Cinema: Years of the Beast

Black Fox. The rise and fall of Adolf Hitler has been told and retold on documentary film so often that it has become a litany of the age. The pictorial archive from which producers draw—walking corpses at Buchenwald, heiling stormtroopers at Nazi rallies, Hitler jigging while Europe burns—has become predictable if still shocking. But Producer Louis Clyde Stoumen (The Naked Eye), finding new film and skillfully interpolating drawings by Picasso, Grosz, Doré and Wilhelm von Kaulbach, has given the story of those years a new aspect. This Oscar-winning film is not just another post-mortem on Hitler: it is a trenchant commentary on the hows and whys of Naziism.

Stoumen picked Marlene Dietrich to narrate the film and the choice is both daring and appropriate. Her taut Teutonic phrasing, with its Dietrichy ws for rs, never lets the listener forget that a German is telling the story of Germany’s shame. “How did it happen in this lovely land?” she asks. Stoumen shows Hitler in his schoolboy days, as a young corporal during World War I. The viewer gets a look at Hitler’s competent paintings and drawings (all without a single human figure). Stoumen’s cleverest stroke is the use of Kaulbach’s illustrations for Goethe’s fable of Reynard the Fox, making a neat allegory between the sly fox, who persuaded the king of the beasts that he could save the animal kingdom from the wicked wolf, and Adolf Hitler, who persuaded the aging Von Hindenburg that he could protect Germany from the threat of Stalin. The parallel perfidy of Reynard and Adolf, once they have seized power, falls almost too trickily into place, but the lesson is memorable.

In less than 90 minutes the film poses its universal question: How could a sensible people like the Germans be fooled by a fox? A quotation from Ecclesiastes is offered as the answer: “Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?”