C'era una volta il West

A restored version of one of Sergio Leone's true masterpieces is currently on a short run at London Cinemas. If ever there was a cause for withholding watching true classics of cinema at home, then this is a shining example. I don't buy DVDs with the exception of the odd boxset now and then, because I don't have a huge TV (I find them rather ugly and preposterous - mine is a mere 26 inches) and for one, I prefer to watch films now in a cinema. The process is important, and there's something distinctly old-fashioned nowadays having to fit one's life according to another schedule, rather than have everything on demand. The serendipity of a 500 films queued-Lovefilm subscription does help though from time to time. Mix and match.

Leone's film veers towards parody at times, but it defies convention in many ways, and he ends up delivering a masterpiece of substance. It's a feast for the eyes, not least in the choice of actors, who all deliver robust, charismatic performances; but also in the scenery and majestic sets, which bring an embryonic railroad and frontier town to life. Morricone's soundtrack doesn't have the ambiguous atmosphere of his earlier films with Leone, rather relying on effective leitmotifs and genuinely masterful harmonies to inflect proceedings with a memorable flourish.

The undoubted star of the film is the leonine presence of Henry Fonda, who portrays one of cinema's finest villains, Frank, with a hint of ageing menace. 63 at the time of making, Fonda originally turned down the role, but was persuaded after a personal visit from the director. It was a dramatic change from the gentle patrician aspect of his acting that he had become legendary for, but became the actors' personal favourite performance. Fonda's icy stare and malelovent half-smile, captured so effectively by Leone's zoom technique, captures the essence of his evil far more than any of his actions. Jason Robard's dusty bandido Cheyenne provides a comic balance to the single-minded drive of the classic man-with-no-name "Harmonica", played by Charles Bronson, who delivered by his best ever performance here. The quartet of main characters is made up by Claudia Cardinale, whose rosy presence is at the centre of the film's affections and plot.

Seeing this at the cinema brought home the sheer volume of sound at times, especially with the grind and screeching of the railroad as it pierces through the narrative at all times. From the plush interior of Morton's caboose to the Coolies working the track from beginning to the end, the clash of metal on metal is present throughout. It's an epic feast in every sense of the word.

Valkyrie

The meme of "Resistance" in World War 2 continues with Bryan Singer's "Valkyrie", which is a dramatization of the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. Tom Cruise portrays Claus Von Stauffenberg, whose role in the attempt still rankles deeply within the heart of Germany.

Resistance itself in Nazi Germany was apparent and in existence for the duration of the conflict, but like the rest of Occupied Europe, the penalties for it were brutally plain to see. Death on a unprecedented scale would be carried out, with those adjudged to be involved almost certainly executed, and the web of killing usually extended to family members and the like as a particularly effective form of warning. There was no concerted movement of any size at any one time, and the success of the 1940 campaign in Western Europe and the almost invulnerable nature of the German Forces up to late 1941 put a huge dent in opposition spreading to the civilian public until the Gestapo began to notice a downturn in 1943, almost certainly brought on by the consistent bombing by the USAAF and RAF of major cities such as Hamburg.

Whilst the White Rose and Edelweiss Pirate movements were small and almost molecular in size, the most obvious source of any sort of resistance that could effect any sort of change then was through the Army itsef, elements of which had harboured a growing dislike of Hitler since his appointment as Reichskanzler in 1933. The dislike was mutual; as the source of the infamous Dolchstoßlegende that had produced the Versailles treaty and the source of all Germany's inter-war woes, Hitler harboured a great resentment to the aristocratic high-minded echelons of the German military until his death. Those concerted in opposition were riven by problems - most agreed that Hitler was the sole problem, but by 1936 it was difficult to see his removal other than by assassination, and many of those involved were devout Christians and against such a proposal. Furthermore, there was no one path for a future without Hitler - many Aristocratic Officers had originally supported his policies and did not forsee a return to the Parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic, which for them was the source of his rise.

At all stages during this period Hitler was always one step ahead; displaying a machiavellian vision that would eventually bind Germany into a unavoidable descent to the abyss. His Reichwehrsreid of 1934 bound the Reichswehr to a pledge of loyalty, and the manufactured Blomberg-Fritsch affair of 1938 removed from office his two foremost and powerful critics. This precipitated a major shake-up in the organisation of the Army, and lay the seeds for the 20 July plot, with one of those generals involved, Ludwig Beck, becoming more and more isolated in his opinion of how any future European war might be waged. After a showdown with Hitler over the proposed invasion of Czechoslovakia, he resigned, producing a memo on 29 July 1938 stating that "the German Army had the duty to prepare for possible wars with foreign enemies and "for an internal conflict which need only take place in Berlin".

By the end of 1942, the outlook for the German Army was weak. Defeats in North Africa, the first inklings of the Allied assault on the "underbelly of the Reich" and the disaster at Stalingrad meant that a concerted withdrawal on the Eastern front was inevitable. Hitler's strategic view of the conflict was from this point on fundamentally flawed - as a military strategist his outlook was in total victory, and for the first time his commanders knew that a more realistic battle had to be fought on the Eastern front in order to maintain stretched supply lines and the morale of a battered Army that had suffered an ignoble defeat of harrowing proportions. Yet those who talked of dissent still found it almost impossible to garner support for the removal of the Fuhrer - some of his most brilliant generals, such as Von Manstein and Rommel knew that the war was lost, but could not bring themselves to mutiny.

It was down to Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg to become the central energizing force in a movement to assassinate Hitler and enable Operation Valkyrie, a pre-planned military doctrine put in place in case of civil unrest by mobilizing the reserve Army. Stauffenberg himself seems to have been a perfect example of German aristocracy in the War - a highly decorated soldier who to Hitler himself would have been the perfect embodiment of the professional warrior - who agreed on the invasion of Poland and its annexation for resources for a Greater Reich, but one who having taking part, also disagreed fundamentally with the invasion of Prague a year earlier. It is documented that he also tried to soften the Occupation policy whilst at the Eastern Front, and was fully aware of the mass executions being carried out by both the SS and the Einsatzgruppen. Wounded severely whilst in North Africa, Stauffenberg lost his right hand and an eye. Whilst recovering, Stauffenberg was introduced to Henning Von Tresckow, a major opponent of Hitler, and soon placed in the higher echelons of the Ersatzheer (replacement Army). One of his superiors was General Olbricht, who was in league with Von Tresckow. This eased the path for Stauffenberg's access to Hitler, which came with his delivery of 2 bombs with adjutant Lt Werner Von Haeften placed inside a suitcase at the Wolfsschanze in Poland.

Stauffenberg was able to prime one of the bombs, which went off as he left, and having bluffed his way past checkpoints with Von Haeften, believed that Hitler was now dead, and returned to Berlin and to the Bendlerblock, the nerve-centre of the coup. But Olbricht had yet to receive confirmation that the Fuhrer had been killed due to a communications blackout at the Wolfsschanze, and Operation Valkyrie, which would use the Ersatzheer to gain command of Berlin and put the Nazi high command and senior SS officers under arrest, was delayed for 3 hours. That evening, both Goebbels and Hitler himself announced on radio that he had survived the blast, and later in the night, with troops loyal to the regime having regained command of the small area of Berlin that had revolted, the inner circle of conspirators including Stauffenberg and Olbricht were summarily court-martialled by General Frohm and executed. Frohm, who was aware of the plot, did not survive and was executed in 1945 as the Nazi regime flickered and died.

Being somewhat dismissive of American cinematic portrayals of events in World War 2, I was surprised that Valkyrie is remarkable for its attention to detail in the events of July 20, and as such director Bryan Singer deserves enormous credit. Much of the casting is excellent, with Bill Nighy in particular giving Olbricht a sense of forlorn dignity, but the central fault of the film is in the lead, played by Cruise.

Singer gained finance from United Artists and Cruise himself for the film, so it was inevitable that he would gain the role, but the fact remains that Stauffenberg was an ambiguous and complex character, and I personally feel that the original choice of the scriptwriters, Thomas Kretschmann (who is in the film but as a Major in the Ersaztheer), would have given the role a gravitas that a Non-German could never hope to achieve. For his part, Cruise acts well, but he lacks the sort of emotional complexity that suited the role, and as such gives either black or white, and never a shade of grey.

The other criticism I would apply is that the subject matter itself is far more labyrinthian than the July 20 plot, and for more serious historians the film does not address these issues. Von Stauffenberg's efforts remain the most well-known attempt on Hitler's life, but we do not know what might have happened had he died. I won't attempt to enter conjecture in detail, but the likelihood is that a face-off between the Wehrmacht and Himmler's SS may have occurred, with many plotters and factions attempting to fill the void, and Von Stauffenberg's original plan may have dissolved in the middle of such chaos. It is unlikely that the Wehrmacht could have saved the Eastern Front as the Russians had launched the great forgotten offensive Operation Bagration, but as the Allied effort in Normandy was still in its infancy, it is likely that the Germans may have attempted to open negotiations, or at least Generals in the Wehrmacht may have do so.

Valkyrie then is a worthy film, and although I'll fully admit that a non-German playing the role, not least Cruise, rankled with me, especially given the intensity of Der Untergang, but given the limitations of a Hollywood time limit, it skilfully manages to portray the historical events with a taut script and is helped by attention to detail in casting.

La Silence de La Mer

Continuing the theme of Nazi occupation, I recently watched Melville's 1949 debut film La Silence de la Mer, which was an adaptation of a book secretly published in Paris in 1942 by Vercors. The story centres around a German Major's billeting with an old man and his niece in a rural part of France. The officer, played with a stately assurance by Swiss actor Howard Vernon, is a cultured man, a musician in his "normal life" and one with thoughts that beyond initial conflict, France and Germany would forget their differences and forge a new cultural alliance.

The film itself is narrated from the perspective of the Old Man, who, along with his niece, never talk to the Officer, imparting only a series of glances and subdued expressions which imbue the film with a peculiar sense of tension. For his part, the Officer, Werner Von Ebrennac, understands this silent protest, but after a furtive start, begins to join the couple each evening, regaling them with his love of France, music, literature, but never entering into the sort of long-winded monologues that one might expect of a man under the flag of the Nazi party - he is soft-spoken and subdued, realising that conflict was necessary to bring France to the table. In a way, this arguably follows the theme of "La Belle et la Bête" in Cocteau's 1946 film. Cocteau himself was much feted by the Germans during the Occupation, much to the chagrin of many right-wing and extremists in France itself. Slowly but surely the couple begin to make ever so slight expressions that identify their growing warmth to him, not least with his decision to play Bach on their Harmonium.

Von Ebrennac then visits Paris, and after meeting old war comrades, realises that the Occupation and what is happening in the East is far, far worse than he could have imagined, and returns to the couple, leaving with the knowledge that their silence was correct.

Apart from several scenes outside, the large majority of the film was filmed in the confines of Vercor's own house, and is described as "Anti-cinemagraphic", yet has a strong modern feel to it, with Decae's photography giving a strong indication of why he would become one of the major cinematographers of post-war French cinema. Unlike Melville's striking 1969 L'Armee des Ombres, this is a markedly different sort of resistance film, bathed in the medium of silent passiveness, and for one makes it a rather remarkable debut.

Mark Mazower - Hitler's Empire

I fully admit that this is a somewhat heavy book to be kicking off a blog with, but Mazower's latest opus on Occupied Europe is for any student of this period essential reading. I remember reading "Dark Continent" some years ago, but Mazower has turned to a more localized subject this time within a set geographical and era-restricted boundary that makes for more compelling reading than that.

When reading a history book, it's often the case that one is presented with maps of the area discussed beforehand. To illustrate the far-reaching impact and rapid spread of Nazi Germany in the early years of the Second World War, we're often presented with a diagram of Europe virtually covered in black, with the odd speck of white to denote neutral countries like Spain, Switzerland and Sweden. It's easy to forget that under this dark web lay a number of countries under occupation, and of course those who had come into the nocturnal fold of the Axis treaty. For 4 years most of Europe lay under the iron fist of the Nazis, and Mazower's book uncovers life under it.

Like most of his books, he shies away from colouring in a biographical nature the more detailed aspects of the men that shaped this period, and it is a slight fault that we rarely get an insight into characters like Himmler, who would play a major role in the shaping of German policy as head of the SS in countries under occupied rule. The Nazi party itself was an unusual combination of sadistic thugs and nationalistic short-sighted intellectuals that were driven along by the ruthless careerism of a particularly effective strata of bureaucrats who took onboard on the creative opportunities given to them by the plunder afforded from the remarkable gains made by the Wehrmacht in 1939 and 1940.

Mazower illustrates with great skill that whilst Hitler was soaked in the idealism of "Lebensraum" for the East, the fact was that once Germany had conquered Poland within a month in October 1939, the incoming administration had little or no idea on how to rule the land, dividing their time between grotesque annihilation of the Polish elite and ransacking the economic wealth of the country. Put simply, they were making it as they went along, leaving great swathes of land to be ruled by Gauleiters who carved out petty kingdoms for themselves, revelling in plunder and atrocities.

One of the central themes of the Nazi occupation is the Jewish question, and naturally the emergence of the Final Solution. Again, this seems to have been drawn up with no great plan beforehand as to what to do with the great populations of European Jewry that the Nazis conquered with their occupation of Poland and after the launch of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The decision to attack the Soviet Union gave precedent to a "war of annihilation" against the European Jews, as Hitler envisaged their extinction on the continent, whereas before he had been concerned with their expulsion only from the Reich.

The Nazi's attitude towards the Jews set a precedent for racial purity, and this strand of thought amongst their party, the SS and the Wehrmacht would set it on a collision course. Himmler's SS was only concerned with the idea of removing any sort of ethnic impurity for German settlers in the East was precisely the sort of grossly idiotic policy that would hamper any chance of the German occupation having a chance of gaining the trust and benevolence of the populations they would so ruthlessly exploit. Hitler's Blitzkreig in the West in 1940 was a chymera; in the East he gambled all in 1941 on a similar military policy against the Red Army and came unstuck in the Winter of 1941 outside Moscow. By the summer of 1942, arguably the "high point" of the Wehrmacht's achievements in the War, most of the top generals knew that the War against the Russians was now only a matter of time before Stalin's armies would attack with punishing consequence, as they did at Stalingrad at the end of the year. Hitler's decision to declare war on America as well meant that the demand for much-needed resources came to the fore. And it's here that Mazower demonstrates with great clarity that the twin-pronged assaults of racial purity and imperial domination were never going to work. By destroying with such abhorrent brutality the populations of Poland and the Ukraine, they also vanquished any chance of extracting with any real abundance any of the vital resources required for Germany to keep fighting on what was to become a number of different fronts after the Italians capitulated in 1943. It would be left to the technocrat Albert Speer to revolutionise the German war effort, but by then it was just a matter of time before the Wehrmacht were pushed out of the Soviet Union.

Germany wasn't the only aggressor in this conflict, and the depictions of Romanian and Croatian atrocities carried out by mindless murderers like Marshall Antonescu and Ante Pavelic show that death and destruction wasn't restricted to the Einsaztgruppen and SS. Sanctioned by Hitler to show "the utmost brutality" these modern day barbarians ran amok across central and south-eastern Europe, reducing the region to something out of a medieval Bosch painting. The sheer numbers of deaths rolled out by Mazower over the course of the book seems to work more effectively than other historians' usage of first hand accounts to describe such scenes.

Of course, outside of the cauldron of annihilation and sheer terror that was Eastern Europe, the occupation of France seems a world away. Until 1942 when the Germans took over the whole country in response to the Allied landings in North Africa, despite Hitler's relative dislike of the French, Mareschal Petain played a relatively skilful hand in maintaining probing German eyes at a distance from the country. The removal of the administration to Vichy away from Paris was a relatively good move for the long-term interests of the French, given the hot-bed of right-wing and Ultra movements that laced the country. Indeed, given the abject state of the country during the 30's, many welcomed the Occupation and Mazower points out markedly that foreign occupation often galvanised the economy in unusual ways. He also points out that the Romanian occupation of Transnistria created a free-market zone where the blackmarket ran free, and Odessa for some period was the only place in the whole of continental Europe outside of Germany where one could buy with ease items such as meat and dairy produce. Many chose to collaborate, but with a view to creating order rather than helping the Germans directly, and Mazower illustrates the example of intelligent Police chief Rene Bousquet, who would create a deal with SS leader Karl Oberg in 1942 whereby the Gendarmerie were not compelled to provide hostages to the Nazis, and therefore created a fragile sort of autonomy for them. Although tried by the Haute Cour in 1949, Bousquet was eventually pardoned in 1958 and grew to be a faithful ally to Francois Mitterand, but was shot dead in 1993 shortly before going on trial for deporting children during the conflict.

As the war turned against Germany, many countries and individuals, not least high-ranking Nazi party officials and Generals realised that only some sort of "European" crusade might stop the Bolshevik menace. Yet despite many efforts, and the reality that by 1944 the Wehrmacht was populated by many non-German divisions, Hitler refused outright at all times. His twisted logic was understandable from his perspective - those who fought with him would turn against him when the tide changed, and in this aspect he was right - but ultimately the reality was that by 1943 Nazi Europe was doomed, and it was left for them to carry out their killing as quickly as possible before the inevitable Götterdämmerung arrived. These attempts at a European-wide coalition contain elements of what would come later in Western Europe, not least in the high-level communication and co-operation between France and Germany, which would launch the careers of many technocrats a decade later.

Like Adam Tooze's superb analysis of the Nazi economy in "Wages of Destruction", Mazower's book is an essential reference for our understanding of the Second World War. Whilst most books on the period tend to focus on the military consequences of Hitler's assault on Europe and the mass murder of the Holocaust, this is an enlightening text on the grotesque policies of the Nazi party and the pathetic idiocy of their economic plunder throughout the continent.