Hitler's Hollywood Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Hitler's Hollywood Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 22, 2020

Even some diehard fans of so-called “world cinema” might have a hard time coming up with more than two or three films that were produced in Germany during the reign of the Nazi Party from circa 1933 to 1945. There’s Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Triumph of the Will, of course, and fans of (more?) fictionalized outings may know of films like Titanic and/or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, both of which pre-dated better known American films built around the same subject matter(s) by decades, but that may be it for some (it was, more or less, anyway, for this particular world cinema fan). Of course, there were scores of films produced under the aegis of the Nazis and Joseph Goebbels in particular, as Hitler’s Hollywood (which bears the subtitle German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda 1933 - 45) gets into, providing a glut of clips from films that include a number of titles that will probably be “new” to many viewers. Documentarian Rüdiger Suchsland has been on an almost archaeological quest to uncover aspects of the history of the German film industry, and this disc also includes From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses, which arguably might be a better place to start, not just for "chronological" reasons but also for the context the earlier documentary provides in terms of the general zeitgeist of Germany which fostered some of the more radical (in both senses of that term) elements seen in some German films.

Hitler's Hollywood operates from the thesis that Hitler and Goebbels were intent on building their own German "dream factory" which could help both distract and indoctrinate the unwashed masses in about equal measure. The documentary is a cornucopia of film clips, and they probably illustrate some of the ideas Suchsland is attempting to explore at least as well as some of the flowery, perhaps pretentious sounding, narration given by Udo Kier (especially since Kier's heavy accent in the English language version can be a bit hard to decipher at times). Frankly, I wasn't always swayed by some of Suchsland's suppositions or intimations about what things "mean", and there are some kind of odd decisions made in terms of mixing the soundtrack from one film with the imagery from another, but simply for the sheer glut of rare material that is on display here, I can't imagine any armchair historian and/or film buff not being impressed by the volume of clips Suchsland provides.

There are passing attempts (as alluded to above) to explicate a kind of underlying rationale as to why certain films did certain things, and at least in the case of some of the more virulent cinema that came out of the Nazi era, Hitler's Hollywood does at least an adequate job of documenting "trends" like anti-Semitism vis a vis films like The Rothschilds and Jud Süss (those interested may want to seek out Jew Suss: Rise and Fall, a 2010 fictionalized version of the making of the latter film). There is also some cogent analysis offered as to some of the last films to come out of the Nazi era, several of which seemed in their own ways to be predicting disaster. Suschland does seem to be an unrequited fan of Gustaf Gründgens, devoting a fair amount of time to the actor and director in both this film and From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses. A number of other stars are also featured prominently, including Ilse Werner, whose father evidently passed on a lucrative offer from MGM to bring the actress to American shores.

Hitler's Hollywood Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Note: Eureka Entertainment provided a check disc for the purposes of this review.

Hitler's Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda 1933 - 45 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eureka Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in a variety of aspect ratios, but with virtually all of the film clips hovering around Academy ratio. A few times the frame opens up significantly wider to offer side by side moments or a few shots of stills and the like. As with any documentary culled together from such a wide variety of sources, there's an undeniable heterogeneity to the presentation here, but what continually struck me is actually how good some of the clips look, especially some of the color ones. While quite a few of the color clips show the kind of peculiar orange toning that seems to be part of vintage German color technology, some of the clips are rather incredibly vivid and well saturated, and a few could pass for very recently shot material. The black and white material is considerably variable, with some clips looking at least relatively decent and some others faring worse, with pretty ragged, and at times outright damaged, moments. As might be expected, detail levels and grain structure fluctuates from clip to clip.

Hitler's Hollywood Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hitler's Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda 1933 - 45 features LPCM 2.0 tracks in either German (with English subtitles) or English (with English subtitles only for the German language film clips). Fidelity is fine on both of these tracks, though as mentioned above, I personally found Kier's English language version a bit hard to make out at times. The actual soundtracks on the film clips are about as variable as the image quality, though there's nothing egregious in terms of age related wear and tear. You will easily hear background hiss spike and fall at various moments, and there are occasional pops and cracks, but no dialogue is ever really lost, and several musical moments resonate with decent authority.

Hitler's Hollywood Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses (HD; 1:58:36) is, as mentioned above, arguably a better place to start with a survey of German cinema, since the films in this documentary obviously come from before the Nazi era. This documentary in fact probably has more familiar titles covered, including such landmarks as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, Metropolis and Nosferatu (among many others). In German with English subtitles.

Hitler's Hollywood Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Suchsland starts this intriguing documentary with an epigram from Siegfried Kracauer which states, "Watching old movies is a way of exploring our past." And indeed it's in the simple act of watching the many clips Suchsland has assembled for Hitler's Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda 1933 - 45 that this piece really finds its voice. The narration, and some of the kind of crazy quilt of ideas Suchsland attempts to knit together, isn't always successful, but does have some interesting bits along the way. With an understanding that this was obviously cobbled together from a wide variety of sources, and so both image and audio quality are somewhat variable, technical merits are solid. The addition of Suchsland's earlier documentary on Weimar Republic filmmaking is going to be an additional selling point for many fans. Highly recommended.