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Hitler's S.S. - Portrait of Evil (1985)


DVD Cover
Four out of Five

Movie

Rating: NR
Length: 140 minutes

Video

Widescreen 1.33:1 Color

Audio

ENGLISH: Dolby Digital 2.0

Captions

None

Purchase

Plot

The movie opens as Hitler starts his rise to power and how it effects the lives of one family, specifically the two brothers. One, an naive ideologue, joins the SA for all the right reasons. The other, an intellect, eventually leaves the university to join the SS for money and power. The movie opens in 1931 and continues until the fall of Berlin.

Pros

This is the perfect film for people that ask "How could the good citizens of Germany elect and follow a leader like Hitler?". It plugs the brothers into historical events so you can see how things worked on the inside and how people were effected by them.

Cons

The audio and video quality is crap; especially the video (just think how more lovely Lucy Gutteridge would have looked if they cleaned it up). I have documentaries I recorded on VHS 20 years ago that look better than this. Yes, this was a made-for-TV movie but they could have done more than a simple media transfer. And, in spite of it's title, if you're looking for a lot of Adolf Hitler you will be disappointed; this movie isn't about him.

Extras

  • Region Free

Recommendation

I think this is a fairly accurate look of what it was like to be living in Germany during Hitler's rise and eventual fall from power. They do not pull any punches and are still able to get the audience to completely understand what had happened without having to flood the screens with gruesome images of the concentration camps. I do hope somebody will take the time to clean this video up and re-release it in the future but I have my doubts. I would highly recommend this to anyone that is interested in WWII.

Director

Actors

Carroll Baker - Gerda Hoffman
[The Game]
Paul Brooke - Gen. Josef Biegler, SA
Warren Clarke - Becker (SS assistant to Dietrich)
[A Clockwork Orange, Firefox, Top Secret!]
Michael Elphick - Ernst Röhm (SA Chief)
[The Elephant Man]
José Ferrer - Prof. Ludwig Rosenberg
[The Caine Mutiny, Dune (1984), Lawrence of Arabia]
Lucy Gutteridge - Mitzi Templer (nightclub singer)
[Top Secret!]
Colin Jeavons - Adolf Hitler
Stratford Johns - Uncle Walter (bartender)
Derek Newark - Theodor Eicke
[The Blue Max]
Bill Nighy - Helmut Hoffmann
[The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, POTC: Dead Man's Chest/At World's End, Shaun of the Dead, Underworld, Underworld: Evolution]
John Normington - Heinrich Himmler
Tony Randall - Putzi (the comedian)
John Shea - Karl Hoffmann
Robert Urquhart - Albrecht Hoffman
David Warner - Reinhard Heydrich
[Cross of Iron, The Omen, Planet of the Apes (2001), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Time Bandits, Titanic)]

Links

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