By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
First German-Made Hitler Comedy: Not Funny
The advance buzz about MEIN FUHRER: THE TRULY TRUEST TRUTH ABOUT ADOLF HITLER, which opens in Germany Thursday [Jan. 14], has been almost uniformly negative, with German critics and commentators proclaiming the film naïve, bizarre, vulgar and — most damning of all — not funny,” writes the New York Times. Perhaps it was inevitable that the first German-made film comedy about Hitler would get a mixed reception in Germany — a country still haunted, six decades after the fall of the Third Reich, by the mystery of how this strange madman once held it in thrall.”
This movie is wrong in so many ways.
What’s even more wrong is that Germans haven’t had a chance to see MR. SHOW WITH BOB AND DAVID, especially this 1998 sketch called “Hitlers” (from show 401), which dispenses in two minutes, the idea of what to do, comically, with Hitler.
In this sketch, a takeoff of THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL, clones of Adolph Hitler are created by the thousands–emerging from the laboratory full-grown and sent forth not to do evil, but to live as servants, performing menial tasks (cleaning, child-minding) for the relatives of Holocaust victims. In no time, they’re like part of the furniture–shut into closets when they’re not needed.
But they’re treated humanely, these old men, even given an evening off: there they are at a clone honky-tonk, drowning their sorrows and complaining about their lot in life. “It’s impossible to get a date,” one sighs. “Once they find out you’re Hitler, it’s over. Forget it.” (Listen to the country and western tune on the jukebox: it took me a while to notice that the lyrics-“Ja, ja…schnell, schnell…”-are an approximation of the classic cowpoke song, “Git along, git along….Little dogey”
