Customer Reviews

Forty Days of Musa Dagh

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I've read the book, "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" by Franz Werfel. It's an amazing book and a great story, and it so obviously has the potential to be turned into a truly great movie.

Unfortunately, this is not that movie.

What we have here instead is a dreadful, horribly-acted, poorly-written adaptation that is an embarrassment to everyone involved. No one associated with this film comes out of it looking good. I'm rather surprised that the director and cast use their real names rather than all choose to be credited as "Alan Smithee." There's so much wrong with this movie that it's pointless to explore the subject further.

Whether this or "Assignment Berlin" (an equally dreadful film) deserves to be called the worst film on the Armenian Genocide ever made, would be the subject of an interesting (albeit pointless) discussion. ["Assignment Berlin" tells the story of Soghomon Tehlirian's assassination of (former Turkish leader) Mehmet Talaat in Germany during Operation Nemesis, the operation organized in the 1920s by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation to assassinate Talaat and the other exiled Ittihadist leaders. Talaat and his fellow mass murderers were hiding out in Europe under false identities after they fled Turkey following its defeat in World War I. Many of them were eventually executed by Armenian assassins for their roles and responsibility in organizing and implementing the utter and complete annihilation of the Armenians in Turkey, i.e. the Armenian Genocide, which took place in 1915-1917.]

Both the Musa Dagh story and Operation Nemesis have the ingredients that would make for truly great movies. But those movies have yet to be made.