Maidgethma Wonderfully offbeat film!

PlatinumRead Just so...so bad

Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

phd_travel This well intentioned but not very rewarding movie of the filming of Eichmann's trial delivers what the title promises no more than the title states. It's about the film maker's troubles and decisions filming the show. But who really cares if the producer and director argued about camera angles or cleverly concealed cameras in the court room. The actual survivors testimonies were hard to follow through translated voices. And Eichmann's own testimony and excuses were very briefly shown. At least for the trial they could have cut away from the camera room POV to put you inside the court room.Anthony La Paglia plays Leo Hurwitz the director. But his accent comes through as Australian more often than it should. Martin Freeman is better but a little goofy looking.This movie doesn't pretend to be a movie dramatizing Eichmann's crimes and capture. But it leaves you wishing for a well made movie about that instead and indeed there is one in the works so be patient. This one is not a must watch by any means.

ppal This movies tries too hard to create conflict and tension within the film crew characters but the already known facts of the atrocities swamp and nullify the emotions exhibited by the characters. A rather bland depiction of a very important event in history. Throwing in children and wives to tug at the heart strings does nothing for this movie. A riveting story was already there and attempts to embed an emotional tear jerker behind the scene fails to deliver. A lot of drama revolved around controlling 4 cameras and missing the best shots. Shouldn't be rocket science - which rightly so was taking away a chunk of the viewing audience. The use of the historical footage was good and the colour shots looked rather unnecessary.

zangiku Apart from the flagrantly bad acting of Martin Freeman, whom I have never seen before and hope never to see again, this is an enormously impressive film which tackles a difficult subject well. Excellently done was the blending of the real 1961 trial footage with modern reconstruction, something that frequently goes awry. Here the back-&-forth switching seems odd at first but grows on the viewer, involving us even more closely in the events on screen. Also very clever was the use of English voice-over to all the trial footage, an authentic-sounding simultaneous interpreter, flubs and all, echoing over earphones. Good idea! One did wish, however, that the original languages were occasionally allowed to leak through in voice-over pauses, to give more authenticity to the speakers: atrocity witnesses, prosecutors, judges and also the defendant himself. (In this film it is hard to tell that the trial was conducted almost entirely in German, which is a fact worth knowing; with some witnesses speaking in French, a language utterly unsuited to such descriptions and all the more harrowing for that reason.) Most eyes should be turned away from the camp archive footage, but thankfully there is not too much of it and one is always forewarned. The same cannot be said about watching the defendant himself, which is upsetting. But the Eichmann footage used here was also a choice by the film-makers, to render him less than the "human" Hurwitz starts out by assuming he is.The twisted, vicious face we see continually on display was not, however, the only face available. I had the privilege many years ago of seeing a documentary of the trial, at an art cinema in Tokyo, with English subs. It was very long and composed entirely of trial footage deftly edited: no narration, no music, no inter-titles. (I have tried in vain to locate it on this site; does anyone know the film I mean? I saw it in 97? 98? but it may have been made earlier,in Canada? US? UK?) What I remember about Eichmann was his many faces in the dock. Often a very nervous, ratty man with huge stacks of paper and notepads, which he shuffled through constantly, taking notes and looking for all the world like a perfectly sane accountant on trial for fiddling the books. This aspect was not shown to us in "The Eichmann Show", which is a pity. Not for any kind of sympathy, God knows, but to scare the living daylights out of us by what Arendt called the "banality of evil." In many ways this banal accountant type was more horrible than the leering, sneering, unchanging Satanic face we constantly see in this film... because it did not seem to occur to the accountant that he had done anything seriously wrong. But the film-makers here were wedded to a certain view, and did not want to complicate it.One understands that such an overwhelming event needs simplifying for the movie-going masses, and this film has done a fine job overall. But as I watched it myself, I had the longer documentary in mind to help me come to grips with it. If "help" is the right word.

scurvytoon You need to be dead to be unmoved by this. I had family in several camps, some nearly murdered in Katyn instead feeling "lucky" to be deported to Siberia where 80% did not survive. All around me as a boy there were camp survivors, how could I think they had made up even the least horrifying of the stories they thought I, a child, could stomach and understand? This film about the production crew who had to film the trial and not crack, not loose focus and not drop to the same level as the beast; it is important. It is important because even as they sat there and did their work, one man kept saying that we are all just as capable as Eichmann to cross that line, to be a fascist, to be the beast we do not believe we can be. How in 90 minutes can you convey the horror of the crimes and the effect of 4 months day in day out on those made to be there till the end of the trial? Probably not nearly as well as they would have liked and I suspect it would have been impossible. But come close they did with a series of powerful scenes that exposed the raw nerves, the sense of frustration of the survivors followed by the dignified and stoic release of tension when they knew the world was listening. In their lifetimes they had been allowed to tell their story and see justice of a sort.The closing statement of the piece lifted from the original tapes reminds us of how close so many even today stand at the threshold of repeating these dehumanising acts. The film leaves the viewer in no doubt that the lessons learned in 1961 have been unlearned in many countries since and often with the same grim superiority and justifications. The unnamed nations and future monsters I leave to your imagination as does the film.How often the entire process could have been derailed by well meaning judicial decisions, outside threats, and the unfolding events that at the time did overshadow the trial itself. How these bumps in the road were dealt with are explored with a deft touch that kept us in mindset of the director who at the end of the day needed to keep his mind clear and the staff focused on the job. The production of the trial is the star of the show but never shakes the feeling that it was ever going be like anything before or since. Many of the techniques pioneered at that trial are now taken for granted when broadcasting such events proving yet again that some of the most obvious things today are a result of forced innovation.As for the cast, some better known for comedy and light drama, this was a wonderful chance to show they could do the heavy stuff, often in accents utterly foreign to them. Being a BBC film made to air without adverts and about subject matter that at times was deeply troubling, the script does not waste a second and you never check your watch. I particularly appreciated the use of the many European languages representing the vastness of the crime, then allowing the haunting song during the camp montage to be sung in Polish. Poles, Jews and Catholics alike,suffered massively at the hands of the Nazis and would have been the language most spoken in the court, it seemed only right.One can never say about such a film that you enjoyed it, or that it was thought provoking, that would be strange and wholly inadequate. I would say though that it accomplished what it set out to do really well.