Word: speers
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...Nothing in nature, including a rock, could be that color. Guards say the wall goes down 30 ft. in spots so as to hold fast in the quicksand. At intervals along the flat surface, watch turrets sit with witch-hat tops; Disney World, had it been built by Albert Speer, would have this look. The wall encompasses five separate cell blocks. Inside these are individual cells, 7 ft. from floor to ceiling, 9 ft. by 6 ft. in area, in which some 2,000 men live among the possessions permitted them...
Inside the Third Reich, a five-hour TV movie based on the best-selling 1970 memoirs of Albert Speer, is one more honorable exploitation of Nazism's awful charm. At an early Nazi reception, Speer's wife (Blythe Danner) surveys the panoply and calls it "a dress rehearsal for disaster." It was no dress rehearsal; it was a superproduction of the real thing, and the main characters acted as if they were in their own movie. Hitler (Derek Jacobi) does malicious impersonations of Mussolini and Chamberlain; he sits raptly before a Busby Berkeley musical extravaganza; he watches himself...
Architecture is an art in the service of the power it houses, and Speer, the upper-middle-class son and grandson of architects, was a smooth courtier. His stern father (John Gielgud) despised the Nazis from the start for their socialism rather than their nationalism, but Albert felt no foreboding at all. This TV movie wonders just what he was capable of feeling. Hauer is a Dutch actor (Soldier of Orange, Nighthawks) with a sharp-featured face that emotion seems never to have touched. Thus he makes a perfect Speer, whom E. Jack Neuman's teleplay depicts...
...rhythm, and a company of distinguished actors has lent it an elegant tone. Gielgud is haughtily endearing, a stiff-collared gentleman who speaks in the cadences of Schiller and dreams in the images of Goethe. Robert Vaughn displays a flinty decency as Field Marshal Milch, who probes surgically for Speer's conscience, or at least his common sense. As Hitler, Jacobi spellbinds-first with the ingratiating gifts of the born orator, then with capricious viciousness. Finally, as the cracked shell of a dictator, he feebly insists that "it is easy for me to end my life." It would indeed...
...Albert Speer, 76, Adolf Hitler's architect and builder of monuments to the Third Reich who, as Minister of Armaments and War Production, used slave labor to keep the German war machine running. The only Nazi leader to admit his guilt at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, he served 20 years before his release...