German uniforms to the fore again

Press, 3 May 1977, Page 15

German uniforms to the fore again

By

D. McKENZIE

It is possible to imagine the health and strength of British television without the source material of Nazi Germany, but only just.

The plays, comedies, documentaries, and dramatic reconstructions touching on the period in Germany from 1933 to 1945 must be numbered in their dozens from the British studios.

They roll up on the mind’s screen in a vivid stream of dazzling uniforms, Teutonic barks, heroics, mirth, and lunacy — "World at War,” “Colditz,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” snatches of Dave Allen, Benny Hill, and “Monty Python,” “Hitler’s Germany,” and — on Sunday — "The Death of Adolf Hitler.” That television list, harrowing enough and incomplete in itself, ignores the scores of feature films on the same general subject. The British are obsessed with the German armed forces of World War 11, and before. They don’t do the same for the Italians, or the French, or the Americans — or even the New Zealanders. They barelv do as much for the British. It must be the uniforms, especially in colour. That’s another one “Dad’s Army.” In "Dad’s Army,”

dressed in a German officer’s uniform in the interests of an exercise, John le Mesurier said : “They’r® so smart.”

British film studios must - have enough Nazi, Wehrmacht, and Luftwaff uniforms and Iron Crosses to stage a Nuremberg-type rally any time right off the wardrobe racks. The only comparable storage would be of nineteenthcentury ball gowns. The key words are so familiar as to merge into the language. Wehrmacht now sounds as English as Blitzkrieg: and brown shirts look ..othing except as Brown Shirts.

Among mie notable stage Hitlers, including Alec Guinness, Frank Finlay on Sunday was memorable. He screamed so well in English as to be almost incomprehensible, which is how Hitler struck many of us in German.

The production was a powerful study of disintegration, insantiy and logical outcome. Although it ran for 75 minutes without an advertisement (being a Sunday) it never palled. Some people cannot stand the sight of food being eaten in a TV production. Depicting 10 days in Hitler’s bunker, “The Death” might have been feared to have endless meals. The fact that not one morsel went down at least shows that the

director thought he had more important things to deal with. If “The Death of Adolf Hitler” was good for colour so, on the other channel, were Cousteau in the Antarctic, and “Country Calendar.” It does not take a colour set for a viewer to recognise the delights of colour, as we black-and-whiters wryly know. When the camera lingers over scenery, especially in the autumn, where the result in shades of grey is quite unremarkable, we have to concede that another strong hint is upon us. .