Great Film: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Jazzy score backs typical stock footage fest
For some reason my local PBS station ran this flick in the mid-1990s, and I
caught all three (two-hour-long) episodes. Like most documentaries without
re-enactments, the film is just footage from the period and interviews with
survivors. What made it interesting was the brassy opening music, which
sounded more like the score for a docu on gangland Chicago then one on
Nazis.
Following (loosely) the structure of the book on which it is based, each
episode chronologically followed the origins of Adolf Hitler, the milieu he
grew up in, WWI, his discovery of the German Worker's Party, how he made
this group of right-wing cranks into the Nazi Party, the Depression, his
rise to power, the Nazification of Germany, WWII, the defeat of Germany, the
Allied discovery of the Holocaust. The last hour of the show, I think, was
taken up discussing the "Final Solution," with an interview of a survivor
who was a child when he was sent to one of the death camps.
Despite the amount of material, I think the book is a better chronicler of
what went on those twelve years. A good companion film is Alain Resnais'
French short "Night & Fog."
Cast
- Narrator played by Richard Basehart
