Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

doyle_cm The only reason I rated this miniseries a 6 instead of a 5 is because it was a groundbreaking, envelope-pushing TV drama for its time. Considering the full frontal nudity, I'm wondering how it aired on broadcast television at all. However, the nudity was the most shocking thing about this sterilized treatment of the Holocaust.Shot in standard 70's television fashion--too much lighting, no ambiance, tight shots, poor acting, complete with "happy" ending--this historical drama looked more like an episode of "Little House" than a feature film, like "Schindler's List." Cheesy production, opening credits and acting aside, it was an important moment in American television.Consider that just two decades earlier, very few Americans even spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust. This was a turning point in the general American consciousness about the "Final Solution" mercilessly carried out by the Nazis.For its flaws and triteness, the movie does attempt to be historically accurate and culturally relevant. It touches on the growing anti-Semitism in 1930's Germany as the Nazis rose to power. It shows a meeting of the Einsatzgruppen Death's Head Chiefs discussing the Russian campaign, then their "Special Action" Commandos carrying out the grueling mass murders in ditches and ravines. It touches on the gas van killings and the gradual intensification of gassing pogroms. It shows the SS-initiated Wansee Conference where the Final Solution was discussed in detail. It gives glimpses into the Zyklon-B gassing operations at Auschwitz, and the Warsaw ghetto uprising. None of it is shown as gruesome as it must have been.Throughout the 5-part miniseries (it is 5 parts on the DVD release), neither the ghettos, camps or work details are realistically portrayed. The actors are never shown in overcrowded, lice and disease-infested quarters or bordering starvation. On the contrary, Dr. Weiss is a well dressed and coifed physician throughout his stay in the Warsaw ghetto. Even when he and Mrs. Weiss board the deportation train, they look like they are off to a medical convention instead of a death camp.The worst part was the cheesy, feel-good ending with Rudy Weiss giving pointers to a group of Greek Jewish orphans playing soccer in a field. The expression on the actors face at the end smacks of "Mary Tyler Moore" and many other 70's sitcoms. This was NOT a situation comedy. It should have been darker, drearier and more realistic. Not once did it evoke any strong emotion. I understand it having to be sterilized for a mass Western audience, but it was way too cheerful.I don't want to detract from it's cultural significance in 1978, but watching it in 2010, it just smacks of "Starsky and Hutch" cheesiness. I knew as soon as I saw the opening credits what I was in for. Did they simply burn one of the leftover houses from "Little House on the Prairie"?

jzappa This simply and aptly titled miniseries is not only titled that way, but is told that way as well. Aptly, it is about a circle of German Jews who simply live their lives until they are accosted by the hate campaign against them, which takes them completely aback, and which works the way it worked with virtually every circle of German Jews during the reign of the Third Reich. Their spiral into misery, their loss of freedom, is like a dog whose master drops them off at the pound and drives away, never to come back: Like such an unfortunate animal, they simply have no idea why the master they loved and lived with turned their back coldly and left them to whatever misery would work like clockwork till their lonely, sorrowful and mystified deaths. That is not to say that each of the characters ends up this way. Every character undergoes deeply nuanced strands of this saga.The narrative stems from a Polish émigré, a much-liked general practitioner in 1935 Berlin where he lives with his wife Rosemary Harris, her parents, and their three children. When his oldest son, played by James Woods in a curious uber-American casting choice, marries Meryl Streep, comparatively apt in casting as an Aryan German, he is confronted by Anti-Semitism but justifies it and the family resolves not to leave the country. Michael Moriarty plays the husband of one of the doctor's German patients, a scrambling lawyer who strives for a real living and class progression by joining the fledgling yet prevailing Nazi Party. Within three years things will have transposed markedly for them all.The performances are all persuasive in some way or another. Michael Moriarty is chilling in his indirect self-assertion, unbending in spite of his character's realization of the immediacy of his personal involvement in the histrionics. An early Meryl Streep performance cannot help but be noticed in particular, demonstrating even before Sophie's Choice her realistic emotional responses and how especially aware she is of her character's personal backdrop. Even James Woods merges his expressively temperamental facade with an inward timidity; despite his strange presence, the drama comes naturally to his grand gestures.Holocaust is, yes, a melodrama, but it is also quite unrelenting in its depiction of early Nazi hate campains, and a lot of its drama means going to the far lengths of the everyday horrors of Nazism. It is obligated to take itself seriously and fulfills that duty to the subject matter with a feeling of epic entitlement.

dbdumonteil ...but you must not forget.Chomsky's "Holocaust" stands as the best mini-series ever made in my book .The performances are uniformly good,from Meryl Streep to Joseph Bottoms and from James Wood to David Warner.All have to be praised.The actors were so involved Michael Moriarty (who portrays Erik Dorf) said that he cried after playing the Xmas party scene .Marta Dorf (Deborah Norton) epitomizes the Neo-Nazi we may encounter even today:she never believed that her husband was wrong "let's light a candle for his soul ,children" and she never will ,whereas Dorf perhaps understood his crimes when he saw the photographs in the American officer's office."Holocaust" is full of great scenes ,but I think it should be reserved for students over 12,because some moments are unbearable .It should be shown in every secondary school in the world.A deeply moving sequence shows Berta Weiss (the marvelous Rosemary Harris) saying goodbye to her pupils :she urges them to become educated persons ;she leaves them with sweet memories of "the taming of the shrew" and with a song she could not even sing one last time with them.If you should see only one mini-series,it would have to be this one.A must.

carmi47-1 Time has dulled the impact of this 1978 NBC blockbuster: we have had much more graphic depictions of the Holocaust. What remains intact are the parallel moral experiences of two families, one Aryan German,one Polish-German Jewish, the moral strength of the latter played off against the moral collapse of the former.The problem with this juxtaposition is that the historical moral ambiguities involved were so profound that they cannot be satisfyingly analyzed, let alone brought to a sound conclusion, within a cinematic space. Schindler's List contains this problem by focusing primarily on Schindler himself. Charting 2 competing moral universes, and giving each one equal time (so to speak), inescapably makes Holocaust too diffuse.If there is one overriding criticism, it's that too many characters, while portrayed by actors who went on to greater things, are only moral puppets. Few of them take fire as convincing individuals and too often that happens only with minor characters. The one towering exception is Fritz Weaver's utterly credible Josef Weiss, the Polish-born Jewish doctor who practices in Berlin where his family is one of the film's main foci. As his wife Bertha, Rosemary Harris is statically, even snobbishly, serene even walking into a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Meryl Streep's Inga, the Weiss' Christian daughter-in-law, is nobly devoted to her husband Karl but petulantly defiant with her parents, who resent the danger to which her marriage has exposed them.Such improbabilities plague the film throughout. The final episode deals abruptly and simplistically with too many threads, as if the writers launched so much material that they had no time in the final episode to bring any of it to a believable conclusion. The worst is the final encounter between Rudi Weiss (Joseph Bottoms) and Inga. The 2 almost casually bump into each other at Terezin; they have not seen each other for 7 years, the family has been decimated and Rudi had never seen his nephew Josef, his only living relative. Yet Rudi and Inga chat for only a few minutes and take leave of each other as if they will meet for lunch next week; but the dialogue implies they may never see each other again. This does not ring true, given the heroic efforts by most camp survivors to find living relatives.The writers dispose of Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), a once-idealistic lawyer corrupted by Nazi ideology, in a puzzlingly opaque manner. Dorf witnessed the death camps' operations and personally shot Jews; yet only in the office of a US Army interrogator, as Dorf looks in rather too detached a fashion at photographs of the camps and their victims, does he abruptly (and in that sense, inexplicably) realize what he has become. He pops a cyanide pill and leaves an ambitious, equally corrupt widow and deeply confused children to deal with his dark legacy as best they can.Near-perfect sets, costumes and music can't quite compensate for the flawed achievement that is "Holocaust."