RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/empire-of-evil/

There’s a reason why the History Channel is often, with dark whimsy, referred to as the Hitler Channel. As I scrolled through the online TV Guide recently to check out the channel’s scheduled programming for the next few days, I discovered shows entitled The Nazis’ Secret Bases, Secrets of the Nazi War Machine, and Hitler’s Celebrations of Hate – not to mention several programs about D-Day and the ensuing “battles for Europe” between the Western Allies and the Nazis.

There was nothing remotely touching on the Soviet Union.

This is very much par for the course. Similarly, it’s no surprise that while a great many major feature films have been made about Nazi Germany, among them The Pianist, Downfall, Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, Valkyrie, and Shoah. There’s only a scattering of lesser-known Hollywood pictures about the Soviet Union – notably, the obscure Gulag movie Escape from Sobibor and the TV biopic Stalin starring Robert Duvall.

Why this dramatic disparity? Because the people who write and produce feature films for the major studios, or documentaries for clients like the History Channel, have an entirely appropriate contempt for Hitler and everything he stood for. But the Russian Revolution? Lenin? Many of them – whose knowledge of history tends to have been shaped by left-wing university professors – have something of a soft spot for the people who overthrew the Romanovs. After all, the czars were pretty monstrous – most of them, anyway.

So it is that all too many people who want to make powerful films about history are happy to return yet again to the worst horrors of Nazism, but Soviet Communism? The most famous single movie about that topic is Reds, whose protagonist, the American journalist John Reed (Warren Beatty), was an eager fan of, and participant in, the Russian Revolution. Yes, the film ultimately acknowledges, sort of, that the revolution turned out not to be everything that Reed thought it was – but along the way to that conclusion we’re given a hell of a lot of stirring, heroic images of Lenin and company doing their thing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/irenas-vow/

Irena’s Vow is a 2023 film dramatizing the World War II heroism of a young Polish nursing student, Irena Gut. Irena’s Vow is a two-hour, color film. It was shot in Poland. The film is in English. It received a limited US release in April, 2024. Irena’s Vow has an 86% professional reviewer rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% fan reviewer rating. Veteran reviewer Rex Reed calls Irena’s Vow “One of the most astounding holocaust stories.” He says, “It’s true, if fantastic.” The film is “anchored by the powerful, heartfelt performance of Sophie Nelisse as an innocent girl whose integrity and resolve turns her into a woman of maturity and strength.” Roman Haller, a Holocaust survivor, says, “It is a very great film. I expected a good film, but it is even more than I expected. … I saw my mother. I saw my father. I saw Irena … She was like a mother to me … I want to tell you there were people like that.”

Dr. Glenn R. Schiraldi wrote the 2007 book, World War II Survivors: Lessons in Resilience. He devoted a chapter to Irena Gut Opdyke. She was, he writes, “a diminutive, elegant woman with warm, radiant blue eyes and delicate features. She is one of the kindest, most loving women I have encountered. She reminds one of Mother Teresa. As she spoke, I often found myself choking back tears.”

Dan Gordon is a veteran screenwriter and also a former captain in the Israeli Defense Forces. Gordon says, “About 25 years ago, I was driving to my home in Los Angeles and listening to the radio. I heard a woman, Irene Gut Opdyke, telling her story. When I got home, I sat in the car in the driveway for another hour and a half, because I couldn’t stop listening.” He worked for years to get the film made.

From Janet Levy Ross

In 1941 Occupied Paris, Jews are instructed to identify themselves to the authorities.  Jeweler Joseph Haffmann makes arrangement for his wife and children to flee from Vichy France and offers an employee the opportunity to take over his business and upstairs living quarters until it is safe for him to return.  As his attempts to escape and join his family are thwarted by the omnipresence of Nazis in the city, Haffman is forced to reside in the basement of his home with his employee and his wife.  Their relationship is transformed in intriguing ways but poetic justice prevails in the end.  Excellent acting by the nonpareil Daniel Auteuil and others.  

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woody-allens-cancellation-is-a-crime-against-culture-hollywood-metoo-fb417fa5?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

In August 2017, a year after Prime Video aired Woody Allen’s comic miniseries “Crisis in Six Scenes,” the director signed a deal with Amazon Studios to produce his next four films for a reported minimum payment of $68 million. A few weeks later, allegations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein emerged and the #MeToo movement was born. In December, Mr. Allen’s adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times with the headline “Why Has the #MeToo Revolution Spared Woody Allen?”

Mr. Allen wasn’t spared much longer. Ms. Farrow’s op-ed accused Mr. Allen of molesting her in 1992, when she was 7—a charge that her mother, Mia Farrow, had raised at the time in a custody dispute with Mr. Allen. Authorities in two states thoroughly investigated, and no charges were filed against Mr. Allen. Child-abuse investigators at Yale-New Haven hospital reported that “it is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen.”

Yet a quarter-century later, Mr. Allen found himself an unperson. Though in the intervening decades he had worked with acclaimed actors at major movie studios, been nominated for Oscars and won one for writing “Midnight In Paris” (2011), he became a target of obloquy and outrage.

Several of Mr. Allen’s collaborators, including Kate Winslet, Colin Firth, Timothée Chalamet and Greta Gerwig, publicly turned against him. Others, such as Diane Keaton, Alec Baldwin and Scarlett Johansson, rallied to his defense. Amazon Studios canceled the deal with Mr. Allen, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court on terms that weren’t disclosed. Amazon Studios also declined to release to theaters the third film he had made for them, “A Rainy Day in New York” (2019).

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-life-and-nickys-family/

The 2023 biopic One Life concludes with a very moving scene. An elderly man is surprised by a televised celebration of heroic deeds he performed when he was young. I could not resist the scene’s power. I cried. I made sniffling sounds. I didn’t even try to apply the emotional brakes.

If only the rest of the movie were as good as that final scene.

One Life dramatizes the life of Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE. When he was 29 years old, Winton participated in an effort to save Jewish children from oncoming Nazis. His heroism warrants an uplifting, inspirational, unforgettable film. I was worried when I saw that One Life would be released in the US on March 15. Early March is part of the “dump months” when movies that haven’t tested well are released.

One Life is not a bad movie. It’s just not good enough. I’d give it a six out of ten, but, given that the subject matter is so important and so appealing, I will nudge that up to a seven. Nicky Winton deserves an eleven out of ten.

As I left the theater, I asked, “Who was Nicholas Winton? Why did he perform these heroic acts? How did he perform them?” One Life didn’t answer those questions for me. I spent hours reading about Winton. I stumbled across a movie I’d never heard of before. Nicky’s Family is a 2011, English language, Czech and Slovak documentary. It is currently streaming for free. Nicky’s Family moved me deeply, answered my questions, and worked for me.

Nicholas Winton (1909 – 2015) was born in London. His parents were German Jewish immigrants named Wertheim. During World War I, they encountered anti-German prejudice. In an effort to assimilate, they converted to Christianity and changed their last name to Wortham. After the war, they changed back to Wertheim, but eventually switched to Winton. Nicholas was baptized in the Church of England. At the elite Stowe school, young Nicholas attended chapel regularly and chose to be confirmed as a Christian. Later he self-identified as an agnostic and a socialist.

Winton’s father was a successful banker. The three Winton children grew up in a twenty-room mansion in West Hampstead. At Stowe school, young Winton made connections that lasted for years, including with charismatic Stowe headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh. Roxburgh said that his goal, as an educator, was to produce young men who were “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” Winton fenced at Stowe and he would eventually be accepted to his nation’s Olympic team. He would never compete, though, as World War II canceled the games. After Stowe, Winton fenced at Salle Bertrand in London. There he fenced against British aristocrat, politician, and antisemite Oswald Mosley. Hitler attended Mosley’s second wedding.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-worst-cold-war-documentary-ever-made-part-2/

I jumped the gun near the end of my review of the first three episodes of Netflix’s documentary series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. As I wrote in “The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made,” the series did not address the Korean War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Crisis of 1958, a brief Chinese–Taiwanese war, or the global communist guerrilla insurgency. But the series’ coverage of the 1950s did not end with episode three, as I suspected it had. The series pivoted in episode four to the so-called missile gap and Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban revolution, introducing both phenomena to establish the backdrop against which the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Unfortunately, the film did so only to promote further the narrative that it had established in its first three episodes, which are organized around the notion that the United States was the foremost belligerent in the Cold War.

“The Russians were not on a crash program to build missiles,” the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg said of the discovery unlocked by the launch of America’s first spy satellites. The Soviets were “not trying to be superior,” which meant that they “weren’t trying to dominate the world militarily.” Nefariously enough, American policymakers declined to internalize the conclusion that was so intuitive to Ellsberg. That was motivated reasoning designed to perpetuate the “fraudulent belief” that the Soviets represented a military threat to the West only because it was “very profitable.”

With this, Turning Point’s audience is treated to a Marxian theory of everything that explains the Cold War as an outgrowth of the fact that the American economy was “increasingly oriented around defense, and security, and nuclear weapons,” in the author Audra Wolfe’s formulation. “It’s sort of in everyone’s interests to keep building toward this world-ending moment because it’s good business,” the journalist Garrett Graff posits. Indeed, the arms race was a game, and “both sides played it,” said author Scott Anderson, by which he meant Democrats and Republicans, not the Americans and the Soviets.