robert-temple-1
Stephen Poliakoff has written and directed another masterpiece of a TV series, set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. I am however horrified at the torrent of abuse which this series has received from many sides. Is it possible that audiences are losing the ability to appreciate drama which lasts longer than a soundbite and requires a bit of thought? Or is some of the opposition to the series politically motivated? In this series, Poliakoff deals with his most important subject matter yet. I don't know about the 1938 Foreign Office meeting which figures so prominently in the story, as it may be fictional, but other than that, all the issues in this series are absolutely accurate. It was high time somebody tried to deal with these matters in dramatic form. In his series before last, GLORIOUS 39 (2009, see my review), Poliakoff dealt with the pro-Nazi sentiments of the British Establishment just before the War. Now he has carried those concerns further, by exploring the monstrous events which followed the War, regarding 'the ones who got away' or, more to the point, were allowed to get away with it. By 'it' I mean war crimes, torture, murder, genocide, and all the rest. Although this series deals with the much smaller compass of Britain, the really bad things which happened were in America, where everything was on a gigantic scale. One day, perhaps someone will dramatize that. From 1943 onwards, the 'smart Nazis' were preparing to flee Germany, and most of them later did so. The organiser of all this was Martin Bormann, Hitler's Secretary and manipulator. The organisation he set up was called the Brotherhood (Kameradenwerk), and the ODESSA organisation for fleeing Nazis was only a small part of it. I urge all interested persons to read the fundamental book which is necessary to understand what really happened, namely the meticulously researched book by one of America's leading investigative reporters, William Stevenson, entitled THE BORMANN BROTHERHOOD (1973). It provides the necessary background briefing for anyone who worries about the survival of genuine Nazism to this day, as what has now come to be called The Nazi International. In summary, what happened is this: Germany lost the war, but the Nazis did not. They merely spread and metastasized, no longer requiring their original host body, but finding new places to come to rest, such as Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Mexico, Sweden (which was never de-Nazified, for which see the books of Stieg Larsson and the films of them), Switzerland, Spain (the headquarters of ODESSSA was in Madrid under Franco), Syria, Egypt (President Anwar Sadat had been a Gestapo agent during the War). The total wealth smuggled out of the Third Reich before the surrender of Germany was worth a few trillion dollars in today's money. Most of the gold of Europe 'disappeared', many ingots being smuggled out in I. G. Farben's tanks of poisonous chemicals. (Gold cannot be destroyed by any chemicals, and customs agents do not open poisonous chemical tanks.) With these funds a Fourth Reich was to be created in the future. Poliakoff has clearly been doing his research for years. He wants to alert the public in the only way possible in a controlled-media world, by means of drama which pretends to be fiction, and superficially is fiction, as far as storyline characters go. All the investigators of war crimes of the Allied governments after the War were side-lined, denied funds, files, and access, exactly as shown in Poliakoff's series. It is all true. Wake up, everyone! We have few details of the operations of the Russians available to us, but we now know a very great deal indeed about the monstrous illegality and immorality of such notorious projects as the American Operation Paperclip and its sister operations, which brought thousands of SS officers guilty of mass murder to America to work as scientists. For instance, Werner von Braun had been a Major in the SS, and his boss Dornberger had been a Major General in the SS. And yet they and their SS chums ended up running the American space programme and creating America's intercontinental ballistic missile technology. (Dornberger, 1895-1980, is wrongly described on the internet as a harmless 'German artillery officer', and his SS status has been covered up.) Dornberger even ended up as Vice President of the Bell Aircraft Corporation. Poliakoff's series concentrates on a single German scientist captured by the British, who is wanted by Britain to create a jet engine by improving and completing Frank Whittle's abandoned one. It is later discovered that he had worked in the German rocket programme where slave labourers were executed on a daily basis, and is in fact a war criminal. But enough of history, let us turn to the series. The outstanding performance is by Alfred Molina, as a senior Foreign Office mandarin. Poliakoff has a peculiarly evocative and elegiac style, and Molina 'gets it', thus effectively taking the place of Michael Gambon as the character who provides the correct 'tone'. Lindsay Duncan, in her supporting role, does the same. That is probably because they are both old pros. The younger members of the cast struggle initially, but finally get into groove and 'find the tone'. Poliakoff's magic comes from this 'tone', which always involves the elevating of memory into a numinous realm, where he attempts to touch some other world. Music is always important in a Poliakoff creation, and it is interesting that scent comes into this one as well, via Lindsay Duncan. (He'll be showering his actors with madeleines next!) Poliakoff charmingly has a child as a main character, played brilliantly by the young Lucy Ward, who speaks with her eyes. There are so many fine performances. Freddie Highmore is genuinely inspired as Victor Ferguson, the autistic brother of the hero, who is played in a droll and head-slanting manner by Jim Sturgess. This series is truly magnificent.
asennett-78545
I expect this will annoy some people and if so all well and good. Reading the negative reviews of Poliakoff's recent BBC drama I was apt to think that the reviewers were likely to be from a particular demographic: white, middle aged and ( this is a long shot) Brexit voters. It seems to me that they have completely misunderstood the whole point of this brilliant drama. It is indeed stylistically quirky, stilted in its language and takes a long time to get to its real points. However, it is a wonderful journey and well worth the seven hours it takes to get there. Far from being poorly acted, as several people state, it is quite brilliantly acted and huge talents like Lindsay Duncan and Alfred Molina are far from wasted. Moreover there are new talents being revealed here. I think that the reason several reviewers hate it so much is that it is a cultured and deliberately nuanced piece of drama that demands the audience pay attention and read between the lines. For it is not really about the 1940s at all! It is about now. It is about the racism and bigotry of the time in which we live. The intolerance of difference and tendency to avoid thinking in our society. The moral dilemmas of the central characters are not simply those of the 1940s where murderers got away with things because the British, Americans and Russians wanted to use their knowledge to create weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons are not only still with us but pose a threat that may be even greater than in the Cold War era. It is about power in age age when bigotry, racism and fear are ever present. The efforts of some to create a Europe and international community of cooperation are placed in jeopardy by the ignorance of those who don't want to think, don't wish to explore the past for what it can teach us and who simply want the crap of the vast majority of media output we are presented with on TV, film and the Internet. If you can't see that you have totally misunderstood the point of Poliakoff's work.
keith-malin-702-907019
I've spent the last week wading through the treacle of 6 of the 7 tedious episodes of this series, hoping that one week I will be surprised by something resembling quality. I'm still waiting. There are so many bad things about this self-indulgent series, but in the end I feel it boils down to two (and they are both biggies): the script and the acting. My heart bleeds for both Jim Sturgess and Freddie Highmore if they feel they have been constrained by an appalling script, but both are misfits in this series and it's so easy to imagine plenty of others having a better crack at it. Callum's "anger" (which has finally revealed itself in episode 6) just doesn't wash, and it is not delivered with any real conviction or strength. Victor's part is a complete disaster, utterly unbelievable and delivered, like Callum's, in the most cardboard, two-dimensional of ways. I had hopes for Alfred Molina (at least his acting credentials are strong), but his part, which looked like it might be building up to delivering something resembling dramatic tension, collapsed in a heap with the utter nonsense of his long-trailed speech at the dinner. And the other characters dance around in their own shallow way: Dieter "I'll never work for you: oh all right then", the perfume lady, the female spy, the shadowy figure, the plastic brigadier etc etc. There's barely a strong and believable character in the entire show: Miss Griffiths gives it a good shot.Poliakoff should not have been allowed to develop this idea and to bewitch the BBC to run it as shown. There is a gem in there, the notion of representing (for a change) a genuinely interesting and ambiguous era between war and Cold War, but a firm editorial hand on the tiller was needed, and someone should have stopped his fanciful, distant, arrogant and somewhat academic approach to the whole thing from taking over. Oh, and let's throw some jazz in as well because the writer likes that sort of thing.Hugely disappointed by this offering. It started badly and, frankly, just got worse. Just compare it with, for example, The Night Manager, and you will see the yawning, dimensional gaps between them.
