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207.30.238.78
Istvan Szabo comes the story of the rise and rise and rise of a talented actor trying to keep his career from being derailed by the Nazi propoganda machine.
Klaus Maria Brandauer gives a searing performance which is exhausting to view: perhaps the most overpowering acting turn of the decade.
For the viewer that wishes for an easy answer to whether or not conscientious artists should have refused to perform or left Germany Szabo provides no answers. Instead, what he gives is a complex film examining the ideas of ambition, loyalty, patriotism, sacrifice, and devotion to art.
Bravura film performances (the Prime Minister is equal to the scene-stealing prowess of Brandauer), brilliant play-within-a-play performances (the Mephisto scenes especially are amazing, with Brandauer shifting easily into the different acting style necessary to theater), and unsurpassed dialogue contribute to this classic.
Szabo and Brandauer collaborated on two other films.
Follow Ups:
The most interesting in my opinion is the triangle – relationship between the novel by Klaus Mann from 1936, its real model Gustaf Gründgens, and what Szabo made from both of them. Klaus Mann hated Gustaf Gründgens, not only from political, but from personal reasons too: (mostly homosexual) Gründgens was married for some time with Klaus’ (mostly lesbian) sister Erika, and she felt violated very much by him. Nevertheless, Klaus Mann always was standing on that he had descriped a „typus“ with Hendrik Höfgen, not a single personality.Gründgens reamained a famous actor in West-Germany after 1945, people loved him. The novel was not published in West-Germany until 1981, in East-Germany it was published in 1956.
Szabo had the distance: to Gustaf Gründgens, who died 1963, to the novel, and to german history, that he knew from its bitter end.
As for me, I read the novel with a kind of discomfort, while I estimated the film very much.
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Yes they did. Even worse that this one.
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Well It is too long ago! So I check it out and as far I can remember this one critic I can agree with.
Anyway I found Brandauer also over playing the act.
Remember Out of Africa...
- http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?_r=1&title1=&title2=Mephisto (Movie)&reviewer=JANET MASLIN&v_id=32241&pdate=19810929&oref=slogin (Open in New Window)
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