Nazi Night

“Nazis… I hate these guys”, Harrison Ford growls in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Steven Spielberg’s 1989 adventure movie, in which the archaeologist-with-firsts-of-stone takes on a motley collection of perfidious Nazis, went on to become a classic.

Heavyweight villains

Fighting Nazis is also what twelve convicted criminals do in Robert Aldrich’s action movie The Dirty Dozen (1967). These heavyweight villains – convincingly played by functional, tight-lipped actors including Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson – talk with their fists and their guns, spraying bullets around with abandon in return for their freedom. Only a few live to tell the tale – unlike dozens of Wehrmacht soldiers who meet with grizzly, scripted ends.

The Ernst Lubitsch remake To Be or Not to Be (1983, Alan Johnson) is in a very different register, dealing with the Bronski Theatre in Warsaw, where Mel Brooks and his wife Anne Bancroft give stellar performances in a vehement anti-Nazi satire on the eve of the German invasion. Brooks’ hilarious ‘Hitler-rap’ To Be or Not to Be (“Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Nazi Party!”) went on to be a big hit.

Cinema version of Das Boot (35mm copy from the Eye collection)

More than forty years old and still every bit as tense as the day it was made: Das Boot (1981, Wolfgang Petersen, 149') explores the moral and military competencies of the (young) crew of a German U-boat under the command of Nazi-sceptic Captain Henrich Lehmann-Willenbrock (Jürgen Prochnow).

The submarine is hunting for allied ships to sink, but itself becomes the hunted. One way to escape is to dive down to the very limits of what the boat can withstand. Will it survive the intense pressure of the deep, or will it split open like a tin can? The crew is stuck in spine-chilling silence….