Guess the pic

Courtesy of the Jamie Uhler

The winner can submit their screen-cap to movieman0283@gmail.com. Do not include film title in file name so I can participate as well! (Give a day or two for the new picture to go up)

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Downfall (no 19)

by Allan Fish

(Germany 2004 155m) DVD1/2

Aka. Der Untergang

We aren’t always masters of our own time

p  Bernd Eichinger  d  Oliver Hirschbiegel  w  Bernd Eichinger  book  Joachim Fest  ph  Rainer Klausmann  ed  Hans Funck  m  Stephan Zacharias  art  Bernd Lepel

Bruno Ganz (Adolf Hitler), Alexandra Maria Lara (Traudl Junge), Corinna Harfouch (Magda Goebbels), Ulrich Matthes (Josef Goebbels), Juliane Köhler (Eva Braun), Heino Ferch (Albert Speer), Christian Berkel (Schenck), Thomas Kretschmann (Hermann Fegelein), Mathias Habich (Haase), Ulrich Noethen (Heinrich Himmler), Birgit Minichmayr (Gerda Christian), Anna Thalbach (Frau Reitsch),

We live in an age where information about Nazism, its horrific acts and its fall are commonplace, almost to the point of information overload.  Not only in films such as Schindler’s List and The Pianist, but in the occasional masterful TV documentary.  Even now, I can hear the cultured tones of Sam West narrating Laurence Rees’ monumental works The Nazis: A Warning from History and Auschwitz.  However, when it comes to making a drama out of this final crisis, no-one had succeeded.  There had been various impersonations of Hitler, including Frank Finlay, Derek Jacobi, Robert Carlyle and Alec Guinness.  Fine actors though they all are, something essential was lacking, and perhaps that essence was a sense of perspective, and more importantly a sense of a performance, not just an impersonation.  The actor had to perfectly embody the speech mannerisms of one of the greatest orators of the 20^th century, and that required a German actor speaking in his native tongue.  After all, can one imagine a German playing Churchill?

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