
...mood, Laszlo sounds like a Nazi: "A healthy body makes a healthy spirit," he huffs as he completes a maniacal regimen of push-ups. Ann's father-in-law (Donald Moffat), who helped relocate Nazis as a CIA agent after the war, is no more enlightened. He derides the Holocaust as "the world's sacred cow." He's not even sure it happened...
Herman Broder (Ron Silver), the passive hedonist in director Paul Mazursky's $ film of Enemies, a Love Story, is sure. There must have been a Holocaust, or Herman would not have hidden from it for most of the war. Now it is 1949, and he lives in New York with, eventually, three loving women: his Polish Gentile wife Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), whom he married out of gratitude for protecting him in the old country; his passionate mistress Masha (Lena Olin), whom the Holocaust has driven to a volcanic indecision between childbearing and suicide; and his long-lost first wife...