8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Loving Jud Suss, October 16, 2009
This review is from: Jud Suss: Holocaust Studies Series (DVD)
I loved "Jud Suss," both the film and the character.
Loving this movie was disturbing. "Jud Suss" was commissioned and overseen by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister and Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War. The film was shown before Nazis began rounding up Jews. "Jud Suss" played a direct, horrific, role in the Holocaust. You can't talk about this film without that nightmare hovering over every word you say.
I ended up writing a long essay entitled "Loving Jud Suss." The essay is now linked from my homepage. I hope interested readers will have a look and share their thoughts. I'll try to convey the gist here.
First, this is a well-made, vintage, costume melodrama slash swashbuckler. If you like Golden Age, black-and-white, big budget, studio adaptations of popular novels set in the eighteenth century, chances are you could enjoy many aspects of this film: palace intrigue, fast pace, romance, period detail.
I watched "Jud Suss" as if on split screens. The Nazis want the viewer to see an amoral, crafty Jew who destroys the life of a German city, Stuttgart, by introducing ballet, flirtation, and parties, by instituting a tax to improve the region's poor roads, and by allowing Jews entry to the city. I resisted what the Nazis wanted me to see. I like ballet. I live in a state with toll roads; good roads have to be paid for somehow. I don't think that allowing Jews, or any minority, out of their ghetto and into previously segregated neighborhoods is a bad thing.
I could *also* see what the Nazis did not want me to see. I could see how the film lays bare the self pity, sense of personal victimization, and exaggerated view of the power of the other that is at the heart of racism and prejudice. The main German characters in "Jud Suss" are pathetic. Faber is a ninety-pound weakling and insufferable bigot. He can't even consummate a kiss, never mind a marriage, with his beloved, Dorothea. Dorothea is beautiful but simpleminded and insincere. She wants Suss but can't handle her own desire. Councilman Sturm, Rader, and Duke Karl Alexander are all obese, shouting, ineffectual old men. That Nazis held up blowhard Sturm and prissy bigot Faber as the heroes of the piece tells you how skewed - and how foreign to our modern sensibilities - was the Nazi value system.
In seeing both what the Nazis wanted me to see and what they did not want me to see, I could see the absurdity and ethical and intellectual bankruptcy of Nazi ideology. That exercise made this one of the most fascinating film watching experiences I've ever had.
Ferdinand Marian, as Joseph Suss-Oppenheimer, made this movie. He is onscreen for almost the entire film; even when he is not, he is the super potent center of others' attention. Marian's is one of the most riveting, charismatic performances I've ever seen. I could not take my eyes off him from his first scene to the last.
Off-screen events add to the unforgettable quality of Marian's performance. The story is that Marian did not want to take this role, and was so distraught when Goebbels forced him into it that he got drunk and destroyed his own apartment with an ax. Marian died in a car accident, and the rumor is that he killed himself, because of this role and its horrible history.
All the principles involved in "Jud Suss" made some excuse or another to try to get out of it. Goebbels tightened the screws and forced them into it. They later claimed that they did everything they could to make Suss as sympathetic as possible under the circumstances.
I read Ferdinand Marian's "Jud Suss" as an unforgettably sympathetic character. Even as I was watching the film, even as I was seeing it on a split screen, with the Nazi version on one side and my own interpretation on another, I also saw the tumultuous surrounding events. I saw the real Joseph Suss Oppenheimer, an historical figure who was tortured and executed in eighteenth-century Stuttgart. His killers kept his body on display for six years. I saw Ferdinand Marian, the actor, forced to act in a film he wanted no part of. I saw Jud Suss, the character in the movie, a lone Jew surrounded by bigoted, narrow, primitive proto-Nazis who made his, and their own lives, a misery, because they insisted that only Jews could be so perverse as to bring culture, modernity, and eroticism to a decent, clean, lifeless German city. My sympathy overflowed for Suss the character, Marian the actor, and the historical Suss-Oppenheimer. A Nazi propaganda film achieved the feat of rendering the German characters in the film universally repulsive, and the one Jewish character irresistibly sympathetic. That being the case, it's all the more tragic that Marian ended his own life over this role.
Scholars emphasize the charisma and appeal of Marian's depiction. In fact, the director, Veit Harlan, reported that Marian received "baskets of love letters." It is more than a bit weird that one of the sexiest overtly Jewish characters in the history of cinema is a character in a Nazi propaganda film.
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jud Suss: Celluloid Blueprint for Genocide, March 5, 2008
This review is from: Jud Suss: Holocaust Studies Series (DVD)
Archiv-DVD's newest release, "Jud Suss: Holocaust Studies Series" is the definitive Holocaust collection which features the uncut version of Veit Harlan's vicious anti-Semitic costume epic. For anyone to suggest this film had very little to do with the heinous crimes committed by the Nazis is not only scandalous but a slur against the slain six million during the Holocaust. This is perhaps the only motion picture produced during the Third Reich which encompasses the true anti-Semitic ideology expounded under National Socialism. Much of the screenplay was obviously penned by Goebbels with suggestions by Rosenberg and Streicher. This single film was the cornerstone and exponent of the pre-launching of the official campaign against the Jews of Germany and then Nazi Occupied Europe from 1940 onwards. It is certainly no coincidence nor accident that Goebbels ordered this film produced as early as 1938. And it is neither a coincidence either than Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the entire SS and uniformed police to screen the film prior to going into active service on the Eastern Front by the coming Winter 1940.
This film was as well heavily screened in European areas prior to any official anti-Jewish aktion against the local population. It was also heavily screened to SS guards and camp personnel at all the Nazi concen-tration/extermination camps. One does not have to have much of an imgaination what the end results were. And it is certainly no surprise to anyone that this film was entered into as evidence for the prosecution at the International Military Tribunal (The Nuermberg Trails) during 1945-1946. Its director was tried twice for "Crimes against Humanity" for creating the film and acquitted twice. It was agreed that the original negative be destroyed following the trial. This never happened. It is no suprise as well that this film is still banned by the German Govern-ment to this day as an official law exists banning this specific film.
I thoroughly suggest this film as an excellant example of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda in the way art can be twisted to fit ideology, no matter how tainted it may be. "Jud Suss" was quite obviously a celluloid blueprint for genocide no matter how subtle other reviewers may claim in their own naive opinion.
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