Stanley Baker heads to the mountains of Germany. His father, whom he thought dead for twenty years, has been living there ever since he sent Baker as a boy to live with his mother's people as an Englishman named 'Newman' instead of 'Deutsch'.... it's all very symbolic, you see. Baker arrives just after the funeral, but was there a funeral? Was that his father? He doesn't think so, despite everything Doctor Peter Cushing, half-sister Mai Zetterling, and officials like Eric Portman say.
For a while I thought I was looking at what would turn out to be a remake of THE THIRD MAN without Dutch Angles, pursuit through the sewers, or Orson Welles' whimsical musings on the cuckoo clock. Alas, it's a well performed Cold War drama in which everything turns out to be more important than it seemed, and yet less important to the characters involved, and so less important to me as a viewer. Perhaps there is something lacking in me that I cannot be moved by the fate of large masses of people, but care desperately about the individual and those close to me. It's not fair, I know. Yet as a Jew who lost about a third of his family in the Holocaust to an uncaring world, how am I supposed to feel sympathy when that world turns about and demands my sympathy?
Well, I suppose some people care, even if they come to care too late, and some are just tired and ready to go into the darkness and be done with the whole charade. That's what's going on here, in an ornately overwritten movie. By the time Stanley Baker figured out what was going on, I was too exhausted to care. Perhaps the movie could have been edited a little tighter. Or perhaps that is what I am supposed to feel.
For a while I thought I was looking at what would turn out to be a remake of THE THIRD MAN without Dutch Angles, pursuit through the sewers, or Orson Welles' whimsical musings on the cuckoo clock. Alas, it's a well performed Cold War drama in which everything turns out to be more important than it seemed, and yet less important to the characters involved, and so less important to me as a viewer. Perhaps there is something lacking in me that I cannot be moved by the fate of large masses of people, but care desperately about the individual and those close to me. It's not fair, I know. Yet as a Jew who lost about a third of his family in the Holocaust to an uncaring world, how am I supposed to feel sympathy when that world turns about and demands my sympathy?
Well, I suppose some people care, even if they come to care too late, and some are just tired and ready to go into the darkness and be done with the whole charade. That's what's going on here, in an ornately overwritten movie. By the time Stanley Baker figured out what was going on, I was too exhausted to care. Perhaps the movie could have been edited a little tighter. Or perhaps that is what I am supposed to feel.