PRESSURE POINT

d. Hubert Cornfield (1962)

I've always loved films about psychoanalysis, mainly because they provide so much scope for offbeat and inventive attempts to turn the objective camera into a subjective eye. I particularly enjoy dream sequences, haunting visuals, unusual staging, blurred edges, atonal electronic music and lots and lots of mime. Pressure Point is almost mainstream in many ways, but has some fascinating components that keep it plenty weird enough for consideration on this somewhat specialist blog. 

The very great Sidney Poitier is the prison psychiatrist, Bobby Darin the prisoner patient, an American Nazi imprisoned when the USA entered the war with Germany. They are diametrically opposed from the outset, of course, but the tension between the racist loser and the black high flier sparks some soul searching from each of them, which makes for a fascinating conflict. 

Their sessions together open up all sorts of odd, abstract flashbacks from Darin's less than illustrious past, sometimes staged in anonymous dreamscapes (the scenes where a young Darin bullies his imaginary friend), sometimes in Poitier's office (the venue for a fantasy about Darin ordering an elephant to stand on his pathetic hypochondriac Mother's head). It's pretty intense, particularly the restaging of a unsettling incident in which Darin and his drunken friends play Noughts and Crosses on every available surface in a bar - including the landlord's wife.   

Although the narrative is framed as a fairly conventional tale of triumph over adversity, Pressure Point does a lot more besides, riveting the attention and stimulating the imagination, and the performances, particularly from the under-rated Darin, are excellent. 

WOMEN IN BONDAGE

d. Steve Sekely (1943)

Cheap but potent propaganda, Women In Bondage takes the unusual step of showing Nazi Germany on the home front, and from the perspective of the women caught up in the mad world of Hitler and his murderous stooges. 

All women must join a paramilitary organisation, for instance, and spend their time marching, identifying enemy planes and informing on their friends, colleagues, neighbours and anyone else who dares question the Fuhrer. On their spare evenings, the girls are expected to be sexually promiscuous, particularly with soldiers, doing their bit to keep the master race well stocked. Then there are the intrusive medical examinations, and the obsession with Aryan purity (one girl is unable to marry her SS man boyfriend because she fails an eye test), as well as other sundry surprises that the insanely inhuman and unsentimental logic of the Reich throws up (a woman's husband returns from the Russian Front a hero but an impotent invalid; she is officially instructed to get pregnant by his brother instead). 

It's occasionally strong stuff, and is particularly successful in the way that it presents the regime (quite realistically) as a sick but ultimately rather banal bureaucracy that, like all totalitarian states, can only function by the constant exertion of force, a mountain of paperwork and a willing workforce of goon-like enforcers. 

Please note that the title refers to bondage in the sense of serfdom or slavery, not the act of tying or binding for sexual pleasure. Although there is a bit of that, and some whipping.   

BLACK GESTAPO

d. Lee Frost (1975) 

I know what you're thinking: this film would have to be absolutely extraordinary to live up to its jaw-dropping title. It isn't, of course, but it's far from a failure, being a thought provoking allegory about power, corruption and the way they intersect - absolutely.

In a Watts, California, a sidestep away from reality, the Government have decided to 'help' the black population by empowering a People's Army, a do-gooding paramilitary organisation led by the idealistic General Ahmed. It's hard to think of any circumstances in which the formation of a black army would be seen as a good thing by white America, but here it's qualified as part of a more believable policy: the money is both inadequate for what they need and all they get, i.e. the ghetto is left to its own devices entirely and, as a result, is at the mercy of low life scum and crime syndicates, who are bleeding the people dry through drugs, gambling, prostitution, extortion and violence.

Colonel Kojah, a firebrand Peoples Army officer who is frustrated by his leaders pacifism, sets up his own unit, ostensibly to provide an element of security and protection. Pretty soon, they are dressed all in black and wearing SS caps, castrating rapists and running the gangsters out of town once and for all, which is slightly regrettable as the mob boss, played by the film's director, Lee Frost, is probably the best character in the film: a pyjama clad, dog stroking, wig wearing weasel  who, nevertheless, is hard as nails when he needs to be, except when it comes to his girlfriend, who speaks to him like shit.   

Kojah's unit are far worse than the threat they replaced. The officers live in splendour, eating suckling pig by the pool, while the lower ranks are put through a stringent programme of military training. Kojah quickly adapts to the role of Fuhrer, breathing hard with his eyes glistening as his men salute him and chant 'Vengeance! Vengeance!'. He's no long sticking to The Man, however, he's sticking it to everybody: robbing from the very people he claims to protect, replacing one system of violent oppression with another, one criminal organisation with another.

Blaxploitation films are often social issue films before anything else, the social issue being how it feels to be black in a white world. The cornerstone of joy in such films is community and honour, the way people come together to fight back against injustice, to support each other, to hold each other up. The Black Gestapo is a warning from history: beware of big men who are for little men, and seize power to 'make things better'. It always ends in blood.

THE MADMAN OF MANDORAS

d. David Bradley (1963)

More brains. Well, sort of. Hitler crops up a lot in psychotronic films, either in person or as the justification for various nefarious goings on. Although he is clearly a villain, he is not always the genocidal monster that we know and despise him as. Instead, he is a stereotypical bad person and common or garden megalomaniac, sometimes slightly silly, even comical. It's a facile and potentially offensive view, but I think it comes from an understandable place: these films were made in the aftermath of the war and, even twenty or thirty years later, the enormity of Hitler's crimes were still too much to process - too hard to remember.        

The Madman of Mandoras is a load of claptrap about poison gas and the threat to world peace posed by a Third Reich who have run away / relocated to South America. The Nazis have Hitler's head in a jar and it is still giving them orders and rolling his eyes in frustration and anger. No idea why they haven't attached a body to the head, they're clearly pretty technologically advanced. Perhaps it's better to know where that guy is.

Do the Nazis succeed? Do they fuck, and we get to see the flesh burned from Das Fuhrer's skull, a sight that is unedifying but strangely satisfying, which is perhaps why we get to watch it for a whole minute and a half.   

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.

TARZAN TRIUMPHS

d. Wilhelm Thiele (1943)

I’ll start by saying that I love Tarzan films. I also hate Nazis, so Tarzan Triumphs, where Tarzan kills Nazis, is my sort of movie.

When the German army invade the sub-Saharan city of Palandrya it takes Tarzan a long time to intervene, despite the entreaties of an exotic Princess (Jane is away in England nursing wounded soldiers). Tarzan, played with implacable practicality by Johnny Weissmuller, doesn’t understand what it has to do with him – he fights as a last resort, and only to survive – this isn’t any of his business. When the Nazis impinge on his escarpment, however, and try to kill his son and his monkey, Tarzan, rather like the United States after Pearl Harbour, finally understands that tyrants don’t just stay in other people’s backyards, instead having a nasty habit of spreading out if unchecked. In perhaps the single most dramatic moment of the cycle, Tarzan’s face darkens and he grabs his knife, uttering the immortal line: ‘Now Tarzan make WAR!’ and, by Christ, he does.

We needn’t go into extensive detail about how he systematically wipes out the Germans other than to say he employs both his in-built talent for death (Tarzan is a good man, but he kills pretty much everything that he disagrees with) and the deadly natural accoutrements of his jungle home: crocodiles, rampaging elephants, some geographically misplaced piranhas. For all their arrogance and advanced ordnance, The Nazis have no effective answer to Tarzan’s primal savagery and so, accordingly, die, one by one, screaming in horror and incomprehension at how this could happen to a member of the master race. Aficionados of the series will be familiar with the relentless horror and violence of Tarzan films, and although this is relatively tame in comparison to, say, Tarzan Escapes, it is still strangely satisfying to see so many nasty National Socialists get their bloody comeuppance.

The pay off, in which almost psychotically naughty chimp Cheeta talks to Berlin on the radio and is mistaken for Hitler, is brilliant, propaganda at its best, although, even in her role as an agent of chaos and misrule, Cheeta consistently demonstrates more humanity and compassion than the fucking Fuhrer ever did.   

There are clips of this fantastically entertaining film all over the internet, including one which comes with a very 21st century proviso: '*WARNING* Johnny Sheffield ('Boy') is only 12 in these clips. If you prefer to see older people in peril then please do not view'.

HITLER'S CHILDREN

d. Edward Dmytryk (1943)

At first I wondered why, in 1943, US audiences were watching a film about the dangers of Nazism set in 1938, especially as America had already been at war with Germany for two years. Then I thought about the timing and realised that it was probably preparing them for D-Day: when there is sacrifice ahead, it's a good idea to remind people what it's all for.

In order to connect with audiences, the film uses a handsome boy and a pretty girl, a sort of Nazi Romeo and Juliet: he is a German born in America; she is an American born in Germany, and they love each other, despite their political differences. In the early days, it's picnics and sing-a-longs in the stereotypical hale and hearty way of the old Fatherland, all jolly rucksacks and strudel. When Hitler begins his conquests, however, things change. The boy joins the SS and the girl, because she has 'German blood' is sent to a re-education centre for lessons in National Socialism. 

Being a decent, freedom loving girl she doesn't take to the teachings of Herr Hitler one bit, of course, so is publicly whipped and scheduled for enforced sterilisation. The boy, belatedly realising that Nazism is as fucked up a philosophy as you can get, tries to save her, but is arrested. He has time to denounce Hitler at his trial before he and the girl are shot.

Heavy stuff, but then what else could it be? A light musical would have been completely inappropriate. Behind the fractured love story we occasionally get glimpses of other heinous policies: the rounding up of Jewish schoolchildren, no doubt destined for concentration camps; talk of the extermination of the physically and mentally impaired to further the bloodline of 'the master race'; the suggestion that it is the girl's duty to get pregnant by an approved Aryan at the soonest opportunity, no relationship required. The overall picture is of a sick, almost surreally inhuman society presided over by sadists who are either thugs or pseudo-intellectuals or an unsavoury combination of the two. 

Hitler's Children was an absolutely enormous box office success. Propaganda is always propaganda, of course, no matter which side it comes from, no matter how many facts (or lies) it contains. It's purpose is to create the collective frame of mind where it is okay to hate, to fight, to kill, to die - and this film, with its emphasis on the way the Nazis stamp down on personal expression and individual liberty, chimed absolutely with American audiences. They've always been very big on the old freedom thing in the US of A - for Americans, anyway.