Nope, that doesn’t sufficiently convey how bad it is.
In any case, it seems fair to note that watching this hippie-fried home movie from 1968 spliced into a feature from five years earlier is a bit like seeing one of the cavemen in Quest for Fire using a ray gun.
Fortunately, most of this stuff dissipates after a while and we’re returned to the comparatively swank environs of early-'60s horror schlock once more. Sadly, like cross-country motorists making their way through Kansas, we must brave many more miles of flat, plodding exposition before we get to the good stuff. Can we agree that a film that makes Jews like us fast-forward to get to Hitler is a unique atrocity in its own right?
But the Hitler scenes – they’re so good. In the titular role, Bill Freed (whose only other credit, according to IMDb, was an ensemble part in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1962 cowboy nudie flick Tonight For Sure) really sinks his choppers into the scenery – understanding that the essence of history’s most notorious fascist maniac is the yelling. Seriously, the dude is apoplectic 100% of the time, and that, my friends, is movie gold.
And since the Nazis knew that without his yelling they would lack direction (really, what have they accomplished since 1945?), you understand why they preserve his keppe in a relatively portable container. That way he can yell at them anywhere – in the car, in the basket of a Schwinn bike, even on roller skates! How they rely on his yelling to give them purpose and meaning. Although Freed’s guttural faux-German tirades prevent the audience from dozing off during the production’s many tension-free chase sequences, the same cannot be said, alas, for Freed's stunt double, the dummy head carried around by Hitler's truculent (and, I must say, easily defeated) underlings.
Why, then, are we so fascinated by They Saved Hitler’s Brain? There are many layers to the answer. As most Jews now realize, Hitler is probably still at large – and the primary role of human creative endeavors like film, literature, and interpretive dance is to help us figure out where he is and what he’s doing. But there’s also the place of this unique enterprise in movie history.
Article comments
1 - Michael J. West
A college buddy and I used to have an exam-time tradition. Every semester during finals we would have a "Hitler's Brain Night." We'd rent two or three films, but Hitler's Brain was always the feature - not the one with the '68 footage, mind you, but the original 1963 edit.
Like a great piece of literature, we found something new in it each time - one semester it was the surf-inspired score, another it was that the city in which the film took place was called Dos Palabras ("Two Words"). Watching it became like rereading a favorite poem, one in which you were required to come up with a new "Hitler's Brain" crack every time. (There's an important distinction between Hitler and Hitler's Brain - they share many physical aspects and other traits, but in fact they are two different entities.)
Then we checked IMDb and discovered that it had the alternate title of The Amazing Mr. H. Not as good a title as They Saved Hitler's Brain, but light-years more apropos.
God, what a film. Mach schnell! Mach schnell!
2 - Baronius
Simon - Your article is a worthy homage.