The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1943
length 72, 74 minutes
Rod
Director James P. Hogan
script Fritz Kortner
Joe May (story template with Kortner)
production Ben Pivar
Joseph Gershenson
music Hans J. Salter
camera Jerome Ash
cut Milton Carruth
occupation

The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (in German: The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler ) is an American propaganda film from 1943 by James P. Hogan , based on a script by the two Viennese emigrants Fritz Kortner and Joe May . Kortner worked alongside the Austrian co-emigrant Ludwig Donath in the double role of a petty bourgeois and Adolf Hitler also as an actor.

action

"Austria! ... The first of all those unfortunate countries that fell under the heels of Nazi tyranny. A people subjugated and forced to do the work and the orders of a conqueror. Vienna 1942 ”. With these words the film begins. At the center of the action is the civil servant and father of two, Franz Huber, who has a talent for imitating the voices of famous contemporaries. One day he was arrested by Nazi leaders and had to undergo facial surgery: in the event of an incident, he was supposed to play Adolf Hitler's face double, should the “Führer” fail. In truth, these people are conspirators who murder Hitler and want to use Huber in his place in order to better control the actions of the "new Hitler".

Huber has absolutely nothing to do with the ideals and ideas of National Socialism and detests Hitler. He is therefore doing everything possible to outsmart the Gestapo and their backers in order to restore democracy as a replacement for Hitler and to end the madness of war. But his plan has a weak point: Huber's wife Anna knows nothing of Franz's double life and certainly not that behind the face of the German warlord there is no one other than her husband. In the meantime, Franz Huber set about doing everything as Adolf Hitler so that the war would be lost for “Greater Germany”.

Production notes

The B-film production The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler , premiered on September 10, 1943, is a good example of a typical emigre production in Hollywood from the war years 1941 to 1945. A large part of the cast of this film was from Germany from 1933 or 1938 fled Austria from the Nazi regime and ended up in the United States. Even after 1945 the film was not shown in German-speaking countries.

Cinema veteran Joe May , a star director in German film since the childhood days of cinematography, should actually direct this film himself, according to a report by The Hollywood Reporter , but he could not agree on a budget that seemed appropriate to him with the production company Universal.

John B. Goodman designed the film structures, Russell A. Gausman was responsible for the equipment. Director Hogan died a few weeks after the premiere of this film, his penultimate directorial work.

The idea of ​​this film was reused in the US production The Magic Face a few years after the war .

Reviews

For the Movie & Video Guide, The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler was an “outdated melodrama” that could be forgotten.

Halliwell's Film Guide saw this B-flick as one of "the more eccentric curiosities from World War II" and found that "once you've recovered from the shock of existence, the whole thing has actually been done quite well".

Film historian Jan-Christopher Horak wrote: “The script that Kortner co-authored provides the framework for a number of politically explosive questions: duck or resist? Individual or collective resistance? What can the assassination of a leading figure achieve? What role does the German military play? Hardly any other Hollywood film has so clearly stated the middle class's guilt for the fascist takeover ”

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler in American Film Institute
  2. ^ Leonard Maltin : Movie & Video Guide, 1996 edition, p. 1254
  3. ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 967
  4. ↑ The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler on film.at

Web links