April 5



USA----televison program

'Witness' confronts the Holocaust on film
The ultimate monster movie

BY NOEL HOLSTON


'Imaginary Witness" has most of the horrifying and poignant images you
would expect, scenes from esteemed Holocaust-related movies such as "The
Diary of Anne Frank," "Judgment at Nuremberg" and, of course, "Schindler's
List." But there are unexpected clips as well, and it was one of those, a
bizarre blend of social conscience and calculated melodramatics, that
first reduced me to tears.

It's not from a movie. It's from a 1953 TV broadcast of "This Is Your
Life" in which host Ralph Edwards surprises Hanna Block Kohner, an
Auschwitz survivor, with visits from important people from her past,
including one of the G.I.s who liberated the Nazi death camp and a fellow
survivor.

"You were sent to the so-called showers," Edwards says to the two women
and viewers at home, "and even that was a doubtful procedure because some
showers had regular water, others had liquid gas."

Apart from the surreal quality of seeing Kohner's experience treated so
matter-of-factly, the stunning thing about the clip is that it apparently
was a rare example for its time of the entertainment industry's directly
acknowledging the Holocaust. Narrator Gene Hackman says the movie studios
were still being cautious in the mid-'50s. Edwards, an early-TV
entrepreneur who also concocted "Truth or Consequences," was not only
doing the right thing, but the brave thing.

The Kohner clip is far from the only surprise in "Imaginary Witness." The
subject matter is so inherently powerful, producer-director Daniel Anker
could have made a memorable documentary just by stringing together scenes
from movies such as those already mentioned.

Much to his credit, he includes often startling background that predates
by a decade America's entry into World War II. There are newsreels
produced by American - and often Jewish-run - studios that treat book
burnings by Hitler Youth in the 1930s as though they were little more than
college pranks. And there are reminders, often supported with film
footage, of anti-Semitism and support for Hitler in this country while he
was seizing power.

According to "Imaginary Witness," Warner Bros. produced its 1939
"Confessions of a Nazi Spy" under a code name, "Confessions of Nancy
Drew," to avoid pre-release attacks from the German-American Bund, the Ku
Klux Klan and anti-Semitic politicians. MGM nervously excised the word
"Jew" entirely from its 1940 movie version of "The Mortal Storm," a novel
about a family victimized by Hitler's policies. Nazi Germany still banned
the film and threatened reprisals against MGM studio bosses.

Sidney Lumet, who directed the landmark Holocaust-survivor drama "The
Pawnbroker" (1965), recalls that in 1940, when he saw Charlie Chaplin's
self-financed anti-Hitler satire, "The Great Dictator," he had never
before heard the word "Jew" spoken in a movie.

Chaplin's film is excerpted in a segment about using humor as a weapon. It
also includes clips from director Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be or Not to Be,"
an anti-Nazi comedy revered now but pronounced tasteless when it was
released in 1942, and a viciously funny Warner Bros. cartoon, "The
Ducktator," from the same year.

At the other extreme, there are excerpts from footage shot by the Army
Signal Corps when Auschwitz, Dachau and other Nazi camps were liberated. A
Warners employee who was one of the first stateside Americans to see the
raw footage recalls stepping outside to throw up.

Again to Anker's credit, he doesn't shortchange television's contribution
to Holocaust remembrance, which, I would contend, has been greater by and
large than the movie industry's. We see, for instance, scenes from Abby
Mann's "Judgment at Nuremberg," a drama about the war-crimes tribunal
first performed on CBS' "Playhouse 90" in 1959, two years before it was
made into a theatrical film.

The documentary also showcases "Holocaust," the 1978 NBC miniseries that
scored huge ratings and touched off a national debate about whether any
attempt to dramatize such horrors were doomed to trivialize them, and
ABC's "War and Remembrance." Steven Spielberg calls that great, underrated
1988 miniseries the most graphic Holocaust drama he'd seen before he made
his own "Schindler's List."

In "Imaginary Witness," Spielberg's masterpiece, released in 1993, 60
years after Hitler began his rise, is viewed as the culmination of
Hollywood's struggle to come to grips with world events utterly at odds
with its traditional role in society: providing escapist entertainment.

Far from condemning those earlier efforts, Anker's documentary sees them
as the laboratory in which Spielberg - and other movie-makers who've
followed him - figured out how to get it right.

IMAGINARY WITNESS: HOLLYWOOD AND THE HOLOCAUST. A powerful American Movie
Classics documentary examines how a movie industry that ordinarily
traffics in fantasy has dealt with the hideous reality of Hitler's
genocidal campaign against Jews. Premieres tonight at 9 on AMC.

(source: Newsday)