 |
|||
 |
Empty
|
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
Downfall
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Our DVD Price: £13.99 RRP: 
Availability In Stock - should be despatched within 24 hours. This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times
Earn 65 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info |
DVD £15.99
RRP £19.99 You save £4.00 (20%)
Film Description
Controversial and award-winning German drama about the final days of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Bruno Ganz plays the German dictator who, as the Russians close in towards Berlin, retreats to his bunker with his fiancee Eva Braun, his private secretary Traudle Junge, and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. His mood ranging from violent rage to pessimistic defeat, Hitler attempts to deny the inevitable as the other occupants of the bunker deal with the prospect of their impending death at the hands of the Russians. Goebbels kills his family before committing suicide, while Hitler finally marries Eva Braun in a ceremony that precedes their own suicide by hours. With only Junge surviving, the Red Army closes in and takes the capital.
Film Information
| Director | Oliver Hirschbiegel | ||||
| Starring | Bruno Ganz
|
||||
| Genre | World Cinema
|
||||
| Country | Germany | Language | German | Year | 2004 |
Technical Details
| Certificate | 15 | Length | 155 mins | Label | MOMET | ||
| Cat No | MP580D | Format | DVD | Colour | |||
| Region | 2 | Aspect | 1.78 Anamorphic Wide Screen | ||||
| Subtitles | English . | ||||||
10 Stills
 |
 |
1 Trailer
View - Medium (5.20 MB)
Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review
Review by Mike Whitworth on 25th October 2005
Given the British people's continued fascination with the Third Reich and virtually everything to do with the rise and fall of the Nazis it is tempting to ask whether a film like 'Downfall' can tell us anything we don't already know about Hitler's last days.
The short answer is not really. There can't be may people who will not recognise immediately the sinister calm of Joseph Goebells, unrepentant and loyal to the last. Nor will they surprised at the spectacle of his wife, the truly ghastly Magda, still starry-eyed in her admiration of the Fuhrer despite the catastrophe he has brought upon her and the German people. Even the gallows humour of the junior officers has a faint ring of familiarity about it from previous films and TV dramas tackling the same subject.
And yet this superbly constructed movie does manage to offer an experience both thrilling and disturbing that is very different to that of previous depictions of those final days in a Berlin bunker. That experience centres around the exhausted and visbly crumbling leader himself, masterfully portrayed by Bruno Ganz.
Downfall, like no other film before it, fixes its attention on the mindset of the dictator about to be consigned to eternal ignomony. It goes about its task with an assiduous, almost surgical methodology which is unsparing and wholly unforgiving in its approach. And what is revealed is something that has never been fully explored before in quite such detail. It is a kind of hubris or perhaps unseemly egoism that prevents Hitler from acknowleging what he has done.
With his world, Germany's world, crumbling around him we see Hitler flailing around desperately seeking culprits. First he blames his generals for their incompetence, then he is seen raging against his own cabinet ministers for their failure to carry out his commands to the letter. Finally, absurdly, he comes around to blaming the German people. 'The people have failed'. There is not a trace of irony in his voice when he utters these preposterous words. At no point is the Fuhrer prepared to consider his own part in the disaster. At no point can he imagine that it is he who has failed.
Egoism, hubris and monstrous pride brought about by years of the misplaced adoration of millions of German people left a man incapable of anything resembling humility even in abject defeat.
View more reviews by Mike Whitworth
Review by Mike McCahill on 25th July 2005
Downfall received criticism in its native Germany for seeking to “humanise” Hitler, as if to try and explain the horrors of the Nazi regime were somehow to explain them away. Yet the tactics employed by writer Bernd Eichinger and director Oliver Hirschbiegel are sound. The film has to describe the loyalty Hitler inspired in his staff – for Hitler the man, rather than Hitler the monster - before it can dramatise the inevitable desertion.
Spring 1945, a bunker beneath a Berlin besieged by Russian forces, and from cold-eyed ideologue Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes) to a manic depressive Eva Braun (Juliane Kohler), the gang is very much all here. Hitler (a superlative Bruno Ganz) had by this point reached his all-or-nothing phase, fluctuating between absolute resignation and wheedling around, somewhat pathetically, in search of some way back.
Playing one of history’s great over-actors, Ganz nails Hitler’s voice, his tendency for splenetic eruptions, with remarkable precision. This Hitler is chillingly sober when it comes to discussing his anti-Semitic legacy, but prone to childlike outbursts (“It is my Will!”) whenever he can’t get his own way. Ganz’s interpretation of the Fuhrer’s body language - forever struggling to keep shaking hands under control, just one more domain slipping away from him - is so compelling in itself you might well be distracted from the subtitles.
Between them, Hirschbiegel and Eichinger display a powerhouse combination: the sense of broader historical events coupled with an eye for the telling anecdote. As in his previous Das Experiment, Hirschbiegel’s trick is to lock the viewer in primarily the one location with the only certainty that things are going to get much worse. It is, as one might expect, a long and serious-minded film. Yet the result is rarely less than fascinating: a two-and-a-half hour redefinition of the term “bunker mentality”.
View more reviews by Mike McCahill
Hand-picked recommendations of related films
|
Dir: Leni Riefenstahl Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film is surely the most notorious example of cinema's potentially malevolent influ... More > |
|
Dir: Othmar Schmiderer A riveting documentary on the life of Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's private secretaries - from her presence at H... More > |
|
From the makers of the BAFTA-winning 'Britain at War in Colour' comes this fascinating insight into one of histo... More > |
This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists
Discovery at Marigot Bay by Moviemail
For Discovery Comments.
DVDS WITH NICE COVERS by CHRIS BARLTROP
THESE ARE DVDS I THINK HAVE NICE COVERS
five films for $ 10 for seven nights by Steve Ring
happened to pop into the local DVD shop and hired these five films
MovieMail Top 100 Best-Sellers of All-Time by MovieMail
This is your list: the 100 films you've bought the most of in the 10 years of MovieMail's existence. There are some surprise entries and some glaring omissions – but it’s all true, and, frankly, you’ve got very good taste! It’s such a good list that we're going to make it a permanent fixture on our website and to celebrate the launch we’ve slashed many of the prices on these wonderful films. Enjoy!
My Favourite DVDs of 2005 by Mike McCahill
Showing up at press screenings recently, I’ve been struck by just how many films these days are being released in cinemas solely to emerge on shiny silver discs only a few weeks later. DVD has, it seems, become the dominant medium of our time, sending Hollywood bosses into panics over piracy and falling box-office receipts. They now understand what the rest of us knew all along: that whether allowing us to watch a TV series without ad breaks, catch up on something missed in cinemas, or see an old favourite in a new, digitally-remastered light, the disc takes some beating. I’d be happy to find any of the following ten under the Christmas tree this year, though I wouldn’t envy my family’s attempts to pry my fingers from the remote control...
These are a few of my favourite things! by Kerry Wilkins
Some of my favourite films of all time for you to enjoy. Some I am proud to admit to, others not so!
Recommendations from fellow customers
by Jean Renoir
The Humphrey Jennings Collection
More films directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
More films starring Bruno Ganz
by Eric Rohmer
by Wim Wenders
by Wim Wenders
| Special Offers | ||||||||||||||||
|
More Great Offers
|
| BestSellers | ||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Recommended by MovieMail | ||||||||||
|
A curated collection of the best DVDs
Latest Additions
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
| Just Released |
|
Im Not There A Year In Provence Screen Icons: Richard Attenborough Robbery You, the Living |
| Coming Soon |
|
Azur and Asmar: The Princes Quest Four Minutes Tropical Malady A Comedy of Power Target for Today |
|
||
| Home | Film Catalogue | New Releases | Special Offers | Top 30 | ||
|
||
| Film Collections | Film Media | News | Your Account | Help | Become a MovieMail affiliate | ||
|
||
For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk © 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail |
||
|
La Regle du Jeu
Hidden (Caché)
Bowling For Columbine
Fahrenheit 9/11
