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"A wrong-doer is often a man that has left something undone, not always he that has done something."--Emperor Marcus Aurelius
The DVD release of "Watch on the Rhine" could not come at a better moment. It restores to us a major Lillian Hellman play stirringly adapted to the screen by Dashiell Hammett (Hellman scholar Bernard F. Dick's audio commentary affirms his authorship). It presents a subtle performance by Bette Davis, who took a subdued secondary role long after she'd become the workhorse queen at the Warner Bros. lot. Equally significantly, it reminds us that World War II had a purpose.
Sure, you say, like we needed that. We've heard Cary Grant sermonizing in "Destination Tokyo" (1943) about Japanese boys and their Bushido knives. We've watched jackboots stomp the living hills in "The Sound of Music" (1965). We've toured an England callously occupied by Germany in "It Happened Here" (1966). Yet, truth to tell, we still need the message spread.
I have an 81-year-old friend who curses Franklin Roosevelt regularly. He feels that FDR connived the U.S. into a foreign fight we didn't need, and thereby caused the death of his favorite cousin. He's encouraged in his demonizing of Allied leaders and the trivializing of War Two by Patrick Buchanan.
The political columnist has freshly released a fat book heavy with detailed research which claims that Adolf Hitler would have posed no further menace to Poland, Europe, or the world if only the Third Reich had been handed the Free City of Danzig in 1939. Buchanan holds that if those selfish Poles hadn't confronted the Nazis, drawing in foolishly meddling Britain and giddily altruistic France, no war would have engulfed the West. He believes that without the rigors of Total War, no one in Germany would have built gas chambers to provide a Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.
Some commenters on this site feel that "Watch" sags under the weight of stale propaganda. Maybe. However, neither my friend nor Pat Buchanan seem to have gotten the film's point: Some people hurt and kill to grab other people's land, goods, and liberty; such people dominated the Axis Powers and "enough" didn't appear in their vocabulary.
Paul Lukas deserved the Oscar he won. He and Bette Davis put convincing passion into their portrayals of refugees who fight oppressors. They give emotional punch to the intellectual case for stepping off the sidelines, for actively facing down torturers and murderers. Bernard Dick notes that Hellman didn't care for Lukas as a person since he stayed apolitical. Of course, as a Hungarian he had seen first-hand Bela Kun's bloody "dictatorship of the proletariat" replace an outmoded empire and then topple to Admiral Horthy's right-wing tyranny.
In a marvelous cameo role added to the play by Hammett, Henry Daniell sardonically depicts a Wehrmacht officer of the class that disdains the brown shirts he serves. His Phili von Ramme would doubtless stand with Field Marshal Rommel in 1944 during the Plot of July 20th against Hitler. In April 1940, however, he pragmatically abets the Nazi cause, although he insults Herr Blecher "the Butcher" and scorns the Rumanian aristocrat Teck de Brancovis for trying to peddle information on an Underground leader.
Teck, a pauper and possible cuckold, wishes cash and a visa to return to Europe where he can resume the shreds of a life that had come undone with the empire-shattering Great War and the greater world-wide economic Depression. He has no political convictions, no scruples about trading a freedom fighter for his own tomorrow. Mercury Theater graduate George Coulouris lends this burnt-out case's Old World cynicism an edge of desperate menace.
Lucille Watson gives winsome vitality to the grasping man's hostess, a domineering old gal who knows her mind and gets her way--but who doesn't adequately appreciate her children and their achievements outside the home she controls. She and her pallid office-bound son belong to the American version of von Ramme's and de Brancovis' privileged kind. However, this family hasn't seen ruin and never will. They're moneyed people who could silently advance evil simply by not opposing it.
This mother and son might easily make choices which would reflect that complaisance toward National Socialism and Fascism which flourishes today in my friend and in pundit Buchanan. "Watch on the Rhine" has a manicured period look. Its dialogue reflects its erudite origins on the stage rather than sounding fresh from the streets. Yet Hellman and Hammett's film has gut-based power. Audiences still need to hear and heed its call to arms against grabbers relentlessly on the march.


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