Nosh 123: 'Operation Finale' & More

By David Elliott

    

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of Operation Finale

There have been at least ten movies about Adolf Eichmann. His filmography should also include The Man in the Glass Booth, the 1975 movie from Robert Shaw’s play, with its Eichmann figure played with histrionic fervor by Maximilian Schell and given (ironic “inspiration”) Jewish roots as Arthur Goldman. No Nazi was more evil than Eichmann, whose trademark smirk had all the spider charm of a smiling swastika. He looked like a smug file clerk, yet was present (and wrote the official report) on the infamous Wannsee Conference (Jan. 20, 1942), where Germany’s genocidal elite made their plans to carry out Hitler’s wartime dream of the Final Solution.

  

Eichmann, Austrian-born like Hitler, was at 35 the man for the job. He processed death orders and made sure the trains ran with Teutonic precision to the death camps. Today he is a famous villain, but under the Reich was seen as a dull, loyal cog, not a figure for those gala nights at Bayreuth. In Chris Weitz’s Operation Finale, Sir Ben Kingsley plays Eichmann with pasty anonymity, hiding out as Ricardo Klement (with Greta Scacchi barely used as his wife) in a crude house near Buenos Aires. He is also a “good family man” who dotes on his children including an adopted (and fascist) boy, Klaus (Joe Alwyn is maybe the finest Aryan poster boy since Rolfe in The Sound of Music). Klaus and his new, naïve girlfriend trigger events that will bring a secret Israeli kidnap team to Argentina in 1960, abducting Eichmann for trial and execution (Hannah Arendt’s essay report on the trial made her famously controversial).

As docu-drama Finale is a crisp, suspenseful treatment of the mission. Like any Holocaust-related film shot with picturesque color, it risks diluting the tragedy (that’s why Spielberg added just a few spots of red to the acidic black, white and pewter hell of Schindler’s List). The Argentine vistas and a dicey airport climax with glints of Casablanca (I almost expected the Third Reich’s Maj. Strasser to drive up, demanding letters of transit) suggest a rather exotic adventure. As always, factual liberties are taken: the time frame of events is compressed; fretful stuff about a key signature remains opaque; the moral speech given by the team leader in Buenos Aires instead comes in Israel, from Prime Minister Ben-Gurion (a very Exodus touch, for extra gravity); much emotive sketching is given to the troubled history of the team’s tough guy, Peter Malkin, allowing many shots of Oscar Isaac’s good looks (also quite  Exodus, as in: Paul Newman).

But there are strong figures, solid performances, potent if not quite thrilling action. And thankfully Kingsley did not opt to play Eichmann as a drab cipher. After all, Sir Ben acted Gandhi (and won an Oscar) by revealing both a lofty saint and a canny lawyer. Isaac struggles to match Kingsley in their important dialog duels. Kingsley’s Eichmann is a sly, creepy opportunist and a man of simple, fanatical ideas (“We are all animals, fighting for survival”). Damn if he doesn’t dominate a scene while sitting on a toilet and recalling early potty lessons.

There are oddities, including a clip of Troy Donahue racially taunting Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life (this delights Klaus), and Adolf admiring a tightly synchronous swarming of birds (warm memories of Nuremberg rallies?). There is also a clip from the death-camp footage shown at the later Nuremberg trials of Nazis. As drama if not as history, this movie is a little pedestrian, but it is moving. If  it helps brings young viewers a sense not just of Eichmann but the Holocaust – a subject that seems to be receding in schools – than it will have done its best work.

SALAD (List)

My 12 Favorite Movie Nazis

Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, as himself in Triumph of the Will, and Charles Chaplin as the fabled comical Hinkle (Hitler) of The Great Dictator, are the twin summits. My choices goose-step behind them, in order:

1. Conrad Veidt as Maj. Heinrich Strasser (Casablanca, 1942), 2. Maximilian Schell as Capt. Hardenberg (The Young Lions, 1958), 3. Leopoldine Konstantin as Madame “Mother” Sebastian (Notorious, 1946), 4. Noah Taylor as young Adolf Hitler (Max, 2002), 5. Erich von Stroheim as Field Marshal Rommel (Five Graves to Cairo, 1943), 6. Otto Preminger as Oberst Von Scherbach (Stalag 17, 1953), 7. Kenneth Mars as crazy Franz Liebkind (The Producers, 1968), 8. Kurt Kreuger as Luftwaffe pilot Schletow (Sahara, 1943), 9. Ralph Fiennes as S.S. man Amon Goeth (Schindler’s List, 1993), 10. Paul Scofield as Col. Franz Von Waldheim (The Train, 1964), 11. Donald Sutherland as the spy Faber (Eye of the Needle, 1981) and 12. Orson Welles as fugitive Franz Kindler (The Stranger, 1946).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles felt that Kindler, his escaped Nazi in The Stranger, was barely more than a stage-goblin character, but offered a sobering afterthought when Peter Bogdanovich mentioned that it was the first (1946) American feature film to visually note the Holocaust: “Was it? I’m against that sort of thing in principle – exploiting real misery, agony or death for purposes of entertainment. But in that case, I do think that every time you can get the public to look at footage of a concentration camp, under any excuse at all, it’s a step forward. People just don’t want to know that these things ever happened.” (From the Welles-Bogdanovich book This Is Orson Welles.)    

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Ending the disastrous family supper in Alice Adams, Alice (Katharine Hepburn) “quells panic. Her smile is taut but game as her dream dies. She does not flee or weep. With regal courtesy, she even sprinkles some high school French (Hepburn would make starched decorum comical with Bogart in The African Queen). Every word, gesture and smile is a badge of artistic arrival, aligned with the insight of philosopher J. Glenn Gray: ‘Simplicity manifests itself in directness of approach to other human beings (without) dissembling and guile.’ Alice makes the most of less-is-more.” (From the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Major Heinrich Strasser (Conrad Veidt, between lamp and Claude Rains) brings suave Nazi menace to Casablanca (Warner Bros. 1942; director Michael Curtiz, photography by Arthur Edeson).

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