Hitler's Children (1943)
DVD5 | ISO | PAL 4:3 | 01:22:05 | 3,98 Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: French
Genre: Drama, Romance | Montparnasse Edition
DVD5 | ISO | PAL 4:3 | 01:22:05 | 3,98 Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: French
Genre: Drama, Romance | Montparnasse Edition
Directors: Edward Dmytryk, Irving Reis
Stars: Tim Holt, Bonita Granville, Kent Smith
This propaganda piece starts in 1933. Prof. Nichols' American school in Berlin is next door to a school for the Hitler Youth. Karl, from the latter, is attracted to German-American Anna, but events lead to their separation. Six years later, near the outbreak of war in Europe, Anna is removed from Nichols' school on presumption of German citizenship. Nichols becomes obsessed with finding her, as Anna undergoes a rather lurid odyssey through the Nazi nightmare.
I found this film to be one of the most captivating and well-kept movie secrets of all time. If it is the first time you see it, you might be surprised that it was boldly made before WWII was over. The film stretches some emotions like taffy, while it is not overly-graphic, and only moderately intense. It instills in you with what seems to be a fair overview of the Nazi regime, while entertaining you with a plot of escape & a love story. To be expected, the conversation in it is surreal, typical of the film's era, but the only drawback for me is that Bonita Granville (age 19 when the film was made), who plays Anna Miller, passed in 1988 and actually stopped making major films after 1950. I did not realize what a beautiful girl she was until I discovered her in this picture a few weeks ago. A film for all generations (I was born 20 years after WWII).IMDB Reviewer
You'd expect a film with a title like Hitler's Children (1942) to be an exploitation picture, not a prestige production and you wouldn't be wrong in most respects. But this sensationalistic melodrama about a Nazi youth and his American girlfriend struck a resonant chord with audiences of its era, making it the highest grossing film of all time for RKO Studios, surpassing even the box office receipts of King Kong (1933) and Top Hat (1935).
The real intent of Hitler's Children is to show the indoctrination process of young Germans and how their minds are poisoned with fascist ideals. The love story between budding storm trooper Karl Bruner (Tim Holt) and his childhood sweetheart Anna Muller (Bonita Granville) is merely the vehicle which carries the film to its defiant yet grimly determined climax. Along the way we witness various well-staged atrocities from the enforced sterilization of women prisoners deemed unworthy to have Nazi babies to Anna's public flogging at a concentration camp. There's not an ounce of subtlety in Edward Dmytryk's tautly paced programmer but there's plenty of lip-smacking villainy and rabid anti-Nazi propaganda that is so extreme it almost works on a level of pure parody.
Dmytryk actually ended up on the film by accident. In his autobiography, It's a Hell of a Life But Not a Bad Living, he wrote "A friend of mine, Irving Reis, had prepared and actually started shooting a film called Hitler's Children, an exploitation B. Irving was rather headstrong and somewhat touchy - a bad combination in Hollywood. After a few days, he got into a fight with producer Doc Golden. Getting his back up, he quit the film, expecting, so he told me later, to win a quick apology and a free hand. Instead, the studio said, "As you wish," and asked me to take over the direction. He gave me his blessing, asking only that his name be completely removed from the film's credits. The studio was willing and I went to work. I finished on schedule, cut and dubbed it, and turned it over to the distribution department. None of us at the studio was sure of what we had."
From Hitler's Children, Dmytryk went directly to Universal to shoot Captive Wild Woman (1943), a horror film starring the Venezuela born actress, Acquanetta, whose beauty was concealed by her special "monkey woman" makeup. But once Hitler's Children opened theatrically, the director soon found himself in demand. In his autobiography, he recalled: "Taken from a novel titled Education for Death, its story concerned the treatment of youthful nonconformists in Nazi Germany. A title with the word "Hitler" in it was considered box-office poison, and the exhibitors asked [producer] Doc Golden and RKO to change ours. Doc was stubborn - and he was right. The film cost a little over $100,000, and, running only in England and the Western Hemisphere…grossed, by some accounts, $7,500,00."
Seen today, Hitler's Children is clearly a melodramatic but predictable propaganda effort for its era. Nevertheless, it remains an irresistibly compelling B-movie and it helped launch Dmytryk's career. He would go on to direct one more propaganda melodrama for RKO - Behind the Rising Sun (1943) - and then hit the big time the following year with Murder, My Sweet, one of the best film adaptations of a Raymond Chandler detective novel. As for Bonita Granville, she always cited Hitler's Children as her favorite film. Even though she went on to make more upscale movies like Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (1947) and The Lone Ranger (1956), she liked Hitler's Children because it was one of the rare times she got top billing and got to play an adult character.
Special Features: Brief video introduction (in French)
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