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What, another docu about Nazis? Rüdiger Suchsland’s show tells the entire story — with many rare clips and interesting actor and filmmaker profiles — of the hundreds of state-produced German films made during the Third Reich. It’s the most thorough, informative and eye-opening show on the subject I’ve yet seen. It comes with revelations about some surprising names, like Douglas Sirk and Ingrid Bergman.

Hitler’s Hollywood

DVD

Kino Lorber

2017 / Color & B&W / 1:78 enhanced widescreen / 105 min. / Street Date July 10, 2018 / Hitlers Hollywood: Das deutsche Kino im Zeitalter der Propaganda 1933 – 1945 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Narrated by Udo Kier

With film clips of Hans Albers, Heinz Rühmann, Zarah Leander, Ilse Werner, Marianne Hoppe, Gustaf Gründgens, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Alfred Abel, Lída Baaroví, Willy Fritsch, Gustav Fröhlich, Lilian Harvey, Johannes Heesters, Brigitte Helm, Paul Henreid, Margot Hielscher, Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Magda Schneider, Kristina Söderbaum, Anton Walbrook.

Film Editor: Ursula Pürrer

Produced by Gunnar Dedio,...

Hitler’S Hollywood Kino Lorber Reviewed by: Harvey Karten Director: Rüdiger Suchsland Screenwriter: Rüdiger Suchsland Cast: Hans Albert, Heinz Rühmann, Zarah Leander, Adolf Hitler, Ilse Werner, Joseph Goebbels, Marianne Hoppe, Gustaf Gründgens, Hermann Göring, Leni Riefenstahl, Wilhelm Fürtwangler, Leni Riefenstahl Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 4/2/18 Opens: April 11 at New York’s Film Forum, 209 Houston […]

The post Hitler’s Hollywood Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

Mubi is showing Max Ophüls' Liebelei (1933) from November 9 - December 8, 2016 in most countries around the world.While the primary players in Max Ophüls’ 1933 film Liebelei may be introduced at the same opera house, seeing the same performance of Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio,” the real drama is produced away from the stage, though it is rarely any less histrionic. As secretive private passions and illicit romances are revealed, so softly and elegantly in what would become the presentational norm for Ophüls, a genuinely pure, ultimately heartbreaking, relationship emerges from the scandalous furor. When philandering German Lieutenant Fritz Lobheimer (Wolfgang Liebeneiner) meets and falls for Christine Weyring (Magda Schneider), the daughter of an opera musician, he is commendably quick to break off his essentially lustful involvement with the adulterous Baroness von Eggersdorff (Olga Tschechowa). Unlike Arthur Schnitzler’s source play (Schnitzler, who would also provide the foundation for Ophüls’ excellent 1950 film,...

Noah Isenberg tells the story behind Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, from its publication through its stage adaptations, including one starring Gustaf Gründgens, through to her attending the premiere of the MGM movie (featuring Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford) with Noël Coward. Also in today's roundup: The New Yorker's Richard Brody recommends Penny Lane's Nuts!, Anna Biller’s "wild and gory comedy" The Love Witch, Chad Hartigan’s Morris from America and Zia Anger's My Last Film. Plus an honorary Palme d'or for Jean-Pierre Léaud, news of forthcoming work from Jonás Cuarón, Bryan Cranston and Jesse Eisenberg and video essays on Raoul Walsh's Pursued and Leos Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge. » - David Hudson...

Noah Isenberg tells the story behind Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, from its publication through its stage adaptations, including one starring Gustaf Gründgens, through to her attending the premiere of the MGM movie (featuring Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford) with Noël Coward. Also in today's roundup: The New Yorker's Richard Brody recommends Penny Lane's Nuts!, Anna Biller’s "wild and gory comedy" The Love Witch, Chad Hartigan’s Morris from America and Zia Anger's My Last Film. Plus an honorary Palme d'or for Jean-Pierre Léaud, news of forthcoming work from Jonás Cuarón, Bryan Cranston and Jesse Eisenberg and video essays on Raoul Walsh's Pursued and Leos Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge. » - David Hudson...

This ponderous movie is regarded by its writer-director, the talented Russian mystic Alexander Sokurov, as the concluding section of a quartet of films on the subject of the corrupting effects of power, following on from his biographical studies of Hitler (Moloch), Lenin (Taurus) and the emperor Hirohito (The Sun). It won the Golden Lion at Venice last year but is a dull affair, made in German, set in 18th-century central Europe, shot in the Czech Republic and Iceland. It has the impoverished, lugubrious scholar Faust pursuing the meaning of life and taking up with Mauritius, a grotesquely repellent version of Mephistopheles. Mauritius works as the town's pawnbroker and moneylender and reveals during one of his pointless romps with Faust to have his penis attached to his backside. After much rambling talk, Faust sells his soul to Mauritius in order to have sex with the local beauty, Margarete. He signs the...

Fritz Lang entered the sound era with a bold expressionist thriller that captured the ugly mood of the years before the Third Reich

Having completed an extraordinary body of silent films in 1929, Fritz Lang entered the sound era with this bold masterwork, an expressionist thriller that captured the ugly mood of Germany just before the Nazis came to power, and was banned as soon as they took over.

M provided the blueprint for police procedural thrillers, anticipated the vogue for stories about serial killers, and centres on a great performance by Peter Lorre as a child murderer who creates panic in a German city and unites the authorities and the underworld in hunting him down. This subtly lit film uses sound in innovative ways, and concludes with a deeply moving scene in which Lorre's Hans Beckert is tried in a kangaroo court convened by criminal bosses, one of them played...