Word: wagner
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...anyone can look like Adolph Hitler--he is the common man playing out his most banal fantasies. And, the film implies, anyone with the will can be Adolph Hitler. Hitler is climactically embodied by an actor in lengthy monologue, dressed in the togas of Nero, rising up from Wagner's grave, his faced piqued in totalitarian scowl...
Hitler reappears later after he sinks back into Wagner's grave. He is a puppet. A mannequin. A marionette. A ventriloquist's doll. "Is this the world you pit against mine?" he asks. "In the United Nations, 110 out of 159 countries torture and murder, so each time the U.N. votes, a purely democratic majority votes for inhumanity. Without the extinction of the Indians, the progress in America would have been impossible. I am immortal as long as the world exists," he says, as the ventriloquist undresses him through a series of suits and costumes. "Well done...
THERE IS A CONSTANT undercurrent in this film, background monologues that threaten to convert Our Hitler into a polemic, recordings of speeches by Hitler, Goebbels, Goering. The props, the voices, the music (mostly Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart and Nazi Party songs) play off each other to produce the ideological confusion that is the character of this film, that was also Nazi Germany...
Baum is softspoken, polite, bookish, a man who tries to avoid open confrontation. He has a fondness for fine food, art and opera. His taste: Mozart always, Verdi and Wagner occasionally. "There are days when you just can't listen to Wagner," he says. As Archbishop of Washington, B.C., for nearly seven years, he succeeded cut-and-slash Conservative Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle. Baum calmed tempers and tried to strike a balance between outraged church loyalists and Catholic University of America professors who regularly question papal pronouncements...
Shaw is a Vesuvius of eloquent rhetoric. But his ideas are borrowed, chiefly from Nietzsche, Ibsen, Marx, Darwin, Wagner and William Blake. A grand proselytizer, he was to those men what St. Paul was to Christ...