Operation Eichmann

Werner Klemperer plays Adolf Eichman in an Allied Artists production covering his implementation of the "Final Solution", his escape from Allied forces, through his capture by Israeli in Argentina.

Werner Klemperer gives a fine performance in the title role. Someone like me, used to his comic performance in HOGAN'S HEROES -- John Banner, who played "Sergeant Schultz" in that show, plays Rudof Hess -- will be surprised at his performance: fanatic, intelligent, assured of his position and approaching each problem, whether it's how to kill more Jews or how to get to safety, as an intellectual puzzle to be solved: in a word, chilling. It's a portrait of a real-life villain that at first seems too stereotyped to be interesting. Yet Klemperer plays the role with such intelligence that he is fascinating in his portrayal.

Director R.G Springsteen spent most of his career as a solid director of B Westerns. Given a solid cast and a tough subject, he handles the subject well. He is brilliantly aided by the camera of Joseph Biroc, who lights the scenes set in Nazi Germany with a flat, low light that reduces everything to grey. There are no whites or black in Germany, just a greyness that reduces all morality to nullity. Only the later sequences show any light. Yet every scene is shot with a clarity that becomes frightening.

It's a tough movie to watch for an American Jew who grew up in the Post-War era, in a millieu of older relatives and and their friends who had blue numbers tattooed on their arms. It must have been a tough movie to convince the producers to make and to cast; Joseph Schildkraut reportedly turned down $300,000 to take the lead. It's clearly a movie that everyone involved thought had to be made, and made as well as they could.

They succeeded. I don't need to see it again.