Pretty disappointing. The core idea of the Klaus Mann novel this film comes from charts the irresistible rise in Nazi Germany of Klaus Maria Brandauer’s ambitious German actor. The twist is that while he sells his soul to the Nazis to gain power, like some erstwhile Faust, his signature role is the Devil. Ironic to a fault, but workable. (The Faust/Mephistopheles legend something of a Mann family touchstone with Papa Thomas Mann using it in DR. FAUSTUS to posit a link between syphilis & serial music theory. Yikes!) Alas, this once admired film now seems no better than many others from Hungary’s István Szabó, a man whose putative grasp tends to exceed his reach. As a big fish in Hamburg’s small theatrical pond, Klaus Maria Brandauer opportunistically shifts from left-wing to right-wing when Berlin comes a’knocking, gaining a repertory company appointment and eventually his own theater with help from the alternately encouraging & threatening Nazi Prime Minister (presumably a stand-in for Hermann Göring). Picking up and dropping friends, associates, wives & lovers as the political wind blows (along with the occasional principled stand), Brandauer works like the devil to always be the most compelling person on screen, but merely exhausts. (Him and us.) So too Szabó, overbearing & long-winded as the alpha-male Nazi officials & intellectuals he’s come not to praise, but to bury.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Theater, vanity & the Nazi mind-set, all brilliantly hoist on their own petard by Ernst Lubitsch in his triumphantly daring black comedy TO BE OR NOT TO BE/’42.
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