Cinema
Moral Obtuseness
By ISABEL QUIGLY I Aim at the Stars.
(Leicester Square Theatre.) I AM not sure which is nastier to listen to, the repentant or the unre- pentant Nazi (or, come to that, the 99 per cent.
others who claim to have been anti-Nazi from the start); the one that tries to excuse what he did or the one that brazens it out. I am not sure, either, which category Wernher von Braun, member of the Nazi Party and, as maker of the V2 rocket, Hitler's white hope and secret weapon, and now hero of / Aim (.1! the Stars, comes into. And I mean the real von Braun, not just his screen representative; because the real man is quoted in the film's publicity handouts, and treated with cosy deference (You're almost as handsome_ as my Wernher!' has mother tells a delighted Curt Jurgens, who phi's her son, on the set); and there it's plain that he isn't either repentant or unrepentant: he still doesn't know what he did wrong. The secrets have all come out, the things 'ordinary' Germans were supposed never to have guessed — Nazi behaviour and policy wherever they went, the Solution—and still he can say: 'I was just Hke any soldier, doing my duty. Right or wrong, Germany was my country and I wanted her to w,111.' I wanted her to win: no sign of regret or shame for a wish that proved so appalling, an `apparently complete inability to see what he did, What he forwarded, what he gave himself to. . I Alin at the Stars (director : J. Lee Thompson; t-t certificate) makes me see redder than any of ;he Nazily-slanted films we have been having _atelY and its makers' advertisements with one of those qui s'excuse s'accuse statements from Mr. Lee Thompson about the whys and hows of it Make me suppose they anticipate some angry reactions. What beats me is why it was ever made, how—to put it at its mildest—tastelessness could have got as far as to publicise, and with quite a pleased and smirking air about it, too, our perhaps necessary but unfortunate, shameful, and ridiculous collaboration with such a man. Perhaps we have to use a few clever Nazis for their technical contribution to our material pro- gress; but do we have to make films about them, advertise the whole unsavoury transaction to the world, have them played by actors as popular, and considered as captivating, as Curt Jurgens, and give them just the eye-crinkling, friendly, reassuring air that Goering used so successfully to build up a good-sort reputation? Do we have to make them say, as this script does: `I'm a scientist: Hitler or the man in the moon, it's all the same to me.' as if it were a marvellous piece of anti-Nazi bravery. instead of a statement so immoral it turns one cold? Do we have to work up visual excitement (inevitable in the cinema under a director of any skill; and Mr. Lee Thompson is always skilful) at the development of the V2 so that, after innumerable failures, we are bound—physically, visually bound—to feel a sort of elation when his first successful rocket goes whirling off across the screen (at London, of course)? Do we have to listen to a script that says things like, 'The only thing I care about is making sure that Germany wins,' and then be asked to like the speaker, to view him as a nice ordinary family man?
But why, to vary the questions, didn't someone connected with the film point out how likely it was to revolt a large part of its audience? Every thing about this stupid, immoral, elephantinely tactless film is enough to make one writhe; every second line of the script could be quoted as an example of moral obtuseness, of sheer missing- the-point (as von Braun himself clearly misses it, even now) about such things as guilt, responsi- bility and retrospective regret. It invokes all sorts of large issues (scientific morality, for instance, the responsibility of the scientist in society), but without concluding anything about them; and it' starts off on a fatally wrong foot by supposing that you can make von Braun, just because he stood up to Himmler a bit, seem admirable and agreeable while he conducted the most important single part of Hitler's war machine. They say the concentration camp guards were often amiable- looking people, and quite sentimental about cats, children and Christmas. Next, I suppose, we shall have a film about a mixed-up concentration camp superintendent who really worries about the gas chambers and falls in love with a little French spy. (Our secondary hero in this film, Herbert Lom, is of course adored by the film's nice girl, his mistress who longs to marry him but can't quite get round to it because she's an American spy.) And always there's the sickening insistence on 'Germany' as a side in the conflict, as if the war was an ordinary, old-style piece of nationalism. The final hero of the Peenemunde team (Herbert Lom) is the one who refuses to leave at the last because 'Germany' mustn't be let down (moist eyes and general admiration): as if Germany and not Nazism were the point, as if patriotism were a quality to be invoked in such a context, in the stink of Nazism; as if loyalty to such a system were admirable. How in the name of sanity (let alone anything else) was such an offensive shocker of a film ever made? And what was Mr. Lee Thompson doing, not so much with such a subject, as with such a script, such attitudes, such implications? The implications are so enormous and the answers, the solutions, so pathetically false and superficial that one wonders how an intelligent director ever started dealing with' them at all: I mean quite factually, how he coped with the discrepancies in visual terms. The only way I can think of coping with these historical discre- pancies, if you can call them that, is to put on the concentration camp films occasionally, just as a reminder of what the skill and energy and brain of von Braun and others like him kept going. Probably the doctors who used human guinea- pigs in those thought themselves nothing but pure scientists (as von Braun did) in peculiarly favour- able circumstances for research.
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