punisherversion1 The Eichmann Show: Directed by Paul Andrew Williams and written by Simon BlockThis is the true story behind the broadcasting of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in Israel. The true story that this is based on is an important one. It is something that people need to learn. It is also something that can be learned by watching a documentary. The strong aspects of it are from the real footage. This felt more like a Wikipedia page about the event brought to life. There are brief moments with Leo Hurwitz trying to find the humanity in Eichmann. He finds that he is failing miserably. Everyone is stressed out and Nazi sympathers are trying to stop them.While Martin Freeman makes everything look effortless, he's not given much to do here. Anthony LaPaglia does a lot of internal thinking. It's hard to make that cinematic and it pales in comparsion because of it. I understand where it was coming from but I wanted more from these characters. I know this is just my opinion and idea of what to make of everything. They stress the importance of the event and the history making they're doing which is really just an overabundance of the same thing. It's also something that only people looking back at an event usually feels like. You see it on everyone's faces as they watch. There is a lot of people standing around and just watching things unfold. It doesn't make for the most fascinating viewing. I would skip this one if you find a chance to watch it. It's just too basic for me. I give this movie a C.

phd_travel This well intentioned but not very rewarding movie of the filming of Eichmann's trial delivers what the title promises no more than the title states. It's about the film maker's troubles and decisions filming the show. But who really cares if the producer and director argued about camera angles or cleverly concealed cameras in the court room. The actual survivors testimonies were hard to follow through translated voices. And Eichmann's own testimony and excuses were very briefly shown. At least for the trial they could have cut away from the camera room POV to put you inside the court room.Anthony La Paglia plays Leo Hurwitz the director. But his accent comes through as Australian more often than it should. Martin Freeman is better but a little goofy looking.This movie doesn't pretend to be a movie dramatizing Eichmann's crimes and capture. But it leaves you wishing for a well made movie about that instead and indeed there is one in the works so be patient. This one is not a must watch by any means.

zangiku Apart from the flagrantly bad acting of Martin Freeman, whom I have never seen before and hope never to see again, this is an enormously impressive film which tackles a difficult subject well. Excellently done was the blending of the real 1961 trial footage with modern reconstruction, something that frequently goes awry. Here the back-&-forth switching seems odd at first but grows on the viewer, involving us even more closely in the events on screen. Also very clever was the use of English voice-over to all the trial footage, an authentic-sounding simultaneous interpreter, flubs and all, echoing over earphones. Good idea! One did wish, however, that the original languages were occasionally allowed to leak through in voice-over pauses, to give more authenticity to the speakers: atrocity witnesses, prosecutors, judges and also the defendant himself. (In this film it is hard to tell that the trial was conducted almost entirely in German, which is a fact worth knowing; with some witnesses speaking in French, a language utterly unsuited to such descriptions and all the more harrowing for that reason.) Most eyes should be turned away from the camp archive footage, but thankfully there is not too much of it and one is always forewarned. The same cannot be said about watching the defendant himself, which is upsetting. But the Eichmann footage used here was also a choice by the film-makers, to render him less than the "human" Hurwitz starts out by assuming he is.The twisted, vicious face we see continually on display was not, however, the only face available. I had the privilege many years ago of seeing a documentary of the trial, at an art cinema in Tokyo, with English subs. It was very long and composed entirely of trial footage deftly edited: no narration, no music, no inter-titles. (I have tried in vain to locate it on this site; does anyone know the film I mean? I saw it in 97? 98? but it may have been made earlier,in Canada? US? UK?) What I remember about Eichmann was his many faces in the dock. Often a very nervous, ratty man with huge stacks of paper and notepads, which he shuffled through constantly, taking notes and looking for all the world like a perfectly sane accountant on trial for fiddling the books. This aspect was not shown to us in "The Eichmann Show", which is a pity. Not for any kind of sympathy, God knows, but to scare the living daylights out of us by what Arendt called the "banality of evil." In many ways this banal accountant type was more horrible than the leering, sneering, unchanging Satanic face we constantly see in this film... because it did not seem to occur to the accountant that he had done anything seriously wrong. But the film-makers here were wedded to a certain view, and did not want to complicate it.One understands that such an overwhelming event needs simplifying for the movie-going masses, and this film has done a fine job overall. But as I watched it myself, I had the longer documentary in mind to help me come to grips with it. If "help" is the right word.

Sausage1 This is a brilliant BBC production about the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who escaped to Argentina after the Second World War, and who was responsible for facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II.The film is superbly cast, and tells the story from the perspective of the production crew responsible for televising the trial in Jerusalem in 1961. We get to see the logistics involved in bringing the trial to TV screens around the world, and the problems the production team face along the way.Of course the biggest story in a production like this is the horror of the holocaust, and how a man can be responsible for such evil. The Eichmann Show is yet another reminder of this horror, and is well worth a couple of hours of anyones time.8/10