Is The Holocaust really a suitable subject for a Hollywood movie?

Rating: 7/10 (18 March 2006)

Back in the 1950s there was a shop near Brighton station that sold "Surgical Rubberware".Behind the murky plate-glass window lurked copies of "The History of Torture", "The Kiss of the Whip","L'Erotisme au Cinema" "Health and Efficiency" and,bizarrely ,next to a flyblown handwritten sign promising "Trusses fitted here","The Scourge of the Swastika". As a young man I could never work out why the clientele ,a cross section of grubby-mackintoshed bottom-feeders of all ages,would want to read what was presumably a serious study of Nazi atrocities written by a peer of the realm.Sadly,after a few years in the Met Police it became abundantly clear to me that a significant number of my fellow citizens had a prurient interest in Nazism and all its appalling consequences.This coincided with the reappearance of Sir Oswald Mosley and his reconstituted British Union of Fascists on the streets of the East End.Fortunately The Met dealt with these persons in a fairly uninhibited way,and one sunny Sunday morning in the summer of 1962,Mosley's rabble took a fearful hiding from a predominantly Jewish crowd in Ridley Road,Dalston,whilst we stood by admiringly.Among the crowd were many men with tattoos on the inside of their wrists:it was my introduction to the survivors of The Holocaust. Later they saw off Colin Jordan,the British Nazis' new Messiah in a bloody battle near Forest Gate station,and for the next ten years,the British Fascist movement went underground.It crawled back into the light,fuelled by ill-informed resentment against immigrant communities, and nowadays is busy at its evil work of setting the poor and vulnerable against the poor and vulnerable.Just when it was beginning to award itself a thin veneer of political respectability Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" was released and stopped it in its tracks. Generations to whom The Holocaust was as historic an event as The Battle of Hastings were confronted with horrific events that had occurred within their grandparents' lifetime. Central to the film is a towering performance from Mr Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler,but it is more than a showcase for virtuoso acting. It's a horrific reminder of a period in recent history when all the vilest parts of man's nature were allowed and even encouraged to flourish in a country less than two hours'flying time from London and don't let anybody kid you it couldn't happen again. However sober it might be I have a problem with "Schindler's List" inasmuch as my personal feeling is that The Holocaust is too horrific an event to be reduced to a "Hollywood Movie" status no matter how well intentioned.There are several harrowing documentairies on the subject which serve to instruct and inform. Turning it into a Big Time Movie with star names and marketing it as "Entertainment" risks rousing the interest of the same sick people who hung around the flyblown Brighton bookshop all those years ago and their appalling descendants.