BEFORE: Ed Harris carries over from "Man on a Ledge", and here he plays General Patton, while Adolf Hitler, of course, plays himself. I have to be careful and not watch too many movies set during World War II, because they all tend to use footage of him, and then he'll win the title for most appearances this year, and we don't want Hitler winning anything, now, do we?
I've reached another century mark for movies, that means that Movie Year 14 (that's 2022 to you normies) is 1/3 over, I can't really say for sure what Movie #4,200 will be, but I think I'll be deep into the Summer Concert + Documentary series, so who can say? Let's just hope it's something good and important.
Speaking of important, I can't help but think this film came up in the rotation for a reason, with all the news these days about Putin and Ukraine, one can't help but think of the parallels with World War II, with Putin as the new Hitler and Ukraine as the new Poland. I'm sure it's not just me.
Just before watching this, on a whim, I Googled when Holocaust Remembrance Day is - and the International version was on January 27, so I'm a bit late. But the JEWISH version, which is called Yom HaShoah, popped up as April 8, and I got really excited for a moment, what are the ODDS against me scheduling this film on Yom HaShoah? Well, 1 in 365, I suppose. But this Jewish day of remembrance was on April 7-8 LAST year - I guess it moves around a bit because the Hebrew calendar is different from the Gregorian one, and this year, it's going to be on April 27-28. Oh, well, you can't blame a guy for trying to get his movie plan to line up right.
THE PLOT: The story of mime Marcel Marceau as he works with a group of Jewish boy scouts and the French Resistance to save the lives of ten thousand orphans during World War II.
AFTER: Finding out that French mime Marcel Marceau (born Marcel Mangel) saved the lives of countless Jewish orphans in Nazi-occupied France is perhaps a bit like finding out that Julia Child and her husband did some intelligence work during World War II, (I think maybe she smuggled out some Nazi secrets inside a plate of coq au vin) or that actress Hedy Lamarr actually contributed to the invention of a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes (which later became a part of Bluetooth technology). I'm almost afraid to watch that documentary about Rita Moreno for fear of learning that she played a part in trying to cover up the Bay of Pigs invasion. KIDDING!
But this is true, Marceau grew up as the son of a butcher, but fell in love with the silent films of Charlie Chaplin, and from that grew this new art based on pantomime. According to this film, a lot of his techniques - the man in the box, the man walking against the wind - were developed while he was entertaining these orphans while hiding from the Nazis in various places. It all makes sense - the invisible wall is a metaphor for Nazi oppression, right? Walking against the wind is the daily struggle... Seriously, though, there weren't a lot of props or materials on hand, so he had to just get people to imagine them. And they had to keep quiet, for fear of being discovered - this is why it's considered improper to laugh at a mime's performance... But, I'm never going to look at a mime act the same way, after this. This film ended up being kind of a cross between "Schindler's List" and "Life Is Beautiful", two very popular films, so I don't know why this one didn't garner as much attention. Ah, there's that release date - March 2020, so this film may have been another casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sure, I could make a lot of jokes here, like something about how Marceau tried to warn everybody about how bad the Nazis were, only nobody could quite take him seriously, or understand exactly what he was getting at...but that doesn't seem right, so I won't do that. I never really "got" Marcel Marceau when I was growing up, I didn't see what the big deal was about mime. But his first big performance was done in front of Patton's troops, after France was liberated, and Marceau was later made an officer of the Legion of Honor, a commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, and later a grand officer of the French National Order of Merit. And let's not forget that Mel Brooks ironically allowed Marceau to say the ONLY word of dialogue in his film "Silent Movie".
When the Nazis invaded France, the Mangel family fled Strasbourg for Limoges in southern France, where Marcel's cousin Georges Loinger urged him and his brother, Alain, to join the Jewish French Resistance (or was it the French Jewish Resistance?). Their organization of nine secret networks rescued thousands of children and adults during the Holocaust, and Marceau led children over the Alps into Switzerland, which must have been a tough run. In 1944 Marcel's father was captured by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, where he was killed. But after the liberation of Paris, Marcel and Alain joined the French army, and Marcel was a liaison with Patton's army corps due to his fluency in English, French and German.
According to this film, Marceau and his girlfriend Emma came face to face with "Barbie" - that's Klaus Barbie, not the doll, this was the ruthless Nazi known as the "Butcher of Lyon". His techniques included getting the French people to turn in members of the Resistance by offering favors and safe passage to the snitches. Barbie also enjoyed torturing people in front of their family members to get people to reveal confidential information - here Marcel's girlfriend, Emma, is forced to watch her own sister being tortured, as Barbie demands information about the Resistance. Later on, Barbie investigates the train carrying Marceau, Emma and a group of Jewish children disguised as a Scout troop going on a hike, you know, over the Swiss Alps, like that's a thing you tend to do. The central question of the film then becomes: is it more important to try to kill your enemies, possibly losing your own life in the attempt, or to try and save as many of your people as you can?
But I want to try to connect this back to Putin and Ukraine, if I can, because really, is that situation any different? (Anne Werzberg, Marcel Marceau's mother, was born in Yabluniv, which is in, you guessed it, Ukraine). Hitler looked over at Poland and said, "Ah, that needs to be part of Germany!" and Putin's doing the exact same thing with Ukraine. If you're the head of a country, you don't get to just decide that the next country over is now part of yours, that's not how this thing is supposed to work. Your country's borders are already defined, that's what you get, it's the luck of the draw - if you wanted to lead a bigger country, you should have been born somewhere else. I'm no politics expert, nor do I have any say in this matter, but something's got to be done to stop Putin, sanctions, sure, but what comes after that? I don't want World War III, but neither do I want Ukraine to revert back to Russian control, it's just not right.
And now we're seeing footage of large groups of Ukrainians, killed by bombs that destroyed buildings, or killed while waiting for a train in Kramatorsk, HOW is this any different from the Nazis bombing Warsaw in September, 1939? I'm also seeing news stories now about regular people on the ground in Ukraine, rescuing people from Kyiv one convoy, one carload or one person at a time, there are heroes out there, but these actions should not have been necessary in the first place. Sure, we didn't know WHEN Putin was going to invade, but we all kind of new that it was going to happen, you don't put that many troops in place to NOT use them. Thankfully, it hasn't been easy for the Russian army, the prediction was that Ukraine would fall within five days, and now here we are, five weeks later, and the Ukrainian Resistance is still putting up a fight. I don't know how this whole crazy thing is going to end, but if the Ukrainians manage to come out on top, then I think that President Zelensky's has a fair chance at becoming famous, he could become the Marcel Marceau of this decade.
As for me, between this film and "The Batman", I think I've set a record for how many times a person can possibly hear "Ave Maria" sung in movies within one week...
Also starring Jesse Eisenberg (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Clémence Poésy (last seen in "Tenet"), Felix Moati (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Vica Kerekes, Matthias Schweighofer (last seen in "Valkyrie"), Géza Röhrig, Bella Ramsey (last seen in "Judy"), Martha Issová (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), Karl Markovics (last seen in "The Grand Budapest Hotel"), Wolfgang Czeczor (ditto), Arndt Schwering-Sohnrey (last seen in "A Dangerous Method"), Alex Fondja (last seen in "The Take"), Aurélie Bancilhon, Alicia von Rittberg (last seen in "Fury"), Louise Morell, Philip Lenkowsky (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Klára Issová, Dimitri Storoge, Felicity Montagu (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Diary"), Werner Biermeier, Ryan Hadaller, Maxim Boubin, Tobias Gareth Elman, Karina Beuthe Orr, Kue Lawrence (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Red Notice").
RATING: 6 out of 10 giant bagels
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