HITLER: THE LAST TEN DAYS

d. Ennio De Concini (1973)

Most of the films I write about here are modest in their expectation: they want to find an audience and make some money. They feature writers, directors and actors who are either at the beginning or the end of their careers, or stranded on a plateau of mediocrity on which they will stay. That's not to say that these films aren't sincere or don't contain artistry, even brilliance, as they often do, but that's a bonus: there is no expectation or pretension towards it.

Hitler: The Last Ten Days is an exploitation film. True, it's not one of the cycle of wretched Nazi sex films later classified as 'video nasties' (they were always nasty, regardless of format), but it's pure trash from start to finish, regardless of the fact that it has expectations, pretensions, even: a decent director, a good cast, a world famous star and the endorsement of historian Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper (it's now forgotten that, for several months after Hitler's death, no-one on the Allied side knew for sure what had happened to him. It was Trevor-Roper who put the pieces together). What we're presented with is a stilted, stifling drama, interspersed with alternately insensitive or ham-fisted use of archive footage. There are extraordinary moments: Eva Braun singing a song in blackface; the summary execution of a drunken Julian Glover; Hitler eating slice after slice of cake, but these are extraordinary because they are drawn from life, and were suffused with the unbearable tension and unreality of the Nazi Götterdämmerung. What we mainly have is British character actors (and a few Italians) talking, talking, talking, but no-one daring to speak, or smoke, or escape, or surrender, or kill Hitler, just fucking kill him, or even to reflect on what a colossal toll their madness has taken on the world (at the end, Eva Braun becomes disillusioned, and even admonishes her new husband, but there is no basis to believe this actually happened).    

The biggest problem with the film is Hitler himself, played here by Alec Guinness. Guinness was a fine and cerebral actor but the absolute antithesis of Das Fuhrer, an extremely unsubtle person. This Hitler looks like Stan Laurel with a stick on moustache and only really convinces when he becomes jovial, talking about nude opera, architecture and the greatest hits of his bloody rampage across Europe and Africa. When he loses his temper (which is often), the performance becomes hollow and unconvincing, with Guinness lacking the inner energy and even the strength of voice to convey his lunatic rantings. His gestures here are drawn from Hitler's speeches, and so are melodramatic and play to the back of the house. At one point, he is so angry he stamps his foot, a ludicrous gesture which, although almost certainly accurate, seems so silly that the director should have asked him gently but firmly not to do it.      

Hitler seems to be one of those roles, along with Napoleon, Jesus, Sherlock Holmes and Batman, that every halfway decent actor should have a go at. Sometimes it works and, well, sometimes you feel like shooting yourself in the head while simultaneously chomping down on a cyanide capsule, that's just the way the Pfefferkuchen crumbles.