Hitler’s Hollywood Movie Download

7 / 10

Good as a movie, not a replacement for a book-length study of the same subject
I found this enjoyable as a documentary movie study of the question of the Nazi use of cinema as propaganda. There is not much in the way of in-depth analysis of the topic, but for that to be well done you really need a book rather than a movie. People don’t go to the movies to be lectured to for 90 minutes. The advantage of a film documentary over a book is that you get to see – and hear – what the German movies of that era were like. Enjoy this movie for that, and don’t expect it to be a scholarly study as well.

My criticisms are minor.

1. I wish the movie had examined these movies in two parts: those from 1933-1940, before Germany was really at war and life started to get very hard in Germany, and then 1940-1945, when life got steadily harder for the Germans. I would have been interested to know if UFA’s movies changed as life got harder.

2. This is not the fault of the movie as such. I watched the American version, which was well dubbed with a decent English-speaking narrator. However

a. the subtitles for the movie clips were in yellow, with no cartouche around them, so they were often hard to read, and

b. the narration was captioned (for the hard of hearing?), and that captioning was full of typos. I don’t envy anyone hard of hearing who had to rely on them.

Both a and b could be corrected.Read More