Prison-camp drama raises tough questions about actual event.
The Counterfeiters: Just when you think you’ve seen every Holocaust story possible, along comes “The Counterfeiters,” this year’s Oscar-winning foreign-language film.
Yes, it’s in German and set largely in a concentration camp, but this drama — based on the memoir of a Jewish survivor — raises issues that the other World War II stories don’t. That’s because instead of pure black-and-white good-and-evil, we get disturbing shades of gray.
Specifically, we get a cynical, selfish forger named Salomon (Karl Markovics) who gets caught and imprisoned — and then gets a better deal from his captors when he agrees to help the Nazis attack the Allies in a unique fashion.
The German commanders think they can destroy the English and American economies if they can flood both lands with fake currency. Salomon becomes a sort of captive team leader, with his crew getting special privileges — you know, like edible food — and we get to see how an ill-equipped genius can improvise clever counterfeits. But one of the fellow prisoners tries to sabotage the effort: He would rather be hanged than help the Nazis get ahead in a war they are losing (this part of the story is set in 1944-45).
Is he right? What would you do? It’s the sort of question that explains the film’s Oscar and makes the movie more than just another atrocity tale.
We give it a B+
As always, find lots of movie reviews by Bob Ross at bobrossmovies.com
