Contact the author: popcultureslut@hotmail.com

As a movie, it isn't exactly the most engaging piece of cinema you could see. But as an accurate historical account of one of the most fascinating subject matters of the 20th century, it is a masterpiece.

Based on the novel "Inside Hitler's Bunker" by Joachim Fest and the memoirs of Hitler's young secretary Traudl Junge, "Downfall: Hitler And The End Of The Third Reich" chronicles the impending doom and cultish aspects of the Nazis who are holed up in a bunker in Berlin with the Fuhrer, awaiting the imminent threat of advancing Russian tanks. The movie's script could easily have been taken straight out of chapter 31 - Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days Of The Third Reich, from William L. Shirer's classic book "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich: A History Of Nazi Germany"; the movie itself is in German with English subtitles.

More "Das Boot" then "Saving Private Ryan", "Downfall" is a harrowing and disturbing piece of surrealism which borders on the profane and insane. In one scene, Hitler's soon-to-be bride Eva Braun, like everyone else in denial of Germany's fate and anxious to drink their troubles away and reminisce about better days, climbs on top of a table, wine glass in hand, and dances to music played from a record player as Russian bombs sound off above ground. The fanaticism induced by Hitler's Nazi Fascism permeates the thoroughly brainwashed Braun, the demented Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels and his wife, who, after deciding she would not want her six young children to grow up in a world without National Socialism, takes their lives before she and her husband take their own. Others, such as Albert Speer, "the architect" of the Third Riech, and a young doctor, seem more lucid and sypathetic to the fate of the German people.

The movie is graphic and poignant and not for the faint of heart, as a scorched earth policy and suicide is a recurring theme; many people left the theatre during the scene where Frau Goebbels entered the room where her children were sleeping and forced each of them to bite down on poison capsules.

The true genius of "Downfall" however, is the performance of Swiss actor Bruno Ganz. Not only is he a spitting image of Hitler, Ganz captures all the eccentricities and mannerisms of the Fuhrer as he gradually loses touch with reality and slips into a downward spiral of paranoia and madness which culminates in his suicide. Ganz also portrays Hitler in a human light, which, although controversial, is only right - he WAS human, and there is no reason to inaccurately portray historical, eye-witnessed events for the sake of demonizing him - for this Ganz's performance is courageous.

In a chilling scene where the gasoline-doused bodies of Hitler and Braun are burning on a rooftop and attended to by a few loyal Party members, the flames silhouette the grotesque face of Goebbels, who soon after with his wife will commit suicide and put the last nail in the coffin of one of the most gruesome chapters of the Third Reich.

© 2004 Aaron Bayley