das boot (the boat)
"Das Boot" has stood the test of time to become not only the greatest submarine movie ever made, but also one of the greatest war movies ever made.
At the outset, the viewer must understand that he/she is NOT watching an American movie. If you were, it would probably star George Clooney or Kevin Coster attempting to speak with a German accent, which would be a real tragedy in itself. It would also have a blatantly annoying soundtrack, lot of shots of the women back home worrying about their men, and loads of bad dialogue. "Das Boot" fortunately contains none of the above. What is does contain is a great story with top-notch production values, acting, and direction.
The story begins with the captain (expertly played by Jurgen Prochnow) and his crew celebrating the night before they will set out to sea in a German U-boat. These men, little more than boys, have no idea what they are about to experience. The captain does know, and you can see that realization on his face and in his character throughout the film. A young, idealistic correspondent obtains permission to travel with the crew and document their journey. The film really belongs to him as we see how he reacts as the realization gradually comes to him of exactly what he has stumbled into.
Director Petersen has done an outstanding job of showing us what it was like to serve on a WWII U-boat. You can almost get lost in the film, imagining the close quarters, the sounds, even the smells of being in a sub. Some viewers have commented that so much of the film is "boring." Again, audiences watching nothing but Hollywood films feel that an explosion has to occur every five minutes for the movie to be exciting. This movie is exciting, but the excitement builds from the tension that runs throughout the entire film. Sure, there's down time, but even at three and a half hours, there are no wasted shots. The ending??? Wow! See it for yourself!
All aspects of the DVD are also wonderful. I would have liked to have seen more of the making of the film, but what's there is very good. I recommend watching the film in the original German with English subtitles. Even if you're opposed to it, at least try it for the first 20 minutes. More people should see this film. It's worth your time.
==============================
Das Boot is a gripping and stunningly authentic journey of the crew of a German U-boat (U-96) in the second world war. The film captures the day to day hardships of the sailors on U-96, mainly through the eyes of a war correspondent, Lt.Werner. Every aspect of life at sea is depicted: the cramped accommodations, the breakdown of hygiene, and the overall squalor that ensues as forty men live in such a small space for weeks on end. From the beginning Werner becomes steadily more aware that the practice of the U-boat war is quite different from the principle, and that its reality is in contrast to the propaganda. Although largely apolitical, the film does show the subtle contempt that some of men have for the war effort, and presumably the regime that it supports. In the beginning, we see the ship's company partying the night away at a night club in La Rochelle in Nazi occupied France. The younger crewmen drink and carouse seemingly without worry, while the captain (Jergen Prochnow) looks on with grim disbelief at their youth and naivet�. It is here that we see that there is a rift between the veteran sailors and the newcomers. Later in the film, the captain fiercely berates his young (and fanatical) first officer for being too disrespectful of threat posed by their British adversaries. The monotony of the patrol is broken up when word comes that the boat is to intercept a nearby convoy. After a night surface attack, U-96 is depth charged and hounded by the convoy's escort vessels. There are masterful scenes which show the desperate struggle the men undergo to hold the boat together while trying to elude the Destroyers above. The groaning of the hull, the pounding of the depth charges, the frantic cries and orders along with the ghostly pinging of the enemy's sonar create searing suspense, and an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. A duplicity in the sailors develops as they remain isolated from both their homeland and the source of their ideology. The men cheer wildly when they hear the sound of one of their torpedoes find its mark, but weep when see British sailors burning and drowning in the sea. When U-96 makes a clandestine re-supply rendezvous with an interned German liner on the Spanish coast, the officers are revered. However, the lavish buffet prepared by the Liner's genteel Captain for the "undersea heroes", only alienates the weary U-boat men. It is as if such hospitality is become total vulgarity. This point is emphasised as the liner's officers sieg heil in unison (all in smartly pressed uniforms), while U-96's officers stand ragged and disoriented. The climax of the film comes after the boat is dispatched to the mediteranean via Gibralter. U-96 attempts to sneek past the British held port, but is hotly recieved. Following a brief and harrowing chase, U-96 finds itself resting on the bottom, severely damaged. The prognosis for the stricken vessel is poor, as the engineer and crew attempt to repair her. Possibly the most authentic scenes in the movie are of the measures taken by the men to restore their boat, and resurface. It is at this point, when it becomes apparent that they will most probably not see home again, that we see final closure to the bonding that has been happening between officers and men. Hours tick by as the captain and most of the crew begin to pray that the engineer can "pull it off". The realization that they are likely doomed causes each character to have his own reckoning with the reality of war. The end of the film is grim and ironic, but well in keeping with the theme of the movie, which is the tragic waste of war. Das boot is a movie much in the spirit of "All Quiet on the Western Front". I recommend it for those who like their movies with unflinching honesty and realism, and where the Calvary does not ride over the hill at the end to save the day.
==============================
Forget the popular portrayals of the German soldier in World War II, forget the Hollywood hype and such diatribes as U-571, this is THE submarine movie! Shown from the point of view of a German U-Boat, U-96, Petersen masterfully depicts a typical patrol for a German U-Boat in the years when the Battle of the Atlantic was starting to slip away from the Kriegsmarine's grasp. You cannot help but identify with each of the character's. The Captain, known with affection as the "Old Man" forever keeps a cool head under the most intense pressures. His death in the final scene is a true tragedy. The journalist, tasked with producing a report for U-Boat Headquarters is unfamiliar with the environment, and subject to many a joke by his collegues on board! As each minutes passes, you'll become more engrossed in the toils that face the crew.
You'll silently wish for them to gain a success after days upon days of waiting for orders, you'll laugh as they poke fun at the Reich's political leaders..."Where are you Herr Goering!"
But what is more, you'll be actively willing them on as they embark on a near suicide mission through the Gibraltar straits, with the Captain all the while on the bridge being drenched with seawater! You'll also curse the Allied bombers as they strafe the dockyards after the crew successfully enter port at La Rochelle - having spent almost an entire day lodged at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, with the crew living off nothing but spare oxygen tanks and stale bread.
Wolfgang Petersen is a master at his profession, and I urge anyone with an interest in military history, or action in general, to watch this superb piece. Pity only five stars are available!
==============================
I saw this film in the theater when I was a wee lad, and I hold it largely responsible for my lifelong fascination with Adolf Hitler's Germany and the men who chose to fight for it. Like most thirtysomethings, I grew up watching cornball American war movies and TV shows that usually depicted the Germans (and the Japanese) as comic-opera buffoons ("Hogans Heroes"), sub-human hordes fit only for a burst from a Tommy gun ("Bataan"), or cartoon bad guys with eyepatches, monocoles, dueling scars and varnished black boots, who smoked cigarettes with that peculiar European three-fingered grip and said things like, "You're being very foolish....we have ways of making you talk" but when push came to shove just couldn't seem to shoot straight ("Where Eagles Dare"....and how hard could it possibly be to hit Richard Burton's fat, drunken ass anyway?)
"Das Boot" was the first film I had ever seen that depicted the Germans as human beings fighting for their country (if not necessarily their Party, or Hitler), and it depicted them in all their vulgar, profane, humorous, sweaty, smelly, unshaven, drunken glory. Strangely enough, the movie (like the book by Lothar-Gunther Bucheim, which remains one of my favorites) decides not to give many of the principal characters full names, but merely ranks or first names(The Captain, The First Watch Officer, the Chief of the Boat, etc). I think this was done mainly to keep the 'everyman' feel of things, i.e., to make sure the audience understood that these characters represented the U-boat arm as a whole rather than any particular 'famous' boat such as Prien's, Schepke's, Kretschmer's, Endrass's, etc.) Many people were distinctly uncomfortable seeing the German soldier (or sailor), always depicted as a jackbooted, sadistic robot, shown as more or less indistinguishable from his American counterpart, and I am convinced that this is 50% of the movie's appeal. The other is of course that this is a submarine film, and they are ALWAYS cool.
The U-boat war against the Allies had a number of phases in which each side gained and then lost the advantage. This film is set during the fall of 1941, just before America entered the war, when the tide of the battle was turning against the Germans for the first time after a year of heavy successes against British convoys. The captain of this boat, brilliantly played by Jurgen Prochnow, is an 'old man' at 30 years of age (not merely because his crew is made up of 18 year olds, but because he is one of the few captains to have survived this long) with a half-buried hate for the Nazis and a grudging admiration for the British navy. His officers made up of a willing but rather naive war correspondent, a stiff-necked Hitler admirer, a clownish second officer, a combat-fatigued chief one step from a nervous breakdown, and a brilliant engineer whose wife has an apparently life-threatening disease. Nevertheless, these fellows know their business, and the actors, who (we are told from the DVD commentary) were not only drilled to look and act like real sailors, but recruited from all over Germany and Austria to give the film a feeling of how Hitler's Reich absorbed German-speakers from all over and homogonized them into a fighting machine of ruthless efficiency.
The best thing about the film, which is a director's cut edited down from the enormous, 18 hour "Das Boot" mini-series originally aired in Germany, is its production. The film takes place almost entirely on the U-boat, and the boredom, claustrophobia, tension, heat, stench and bad lighting seem to close around the viewer as if he were actually on board. In particular the depth-charging scenes are agonizing to watch, as lightbulbs burst, control panels short out, water spurts in from broken fittings and hull bolts, driven by the immense pressure of the ocean's depths, explode out like machine-gun bullets into the crew. The awful nature of the U-boat was that once it struck its target, it was essentially helpless and its destruction or survival depended almost entirely on the ability of one man, the "Kaeleun" (captain) to out-wit the enemy above.
Some reviewers have taken issue with the realism of the anti-Nazi sentiments of the boat's characters, saying that this follows the post-WWII liberal-revisionist German line that there were basically two kinds of Germans during the war: those who were simply fighting for their country and had no use for Hitler, and the Nazi villains who adamantly supported him and his crimes. Many English/American novelists hold this view, a la Jack Higgins, so as to be able to create both "sympathetic" and "evil" German characters. I half-agree with this. The German navy was an extremely apolitical and professional bunch, officers actually being forbidden to join the Nazi Party, and probably many officers echoed the captain's ill feelings in real life. On the other hand, having read works like Stephen Fritz's "Frontsoldaten" and the memiors of Gen. Hans-Ulrich Rudel, I have come to believe that belief in Hitler and National Socialism ran very, VERY deep in the average German for much of the war, and this "good vs evil" mind-set is largely a device of both the Germans and their apologists to avoid this fact.
==============================
stalingrad
I find Stalingrad highly recommendable to anyone interested in a battle that has - with some justification - been regarded as the psychological turning point in a war of attrition between two dictatorships.
Having an army background (military infantry officer) myself, I found great pleasure in watching an infantry platoon "at work" (if you pardon the expression), instead of following a larger unit abstractly. The platoon level provides an excellent opportunity to comprehend life and interaction in a small unit literally under fire. Which the platoon in question certainly is.
In "Stalingrad", I very much appreciated the dramatic way in which the platoon's different phases were described: The relaxation inbetween battles in Italy; the gathering of the battalion and its subsequent departure for Russia; the journey through Russia; the arrival in Stalingrad; the first encounter; the mounting casualties; the conflict between the men on the ground and certain superiors; the uncertainty; the battle fatigue; the chaos; and the ubiquitous and inevitable death.
The actors are splendid, their conversations frank and spontaneous.
However, the reason for only suggesting 4 out of 5 stars is the political correctness inherent in "Stalingrad". On several occasions (for example, during the battle break in the city when both parties send out people to get their wounded, and in the conversations between the platoon leader and the Russo-German woman-prisoner) we are reminded of how unjust the war was, how badly the Germans behaved in Russia and how innocent the attacked Russian were. These incidents are, to be honest, rather pathetic, but luckily not to an extent that completely ruins the general impression of "Stalingrad".
No doubt - the Wehrmacht did indisputedly commit atrocities in the Soviet Union during WW II. But I would have liked the movie to mention the Soviet atrocities as well, both against German troops as well as ITS OWN civilian population. The movie seems to portray the Soviet Union as the innocent victim of German aggression, which it was clearly not: WW II started mainly because Britain declared war on Germany after the attack of the latter on Poland 01 September 1939. But for some "strange" reason, Britain forgot all about declaring war on the Soviets, although the Soviets attacked Poland from the east following the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty.
Germany lost the war, and its conquerors quickly imposed on it a feeling of guilt that may have seemed partly justified in 1945, but which still - as can be seen in "Stalingrad" - haunts movie-making in Germany.
Let me emphasise that the aforementioned political correctness in no way makes the movie bad - but its omission would undoubtedly have motivated the undersigned to suggest all five stars instead of four.
If you liked Das Boot, you will surely like Stalingrad too. I blame neither author nor director of Stalingrad for the political correctness; that ghost is still too firmly rooted in German psyche to be forgotten and omitted in movies about the controversial phase of European history from 1939 to 1945.
==============================
I liked this movie from the very start. Not only does it give the viewer an eye-opener into how ordinary German soldiers thought (not all or even most Germans were Nazi fanatics and anti-Semite but Hollywood doesn't know or care) but it offers something different from typical American propaganda. The combat scenes are as powerful as the opening of Saving Private Ryan (a good movie until the end, when the heroic Yanks defeat the evil Krauts) but we know that it will all be a waste and for nothing, and what's worse, Hitler or the senior officers don't even care (neither do American leaders, but they keep a lid on that kind of stuff).
I don't need to say much about the film itself (there are other reviews for that) but I will say that this film does an excellent job at showing how the fighting at Stalingrad was, and how the German army struggled to gain Hitler his Lebensraum. It displays the character's slow realization that their cause is lost and their reaction, which would happen to just about any soldier in any army (yes, even the Waffen-SS, uh, the U.S. Marines).
==============================
There are few movies around which really deal with war on the Eastern front during WW2, of those which I have seen this is definitley the best.
We follow a group of soldiers through the hell of the battle that was Stalingrad through this very nicely shot film, which really smacks you in the face with the horror of war. One scene which really reached out and grabbed me was Pitomnik Airfield, where we see the mad and desperate frenzy of wounded and dying soldiers trying to get aboard one of the planes, their only hope of salvation from the Kessel. It was exactly how I imagined it while reading Stalingrad by Antony Beevor.
This movie also closes with one of the most desolate and dark scenes ever I think, the remnants of the group having failed at their miserable attempt to escape the Kessel, sitting and freezing in the open Steppe, just waiting to die.
Simply harrowing stuff and I highly recommend this to all.
==============================
There were several scenes in this movie that made me feel awe-inspired by it.
For one, it has some of the most gruesome albeit realistic urban warfare scenes that I've ever watched.
For another, it has one of the most harrowing battle scenes I've watched on film. The scene I speak about is when the main characters fight off a Russian armor unit - the minute those tanks roll out into the open field and then turn to face our heroes...you can feel your heart sink deep into your stomach.
It also has one of the most touching endings I've ever seen. Yes, I will proudly admit, I cried during this movie. The factors of character and the different personalities are well achieved, and even if maybe the German attack on Russia wasn't a good thing, you can't help but feel for the men who had to fight it (in fact, study German military history and you'll find out the majority of military officers in the German army DIDN'T want the war).
It is not a play by play historical drama of the Battle of Stalingrad, however, it manages to capture many aspects of the battle just by following the characters through their campaign: you see the urban fighting, the sewer systems, the Russian attacks, and even the aweful affair of evacuation (and how men with influence got away while men with out it were left behind to die).
In portraying the worse defeat in German military history, this film accomplishes its task on all fronts.
==============================
das eiserne kreuz (the iron cross)
I first saw this movie (albeit in TV-edited version) as a child and knew right away that this was one of the finest war films I had ever seen. As a WWII buff, I had read many books and seen many war films, and Cross of Iron (the movie) was one of the more satisfying (and horrifying!) accounts of the war.
Sam Peckinpah's directing is superb in this film. Coburn's Sergeant Steiner, who is just trying to survive and keep alive the men who follow him, versus the incompetent Captain Stransky (Maximillian Schell) who is on the Eastern Front only because he wants to win the Iron Cross, Germany's military award for valor in combat - makes for a very tense atmosphere throughout the movie. The viewer ultimately sides with Coburn's character, and can't help but feel outrage when Stransky deliberately tries to hang Steiner's men out to dry as the order to retreat is given, and Stransky does not pass along the order to Steiner.
The battle scenes were magnificent, the best I had seen until "Saving Private Ryan" came along. You got a glimpse of the sheer terror the German soldiers must have felt when facing one of the Russians' human wave charges. The T-34 tanks used by the Russians appear authentic, unlike the substitutes used in many war films (see: Battle of the Bulge). This film is a must-see for anyone interested in WW2. It is unfortunate that so few films were made about the Russian Front. The Soviet Union did more to bring down the Nazi regime than the rest of the Allies combined. 90 percent of all battle casualties suffered by the Germans in the war happened on the Russian Front.
The part of the movie that really grabbed me, however, was the beginning. While German children sing a song to the tune of "Lightly Row, Sweetly Row", images are shown of battle, death and the Holocaust - a wrenching juxtaposition of childhood innocence and the horrifying extents of man's inhumanity to man.
==============================
Few films, I think, have the same feeling or flavor of "Cross of Iron." It deserves points not only for its style and grittiness, but as well for its unique take on the anti-war idea and its use of a different front not too well seen in films (with perhaps the exception of the recent films "Stalingrad" and "Enemy At the Gates").
In reality, I don't see it as so much being anti-war as it really mocks one of the most disastrous campaigns in military history: the German attack on Russia in World War II. The opening and ending sequences involving child choirs accompanied by footage of the Eastern front and Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime give a grand sense of irony and sarcasm, and through out the film questions are being asked such as "Why are we here?" and "Do you think the German people will forgive us?"
I suppose you could say that using the Russian front, they mock war altogether. The ending sequence of Lee Marvin laughing at the absurdity of the characters and situation around him most likely represents the absurdity of the times then and the times we will find ourselves forever in the future.
Altogether, an great film that is undervalued in the genre of war films.
==============================