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Dancing on Hitler's grave

September 17 2002

Noah Taylor as Hitler in the film Max

Noah Taylor as Hitler in the film Max

A spate of new merchandise, film and TV shows about Hitler has sparked a bitter controversy about humanising the most infamous villain of the 20th century. Alan Veitch reports.

"Hitler, now there was a painter. One afternoon he did a whole apartment - two coats!" That's just one of many show-stopping, bellylaugh lines in Mel Brooks' musical The Producers, the greatest moneymaking show in Broadway history. The Producers, an hilarious satire of Nazi Germany and featuring a limp-wristed gay Hitler, totted up $A26 million in ticket sales even before the curtain went up on April 19 last year.

Since then the show has won a record 12 Tony Awards, made millions more for Brooks and his backers and its blockbusting commercial success is said to be the reason for two new TV projects and a feature film about Hitler's life - the film called Max starring Australia's Noah Taylor - which premiered at the Toronto film festival last week.

Taylor, who plays an angry young Hitler struggling to be recognised as an artist, admitted after the screening that he was worried about the controversial role.

"It could all end up with me being spat on and never working again," he said, "But we all know how the story ultimately ends.

"I thought it would be almost creepier to make him almost likeable at certain moments, so maybe the audience forgets, even if just for a few seconds, how they hated this person. Because you have to remember, one way or another, he charmed individuals and then an entire nation."

Coincidentally, all three projects deal with Hitler's early years seeking to fulfil his ambitions in the European art world.

Moulin Rouge star Ewan McGregor is reportedly a frontrunner to play a young Hitler in a CBS TV mini-series and Robert Downey Jr., who once played Charlie Chaplin on screen, has been invited to play Hitler in a BBC TV drama, set in Vienna.

CBS boss Leslie Moonves' announcement of the mini-series in July created controversy. Critics say the series - based on British historian Ian Kershaw's book Hitler: 1889-1936 could end up being less about educating than attracting ratings using a figure who instantly titillates.

An outcry has sparked the question: Should the most infamous villain of the 20th century be immortalised on film? Can drama capture him without humanising him?

Some World War II veterans and anti-Nazi campaigners in Britain say such big budget projects could well create a cult anti-hero.

But the race continues to be first to hit the screen.

Two months ago, Hitler was chosen by anti-euro campaigners in Britain to feature in a controversial $3 million TV commercial. Comedian Rik Mayall appeared in in a Hitler uniform and mockingly endorsed the euro with the slogan, "Ein volk, ein Reich. Ein euro!"

The Board of Deputies of British Jews said the sketch was an insult to relatives of Holocast victims. Lord Brittan thought it was "tasteless" but others lauded its hilarity, saying if anyone should be the insulted and outraged it was the Germans.

The success of The Producers is also believed to be responsible for the avalanche of new Hitler books flooding the market and a sudden revived interest in Hitler memorabilia.

On the Internet you can now buy a Barbie-sized Hitler doll for about $100 and a variety of Nazi-themed merchandise, including CDs of Hitler's speeches, nazi war songs, Swastika flags, posters and even 60-year-old Nazi propaganda movies.

Hitler today is a thriving, world-wide industry and it is interesting, as well as disturbing, to note that there have been far more books, movies and TV programs produced about Hitler than Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill, the man who was mainly responsible for preventing the Nazi dictator from plummeting the world into a perverse new dark age.

On a US TV talk show in Los Angeles earlier this year, a street quiz showed that most people stopped and questioned were instantly aware that Nazi Germany's leader was someone called Adolf Hitler, but most had no answer to the question "Who was Winston Churchill?" One university student thought Churchill was an old- time New Orleans African-American jazz band leader.

Despite their openly professed hatred of Hitler, some of Britain's greatest actors have played the evil tyrant in films and TV projects, including the late Sir Alec Guinness in the 1973 film Hitler - The Last 10 Days. On TV Anthony Hopkins was critically acclaimed for his Hitler in The Bunker in 1981 and the following year Derek Jacobi was Hitler in Inside The Third Reich.

However, none of the three British actors relished their roles. Anthony Hopkins recently revealed that playing Hitler was even more emotionally upsetting for him than his Oscar-winning portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic character in The Silence Of The Lambs. "All through my rather long career I've always managed to separate my acting roles from life - except just once," said Hopkins. "It was when I played Hitler on television in the early 1980s and it really affected me.

"I can't explain why this happened, but having to get into that character and then go before the cameras day after day - I just found it all quite disturbing and I was still affected by it for some time after shooting had finished. That's never happened to me for any other role, before or since."

Hopkins later was awarded an Emmy for The Bunker, but the most famous Hitler portrayal to date is Charlie Chaplin's interpretation of the World War II tyrant in his immortal classic The Great Dictator. It was Chaplin's first talking role and is regarded by many movie historians as the greatest work of his career apart from his beloved Tramp character in the silent era.

The Great Dictator was made in Hollywood in 1940 a year before America entered the war after the Pearl Harbour attack. The movie was released despite intense pressure from pro-German lobby groups and death threats against Chaplin.

Chaplin, the son of a Jewish music hall entertainer, fearlessly gave a brilliant send-up of the evil Nazi leader in The Great Dictator, and with his own short-cropped moustache famous decades before Hitler came along, he required very little make-up.

One particular scene from The Great Dictator is now regarded as a treasured piece of cinema history film footage. This unforgettable scene, an awesome display of Chaplin's genius, shows a character plainly based on Hitler playfully performing a bizarre ballet with a huge map-of-the-world floating globe - just like a spoilt child mischievously toying with a balloon.

It was Chaplin's brilliantly expressive way of warning America that Hitler was on a terrifying course of world domination.

Another amazing scene from the movie was censored from most versions for the obvious reason that it virtually shows Der Fuhrer having an orgasm - perhaps this was a bit advanced for 1940 audiences.

The scene shows a wild-eyed Hitler, sweating profusely and waving his arms as he works himself up into an apoplectic frenzy while giving one of his rousing speeches to the excited masses. At the end of the speech Hitler suddenly grabs a jug of water by the lectern, pulls out the front of his pants and pours down the water.

But at the end of the film the laughs subside as Chaplin, now as himself, faces directly to the camera and delivers an impassioned plea for reason to triumph over brute force. Like The Producers musical more than 60 years later, The Great Dictator was a huge success at the box office and was that year's top grossing movie.

Mel Brooks, also Jewish, has indirectly made a fortune from Hitler, not only with his present stage production, set to run for years to come, but also to a much lesser degree with his 1968 cult movie of the same title. However, in a recent interview he made it perfectly clear that despite the gold mine Hitler has been for him he has no affection whatever for the man responsible for the death in concentration camps of many of his European Jewish relatives.

"I was about 19 in 1945 when I heard on the radio that Hitler had killed himself in his Berlin bunker," Brooks, recalled, "And all I could think of was that I had to get to Berlin the first chance I could get. I wanted to go there and dance on the bastard's grave."


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