The Bunker

What went on in the last days of the Third Reich in Adolf Hitler's bunker? This tv film dares to answer that question. It is a first class work that should be shown more often. Anthony Hopkins is one of our acting icons like Olivier. He brings the same chilling conviction to the role of Adolf Hitler that he brought to Hannibal Lecter in Silence Of The Lambs. He portrays Hitler as a drug addicted shell of a man who was once invincible and he captures him at the end when all was lost. The most frightning scene in the film is where he explodes in rage at Albert Speer when he tells him that the war is lost. Hopkins captures all of the rage and madness that was Adolf Hitler, a demon in human form. It is at this point that I wanted to tip my hat to another fine thespian, Susan Blakely, she plays Eva Braun. She gives a wonderful performance as well. She is a first class actress who has never given a bad performance in anything that she has done and who has never been given the credit due her. They talk in this film about how Albert Speer tried to assassinate Hitler in the final days of the Third Reich. This is a blatant whitewash. Speer was lucky to escape with his life at the Nuremburg trial, he got off with twenty years. People called him "the Nazi who said he was sorry". That is all BS!!!!Speer willingly served Hitler for years! He knew of the concentration camps and approved of it. He was in on it from the very beginning and the son of a bitch should have ended his life with a hangman's noose around his neck! There was a writer who wrote a book about Speer called Albert Speer The Whole Story and I highly recommend it.

The Third Reich was a land of insanity from its very beginning. That insanity increased as time went on, and this movie offers a pretty good look at its last days, as Hitler and his entourage hole themselves up in a bunker underneath the Reich Chancellory and act as if they're actually accomplishing something, even as Germany is being systematically overrun by Allied armies.

Of most interest are the various performances and the manner in which the various personalities are portrayed. Anthony Hopkins' work as Adolf Hitler was very good - especially considering the difficulties involved in playing such a complex and controversial subject. I thought Hopkins nailed the emotional complexity of the man - deliberately hiding himself from the realities of the War, calmly sitting down to tea with his secretaries one minute, then launching into a deranged tirade against his generals the next, addicted to drugs administered by his personal physician. Those who did makeup for this also got Hopkins to look the part - well not perfectly, but pretty close. Where I thought Hopkins missed the mark a bit was in Hitler's physical state. Aside from some trembling, Hopkins' Hitler actually looked pretty healthy. Other actors have to be looked at as well though, because this movie isn't really about Hitler - it has more to do with how the various personalities involved interacted with Hitler.

Much of the movie revolved around Nazi architect Albert Speer. Richard Jordan handled the part well, although the portrayal of Speer was interesting - probably unavoidably so, since Speer was almost as complex a character as Hitler. In the movie, Speer comes across as basically a good guy, fighting against Hitler's insane plans. There's truth to that view, but it's too limited. Speer was a devoted disciple of Hitler, and his actions against Hitler began only when it became obvious that Germany would lose the war. For Speer, as long as Germany might win, the horrors of Nazism seemed acceptable. Something was lacking in Cliff Gorman's portrayal of Joseph Goebbels. A lot was right - the portrayal of Goebbels' fanatical devotion to Hitler and Nazism, his rabid anti-semitism and his cold as ice attitude - to the point of killing his own family without a second thought simply because he felt that without Hitler, there was no reason for any of them to live. Still, something about Gorman as Goebbels didn't work for me. He just didn't look the part, and I could never really equate the voice with Goebbels either. The third figure of significance was Martin Bormann, portrayed by Michael Lonsdale. Lonsdale was good here. Bormann was a rather shadowy character, and Lonsdale portrayed him that way. You could never really be sure what Bormann's priority was here - getting out of the bunker or staying loyal to Hitler. In fact, that's accurate, because above everything else, Bormann's main preoccupation was with power - whether represented by Hitler or someone else.

Largely missing from this account of these last days in the bunker (although it does pop up in the end) is the rather morbid and completely unreal question of who would succeed Hitler - as if there was going to be anything to succeed to. As I understand it, that was a rather serious issue in the bunker in those last days and weeks; it gets largely passed over in this movie. Basically, however, this is very well done. I particularly liked the last scene, when the machinist Hentschel (Martin Jarvis) throws papers in disgust at the radio when it announces Hitler's heroic death, "fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism," when Hentschel knew full well that Hitler had cowardly committed suicide and left everyone else to fend for themselves. Overall, I give this a 7/10

A tour de force performance by Hopkins manages to propel this sometimes slow-moving docudrama. The supporting performances, especially by Piper Laurie and Richard Jordan, also drive this intensely psychological take on the last days of the Third Reich. One criticism though: is a German accent really that difficult for professional actors to mimic?

As a military historian, I've probably seen every film depicting Hitler and the last days of the Third Reich there is. Some stand out. "Inside the Third Reich" with Derek Jacobi, and "Hitler: The Last Ten Days," with Alec Guinness, to name a few. But as slow and downright melodramatic as this film is, I think that Anthony Hopkins' Hitler is right on the money, A superb acting job with a difficult role. He brings the image of an old man, difficult, palsied, volatile, confused, distant and changeable as a chameleon on an acid trip to life for the screen. It's not hard to play the classic Hitler with fits of rages and dour looks, but there is a lot more to it, and Hopkins pulls it off magnificently. He literally ages before your eyes and the gray pallor of the Bunker's stone walls seems to seep into his skin with every scene. Jordan as Speer is believable, and the somber, dirgelike music pulls out the hopelessness of the last gasp of the Nazi rat pack's future. Accurately done, but Hopkins is the real star here. But as one other user commented, is it really so hard for a Brit or an American to manage a German accent? Do all civilized Germans sound as if they had been raised in coventry? Ach du Lieber!

As far I know there are at least four movies over Hitler at bunker nearby closing of WWII, firstly Alec Guinness's HITLER THE LAST DAYS made in 1973, Anthony Hopkins's THE BUNKER finished in 1981, then came up Derek Jacobi's INSIDE THE THIRD REICH shot in 1983, and the lasted hors-concours Bruno Ganz's DOWNFALL, this low budge TV-movie in question is almost unknown by a large majority of cinephiles, aired in Brazil in 1986 I watched this fine picture wondering myself if some happenings down there were really true, as the mad dog Hitler demanding to Albert Speer a total destruction of Germany, aiming for didn't let stone unturned to allied forces, even it will cost millions of Germans lives, at my point of view very questionable in fact that Paris was took by Germans and when they lost the power of city it didn't happened there, even some sources said otherwise.

Also in the beginning of the movie the American Soldier James O'Donnell entering in Bunker complex trying figures out what's happened there on those 105 days underneath of surface, he already exposes to the audience the follow line "I can't guarantee that what you're about to see is historical truth", so start this statement all coming next should be understood as simple conjecture, instead accurate facts, even though it has many witnesses whom survived that surely could vouch for those facts here and there to assembly the whole overview in order to reach more closest of the truth.

Anthony Hopkins made a reliable Hitler aside some criticism from some, mainly because Mr. Bruno Ganz becomes unbeaten after his remarkable performance in DOWNFALL, thus stayed so hard for other Hitler's contenders, anyway a hard-to-find picture, I'd to appeal to our last hope Youtube which I've found a fine print with English subtitles only, I went back to 1986 briefly on those narrow facilities that was Hitler's shelter.

Thanks for reading.

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First watch: 1986 / How many: 2 / Source: TV-Youtube / Rating: 7.5.