DVD Reviews: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, The Prisoner, Guilty of Treason - Page 3

The movie's depiction of Sophie is worshipful and by that same token dimensionless. These brave kids acted impulsively on their ideals and lost their lives, taking with them all their comrades and their organization as well. Sophie and Hans are martyrs and while they're heroic they're not heroes you'd be wise to emulate. They embody the adolescent faith that any political action is better than none, and the movie couldn't treat them more glowingly if their actions had been effective. Hans and Sophie's heedlessness can be excused mainly by the fact that their cause — an internal student coup against the Nazi state — was so hopeless, a political reality they were too fervent even to perceive.

The fact that the movie gives us Sophie as a legend, with a halo, means that it's less nuanced and even less intelligent a treatment of student activism than Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich, a pornographic travesty of leftist personality-cult terror cells. Sophie Scholl is certainly less fun. And yet there's a lot irony could do to open up the story of these industrious but quixotic kids who think they're going to leaflet and graffiti Hitler off his throne.

The moviemakers don't even get anything out of the way both the Gestapo and the tribunal kvetch about the Scholls' ingratitude - The Reich magnanimously sent them to the wonderful university and this is how they repay it! (The enforcers of the civilian terror state nag and holler like exasperated parents.)

Instead, Rothemund and Breinersdorfer's approach is utterly earnest, and the latest example of soft-headed sentimentality about Communism, as well. The warm-hearted, maternal political prisoner put in her cell to keep Sophie from committing suicide says she and her activist brother became party members because Communists always stick together. Amusing, when Sophie is about to be condemned in a show trial as brutal but less hallucinatory than those staged by Stalin, in which committed party members were convicted of crimes they had not committed.

The Prisoner (1955): Devictus vincit

The perversion of justice in Communist countries is the subject of two movies about József Cardinal Mindszenty, the Roman Catholic Prince Primate of Hungary who was arrested by the Hungarian Communist government in 1948 because of his staunch, public opposition to the expropriation of church lands and the nationalization of church schools (and because he was a natural figurehead of the democratic Smallholders Party).

Mindszenty was beaten and drugged into signing a false confession (he had the foresight to write a note repudiating any confession, even one bearing an authentic signature, in anticipation of his arrest), convicted in a show trial featuring forged documentary evidence, and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the abortive 1956 revolution, freedom fighters liberated him from prison and the new government exonerated him.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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