The Zone of Interest (2023)

 

The Zone of Interest raises some very intriguing questions, such as how we can live so close (in the movie’s case, literally) to horrible atrocities but maintain some semblance of normalcy. Wouldn’t the awfulness of what we are close to begin to affect us? Wouldn’t we start to behave differently if we were constantly so close to terrible events and activities? What if we are complicit in the atrocities that are happening? Doesn’t that alter who we are and what we do? The film shows us what kind of effect living next door to a site of such evil might have, but it does so gradually. The Zone of Interest moves at a very leisurely pace, in some respects, but it grows increasing more tense as the film progresses.

The Hoss family lives next door to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The father, Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel), serves as the commandant at the camp whose idea it is to exterminate the Jewish prisoners around the clock. He even oversees the installation of a new crematorium at Auschwitz that blazes throughout the night.  He seems rather cold and methodical at first, and he’s so efficient at his horrific occupation that he’s transferred to take command of all of the camps under Nazi control. He also demonstrates the more mundane aspects of life, such as turning off the lights and closing all the doors before going to bed at night. Those moments are often filmed at a rather astonishingly leisurely pace.

His wife, Hedwig (the great Sandra Huller, who had a great year in 2023 with this film and Anatomy of a Fall), keeps the household running efficiently, but she likes a comfortable life and doesn’t want to move away even though she and her children (two young boys, three young girls, including a baby girl) live next door to a concentration camp. She gets other benefits from being so close to the camp besides a nice house, though. Her husband sends her all kinds of clothing and other items taken from the Jewish prisoners. She keeps a fur coat (and a lipstick from its pocket) and gives other items to her servants. She’s rather distant and methodical about all of this herself, particularly when she’s overseeing the various upgrades to the house. She knows what’s on the other side of her garden wall, but she doesn’t acknowledge what is going on at the camp. In fact, she’s rather indifferent to his news about a promotion or his prowess at murdering other human beings.

Interestingly, we as viewers never see any of the camp or its activities. We can hear the screams and gunshots, but we aren’t witness to the killings themselves. Fires burn all the time, and we know what that means, but again, the filmmakers have chosen not to depict the atrocities on screen. The gunshots and furnaces are very disconcerting, as is the musical score, which is really very disorienting. It makes sense, though, for the music to bother us since we at least need to feel some of the anxiety that the characters should be feeling. Otherwise, we might think that this is a rather idyllic depiction of life in the country. The family goes swimming in the nearby river, they acquire a new canoe, and Hedwig even grows beautiful flowers and lots of vegetables in her garden. The garden happens to be on the other side of a wall from a concentration camp, but that doesn’t seem to bother the family members. We see just a few moments, such as when ashes start to flow down the river where Rudolph is fishing and his children are playing in the water, where the activities of the camp enter into their lives.

People in the family start to be affected by their proximity to the concentration camp. Again, how could you live next door and not be affected? Hedwig’s mother arrives for a visit, and she seems blasé about the prisoners next door, even wondering at one point if the woman she used to clean for might be one of them. (She missed out on purchasing the woman’s curtains in an auction of stolen property.) She begins coughing a lot almost immediately, perhaps from all the smoke in the air. At night, the sky is red from the fires, and it becomes too much for her. The fire and the smoke and the gunshots lead to her departing in the middle of the night; she leaves a note for her daughter and just disappears. The older son becomes much crueler as the film progresses, as if he has been given license by the awfulness of what’s happening at the camp. At one point, he locks his younger brother in the greenhouse and laughs at the boy’s predicament.

Rudolph, however, might be affected the most. Despite his claims during a medical examination that he’s well, he starts to dry heave after a party attended by Nazis and others. He tells his wife over the phone that he’s been calculating (or fantasizing) about how might be able to kill entire room full of people. It’s a chilling moment, and then he gets sick to his stomach. I don’t think this makes him sympathetic. It’s just another puzzling moment for us as viewers to ponder. Is his body trying to tell him something? He doesn’t seem to be listening to it or learning.

The film is based on a novel about real people and events. We all know about the horrors of the Holocaust, but this may be the first film to depict those horrors without showing them on the screen. You don’t get to see what actually happens in the camps, but do you need to at this point? That’s another one of those questions that are raised by the film. Is it awful enough that we witness Hedwig talking to her husband about what they’re going to do when the war ends? She’s obviously under the impression that the Germans are going to win, and she has plans for further renovations and improvements at her home.

I will readily admit that I don’t understand everything that occurs in the film. For instance, the movie features a couple of scenes where a young girl leaves apples for workers in the fields outside the concentration camp. It’s shot in what appears to be night vision, and it’s never entirely clear to me who she is or why she’s leaving the food. She always seems to appear in the movie when Rudolph is reading a fairy tale to one of his children. We also watch several women cleaning a Holocaust museum in the present day, presumably the camp at Auschwitz. We’ve seen some of the displays before, such as the massive number of shoes taken from the prisoners, so this sequence’s purpose in the overall film is unclear. The dog, Dilla, also steals the movie at times, probably because we need some relief from the intensity of everything else that’s happening on the screen. Perhaps the dog is meant to show someone or something innocent since it doesn’t know what’s going on and just wants to follow people around. Even that idea, though, comes with some questions about who could be truly innocent in circumstances like these.

The film starts (and ends) with a black screen and very disturbing music. We have no legend to tell us as viewers when or where we are as the film starts, and we have to figure out as details emerge that we’re actually witnessing Nazi atrocities. We also pause in the middle of the film and have a red screen accompanied by discordant music. Such moments don’t really allow you much of an opportunity to process how you’re feeling about what you’ve seen and heard. The music just puts you off any sort of quiet reflection.

Oscar Wins: Best International Feature Film and Best Sound

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing (Jonathan Glazer), and Best Adapted Screenplay

The Ten Commandments (1956)

 

Since it’s become an Easter tradition to show The Ten Commandments on network television, I probably don’t have to explain that it’s the story of the life of Moses, who led the Hebrews to their freedom from Egyptian rule. So many people have seen this film on television over the years, but I still don’t understand what it has to do with Easter. It’s a film that is truly spectacular in every sense of the word. You won’t see production design and costume design and scale of production at this level nowadays without a great deal of assistance from computer-generated imagery. In those days, they actually had to have lots of people and actual sets for much of what we see on the screen.

The film’s director, Cecil B. De Mille, serves as the narrator for The Ten Commandments, and he even does an introduction to the film that explains that it’s historically accurate, and he has the big books in front of him to prove it. I’m not sure that anyone needs a movie to teach them accurate history, but it’s probably more important that it gets the details right for the viewers who have spent time with their Bibles and know what happened to Moses there. Does the film truly follow the Biblical story of Moses? I don’t know; it seems to take a few liberties here and there for the sake of the visuals. Does it truly matter? Probably to some people, probably not to most. The hyperbolic voiceover narration frequently glosses over any sort of questions a viewer might have, so in the midst of the narrative, you’re just going to have to accept what happens.

The film begins with the prophecy that a man will be born who will deliver the Hebrews from bondage, so the pharaoh orders that all newborn Hebrew males be killed. Moses’ mother places him in a basket and sets him adrift in a river. He’s found, of course, by the daughter of the pharaoh, who raises him as her own child and as a prince of Egypt. Should that be Prince of Egypt? I’m not sure of the appropriate grammar for a film like this one. Charlton Heston plays Moses as an adult, and he’s just as stoic and wooden here as in Ben-Hur or, really, almost any movie that he starred in. I suspect he’s trying to treat the religious material with a great deal of seriousness, but it really does come across almost as camp. It’s not easy to feel a great deal of emotion for someone who comes across as so stolid all the time.

 

Yul Brynner plays Ramses, the actual son of the pharaoh and Moses’ rival for the throne and for the attentions of Anne Baxter’s Nefretiri. Brynner can really strut when he walks, and when you look as good in a skirt and a cape (and only a skirt and a cape) as he does, you’ve probably earned the right to strut. Heston shows up in roughly the same outfit at one point in the film, and sadly, he just can’t compete with Rameses’ hotness. Having the two of them side by side to compare, it’s all the more confusing that Nefretiri has the hots for Moses instead. Rameses certainly lets her know – more than once – that he’s very much interested in her, but her rebuffs make him all the more upset at the attention that Moses gets. It probably was the same for Brynner, wondering why Heston was always considered such a sex symbol. I hope his Oscar for Best Actor for The King and I this same year served as some consolation.

The Ten Commandments features lots of stars in smaller roles. It’s really a cast of thousands, and we get a few moments with some of these famous actors. The great Dame Judith Anderson is a servant who finds out the truth about Moses’ background and tries to use that information to stop Nefretiri from chasing after him. Baxter, though, didn’t play women who were too gentle, and Nefretiri has Memnet killed so that she can continue to pursue Moses. Vincent Price plays a master builder who spends a great deal of time talking about this amazing city that Moses is in charge of building for the Pharaoh Sethi (Sir Cedric Hardwick, imperious as he can possibly be). Most inexplicably, Edward G. Robinson plays Dathan, a Hebrew overseer who is consistently trying to undermine Moses and prevent him from fulfilling the prophecy of freeing the Hebrew people. I do like Robinson as an actor, and I think he was underappreciated by the Academy for several of the roles he played in films over the years, but his accent is so out of place in this film.

The film also features a subplot involving John Derek’s Joshua and Debra Paget’s Lilia as young lovers who keep getting separated from each other. Lilia actually winds up being enslaved by Dathan, and Derek keeps trying to rescue her. He often does so while shirtless, and he gives Brynner a serious challenger for who looks best wearing as few clothes as possible. These two characters are also responsible for Moses rescuing an older woman who’s almost crushed by a large stone that the Hebrew slaves are being forced to move in order to make this city for the pharaoh. Of course, Moses does the right thing, and he also order that food and water be given to the slaves. Little does he realize that he’s also Hebrew (and that the older woman is actually his mother).

Baxter’s Nefretiri tells Moses about his background, but she doesn’t care. She thinks they should continue to keep his secret, but he decides instead to join his people and starts working in the mud to make bricks. He wants to find his family, his heritage, so that he can understand himself better, I suppose, but of course, this just gets the attention of Sethi and Ramses. Sethi has always treated Moses as a sort of adopted son, and he certainly seems to like Moses much more than he does Ramses.

The film clocks in at almost four hours running time, so we have plenty of time for Moses to wander through the desert after Sehti banishes him from Egypt. He finds his wife Sephora (yes, that’s how it’s spelled in the film) among the seven daughters of a Bedouin sheik named Jethro. He becomes a shepherd, but he winds up seeing the Burning Bush while wandering around Mt. Sinai. By this point, Joshua has shown up in the desert to convince Moses that he’s the deliverer of the Hebrew people who was prophesied many years earlier. After hearing the voice of God in the Burning Bush say pretty much the same thing, Moses agrees to return to Egypt, where he tells Ramses, who is now the pharaoh and married to Nefretiri, to “let my people go.” Even after all these years, and despite the fact that Moses has married another woman and has grown some wild hair and a beard, Nefretiri still comes on to him. She’s still hot for him despite being married to Ramses and having a child with the pharaoh.

As proof that Ramses must release the Hebrews, Moses does a few parlor tricks like turning his wooden staff into a cobra and turning water into blood. The plagues show up, and he even notes that the first born son of every Egypt will die. That includes the pharaoh’s son, and after the boy’s passing, Ramses relents. The scenes where the Hebrews leave Egypt demonstrate the remarkable scale of moviemaking involved. Hundreds of people, plus sheep and cattle and other livestock, depart the city and make their way into the wilderness.

Of course, the sequence that is most famous (and the one that captured the film’s only Oscar, for special effects) is the parting of the Red Sea, and it’s certainly an amazing moment in the film. Ramses and his men are chasing after the Hebrew people in chariots, only to be stopped by a pillar of fire. That gives Moses time to call forth a storm and split the sea into two parts so that everyone can make their way between two walls of water. It’s still a moment that dazzles even with all of the advancements in filmmaking since its release. The only sequence that comes close to its grandeur is the carving of the titular document by fire. The wording is not in English, so I’ll accept that the commandments written on the stone tablet say what they are supposed to say. Of course, this is happening while there’s that weird, almost orgy-like creation of the Golden Calf (again, thanks to Robinson’s Dathan and his meddling) that Moses has to halt, but that’s what you get when you go to see a De Mille film.

It’s not that much of a stretch to consider this film a plea for greater acceptance of people of different backgrounds. It was released during the Civil Rights Era in the United States, and it talks a great deal about the mistreatment of Hebrews, which is clearly a form of racism, and there’s a lot of talk about why people should be able to live their own lives without being enslaved. The dehumanization of the Hebrew people is depicted in ways that show the parallels to the dehumanization that other categories of people have experienced throughout the centuries. If it accomplishes nothing else, if The Ten Commandments made some people a bit more tolerant, then it was worth all the money spent to recreate the events it depicts.

Oscar Win: Best Special Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Color Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction, Best Color Costume Design, Best Sound Recording, and Best Film Editing

Best Picture of 1928-29

 

The Winner: The Broadway Melody

The Other Nominees: Alibi, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, In Old Arizona, and The Patriot

 

My Choice: The Patriot! Just kidding. It’s a lost film, so we have no idea how to judge its quality these days. To be honest, this is a very tough choice because this may be one of the weakest groups of nominees in the history of the Academy Awards. Each of them has flaws, some larger than others, but none of them are particularly ideal. The Broadway Melody has more of a storyline than The Hollywood Revue of 1929, but the fluency with the camera isn’t there yet. Alibi and In Old Arizona keep inserting singing and dancing into the plot just to make use of the newfangled sound equipment filmmakers were dealing with then, but that makes for some very distracting moments. I guess I’ll stick with the Academy’s choice for this year, The Broadway Melody. At least, the production numbers are fun and interesting to watch.

In Old Arizona (1928-29)

 

When you watch an older film like In Old Arizona, which was reportedly the first sound era Western and the first talkie to be filmed primarily in the outdoors, you get to see moments that are clearly not related to the plot and don’t necessarily add anything to our understanding of the characters or their behaviors. Those moments, however, do serve to demonstrate the novelty of that “new” invention for the movies: sound. For example, In Old Arizona features an early sequence where four guys are harmonizing the song “Bicycle Built for Two.” There are no bicycles in the film, and there’s no particular reason for these men to be singing together outdoors, and they don’t seem to show up again in the film, but it’s a way for you to marvel at how advanced the sound quality of the film is.

In Old Arizona features Warner Baxtor as the Cisco Kid, an Oscar-winning role he would play several more times in his career. We first meet the Kid as he robs a stagecoach and takes the Wells Fargo box with all of the money. He’s very apologetic and polite as he’s stealing from the stagecoach, and he doesn’t take anything from the individual passengers that he doesn’t give them something in return. It’s an interesting way to meet a character, and it allows us to see that, despite his penchant for taking stuff that doesn’t belong to him, he’s really a good person. The story upon which the film’s plot was based, apparently, treats the Cisco Kid as more of a villain, but he’s clearly meant to earn out sympathy even from the start of the movie.

Almost no one knows what the Cisco Kid looks like, which is rather tough to believe given how dazzling the costumes are that he wears. There’s a lot of work that’s gone into the stitching and details of the various clothes Baxter gets to don, and no other character in the movie is wearing such elaborate garb. Still, this kind of anonymity allows for some funny moments, such as when he’s at the barber shop and is surrounded by men talking about him and his various crimes and how dangerous he is and how they’re going to capture him. He even meets Sgt. Mickey Dunn (played, rather broadly and somewhat badly, by Edmund Lowe) in person, and they talk about women and haircuts and perfume. They also have an intriguing moment when they pat each other’s guns and talk about how big the “guns” are. The guns, of course, are strapped to belts around their waists, so you know the general area we’re talking about here. It’s very reminiscent of a similar scene in Red River, but it sadly doesn’t last very long.

Once Dunn learns from the blacksmith that he’s been talking to the Cisco Kid, the film shifts to being more about a love triangle. You see, the Kid loves a woman named Tonia Maria. He even sings, briefly, to her, perhaps one of the first instances of a singing cowboy in the movies. However, she’s astonishingly unfaithful to him; in fact, she’s getting rid of one of her lovers just as he rides up to her home. Tonia (played by Dorothy Burgess) falls very quickly into the stereotypical sexualized Latina. After she’s spent time with the Kid, she almost immediately goes to the bar in town and meets Sgt. Dunn. She flirts with him, but he initially rebuffs her advances, finding her amusing rather than attractive.

However, once Dunn realizes that she’s the Cisco Kid’s lover, he rides over to her house and starts wooing her. Naturally, he’s just leading her on so that he can find out more about where the Kid is, but she seems to fall for him very quickly. She’s offended when she finds out that he’s trying to earn the $500 reward for capturing or killing the Kid, but once he promises all of the money to her and tells her that he wants to take her back to New York to live, she makes an abrupt change in her emotions. The accent that Lowe uses throughout the film is quite horrible, by the way. It’s almost like a comic version of a New Yorker’s way of speaking.

The Cisco Kid overhears the plans that Dunn and Tonia make, including her desire to have Dunn kill the Kid rather than capture him. He’s heartbroken over this realization that she’s never really loved him (although she certainly liked the gifts he brought her), but he plans his revenge, and it’s a strange one. He intercepts a note she’s written to Dunn and changes it so that it seems he will be dressed up as Tonia and she will be dressed as the Cisco Kid. I’m not sure what prompts such an idea, but the alleged cross-dressing has its expected outcome. The Kid escapes after Dunn shoots and kills Tonia, who he thinks is the Cisco Kid wearing a white mantilla. I know, it sounds very odd, and it is very odd.

The film, being a product of its time, traffics in some offensive stereotypes about Mexicans and other Spanish-speaking people. Several sequences involve dialog that’s in Spanish, and it’s not translated for us on the screen. Instead, their speech ridiculed by the whites in the film. The white characters also use several derogatory terms for the Latinx people in the film (mostly women, by the way). Lest you think the film is only racist about the Latinx population, it also features a short image of two Asian characters talking rapidly during a sort of rally to get the townsfolks fired up about forming a vigilante posse to go after the Cisco Kid. Both of these characters are dressed like Hop Sing on the old Bonanza TV show. It’s tough to watch, but when even the central character of the Cisco Kid speaks with broken English despite the fact that his parents are both well educated, and one of them is from San Luis Obispo, you know the film isn’t going to treat all of its characters with dignity. Having white actors portray the Cisco Kid and Tonia Maria doesn’t help either, of course.

The film, as I mentioned earlier, was filmed mostly outdoors, and we are treated to some beautiful desert scenery. The opening sequence involving passengers boarding a stagecoach was clearly filmed at a mission (reportedly, the one at San Juan Capistrano), and lovely Joshua trees populate the landscape. The filmmakers have paid a great deal of attention to the look of the film, and even the interiors are shot with a good eye for art direction and set decoration. In Old Arizona harkens back to the early days of sound film and the various ways that the industry was trying to take what it had accomplished during the silent era and apply some of it to the new techniques of moviemaking. It’s good to see that the visual was not always abandoned at the service of the auditory.

Oscar Win: Best Actor (Warner Baxter)

Other Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Picture, Best Director (Irving Cummings), Best Writing, and Best Cinematography