Two German Movies

In the last couple days I watched two German movies set during the beginning of the Third Reich's rise.  They were both good and subtitled (...the movies, not the Third Reich): "Gloomy Sunday" (in which practically everyone dies...though many not for the reason you'd expect) and "The Harmonists" (which is a true story and everyone lives).

Both, darn them, made me cry.  It's hard not to cry when we are talking about the displacement, rounding up and murdering of people just because of their race and/or faith.  Part of the difficult part was watching the actors' portrayals of these people as the realization sunk in of exactly what was happening - the dawning of the understanding that "I'm going to be persecuted and/or killed because" they (or the people they loved) were Jewish by heritage or by choice.  I suspect if the actors hadn't done their jobs, the movies wouldn't have made me cry.

Both also starred or co-starred the same guy in the role of the "Christian," Aryan *bleep* about whom you're never quite sure of his motivations or intentions...until the end. Spoiler Alert!  In "Gloomy Sunday," karma came back and bit him.  In "The Harmonists," it turns out he was one of the good guys...until his friends were safely out of Nazi Germany and then he went to work for them (but you don't know it until the "after stories" are told at the end).

Both movies also were centered around music.  I must have been in a dark, music-centric place at the time I put them on my Netflix list...or maybe I was hot on the trail of that particular actor...though nothing else on my list would lead me to believe that.  Must have been a coincidence.

I do recommend them both if you can handle the following: foreign films, foreign music, and the touch of romantic in the drama.  (Warning you, though, that "Gloomy Sunday" is a bit risqué at times for the sensitive types.)  Of the two, however, I think I liked "The Harmonists" much more partly because it was a biography (told as a movie, not like the History Channel or something), there were more dynamics in the storyline, and fewer uncovered bodyparts.

I probably need to watch something lighter for a while...like "Star Trek: The Animated Series."