Writer_Mario_Biondi

Strange film. The story of a historical "Fall", the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It makes you immediately think of movies by the gigantic Luchino Visconti such as "Ludwig" and "The Damned" (the original title translates as "The Fall of the Gods"). Dark colors, morbid atmospheres, perturbations, homosexuality open or veiled. And so on. And the story is good, well thought of. But unfortunately narrated too quickly and in a too confused way. To understand it (and again not completely) one must know well history and traditions of the Ottoman Empire, or at least of its last decades. What is really a Harem, which are the relationships of power between one woman and the others, why a very few of them become powerful and others remain behind, what's the position of the Valide, what it means for a woman to bear a male child to the Sultan, why exactly the small child of the main character is poisoned, why near the end the possible poisoner, the favorite of the Sultan, has to go with her son to Salonika? Because she must follow Abdul Hamit 2 in his exile, but one must know it by himself, the movie does not give any explanation whatsoever. All in all a good film, but could have been much better

This is a magnificent movie. Simply magnificent. With a very simple, minimalistic plot John Huston succeeds in creating a story which you can not abandon and on the contrary await avidly to see scene after scene. And, let alone the extraordinary direction (and photography: only a shadowy hint of Edward Hopper, where one risked to have tons of it), the magic is done by the actors. All, all, all of them, but particularly (and obviously) Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges and Susan Tyrrell. This last one is simply fantastic in her portrayal of the desperate, solipsist boozing woman. Bridgse is my favorite actor after Dustin Hoffman, but I had never seen him so young and yet a perfectly accomplished actor. And Keach… well, tell me I am dumb, but I didn't even know him. When I look at a DVD I like to stop near the middle and begin again from that point the day after. So, with this movie I spent two splendid evenings. Depressing movie, I read somewhere. No, no way. I will look at it again

This is a really bad piece of disinformation and propaganda. Harrer is depicted as ant-Nazi, while in his real life he was very proud of the honors he received from Hitler and the photos where he appears with the Nazi boss. As a matter of fact he did not leave Tibet until 1950. Why did he remain there? Was he acting as an "adviser" for some Western power? Was he scared of going back to Austria and being summoned by an anti-Nazi courtroom? Or was he even more afraid to fall in the hands of Chinese judges? After all, he was a Nazi, allied with the Japanese, who had invaded China and killed thousands and thousands of innocent Chinese people. And Aufschnaiter? Did he really remain in the Himalayan areas because he had "married a Tibetan woman"? Or was he similarly afraid to go back to the West? After all, he had joined the Nazi Party in 1933. And so on. Movies should be respectful of History and not play with It and twist It as if It were a toy to use for political amusement.