The Counterfeiters comes across as Cool Hand Luke meets Bridge on the River Kwai with Nazi concentration camp trappings. The Counterfeiters is the true story of a Berlin artist gone bad, who "makes money by making money", and who is still alive today.
From a post-war Monte Carlo casino, the Bogart-esquire counterfeiter recalls, in sepia flashbacks, his arrest in pre-war Berlin by the local anti-fraud police captain. Later, caught up in the sweep of Jews into Auschwitz, he survives five years by sketching portraits and murals for his captors. Fate plucks him from his painting and drops him along with others into S.hausen, a specialty technical research camp where he re-encounters his old nemesis, now a military man on the rise in the new Nazi regime. The Jews in his specialty unit lead a life of near luxury as they are charged with counterfeiting pound notes intended to destabilize the British economy. Moral ambiguity, self-contradiction, gallows humor, unsentimental kindness create an all-enveloping tense-zone of grimness relieved by flickers of conscience. This is a deeply human movie with body heat and soul fire set in darkness.
Eclectic sound track that includes "nigger music" and silence, camera shots that include fast, shaky zooms, selectively collaged glances, a microsecond of the moon seen through an overhead cage in a prisoner 'recreation' area, 'no rules' editing alongside cinematic discipline, there is nothing gratuitous in this movie, not a single shot that does not contribute to telling the story.
The Counterfeiters is a masterpiece of story telling, exceptionally honest to the craft of communication, a movie that captures emotion so well that any human being can see and feel it for his or her own purposes. It touches that deeply, it's no wonder it won an Academy Award, and among Academy Awards I'd place it well above the average. If Holocauste movies can be considered a genre, this is one of the best made. For cinematography, editing, sound, writing, acting, use of music, a ten by all measures.
From a post-war Monte Carlo casino, the Bogart-esquire counterfeiter recalls, in sepia flashbacks, his arrest in pre-war Berlin by the local anti-fraud police captain. Later, caught up in the sweep of Jews into Auschwitz, he survives five years by sketching portraits and murals for his captors. Fate plucks him from his painting and drops him along with others into S.hausen, a specialty technical research camp where he re-encounters his old nemesis, now a military man on the rise in the new Nazi regime. The Jews in his specialty unit lead a life of near luxury as they are charged with counterfeiting pound notes intended to destabilize the British economy. Moral ambiguity, self-contradiction, gallows humor, unsentimental kindness create an all-enveloping tense-zone of grimness relieved by flickers of conscience. This is a deeply human movie with body heat and soul fire set in darkness.
Eclectic sound track that includes "nigger music" and silence, camera shots that include fast, shaky zooms, selectively collaged glances, a microsecond of the moon seen through an overhead cage in a prisoner 'recreation' area, 'no rules' editing alongside cinematic discipline, there is nothing gratuitous in this movie, not a single shot that does not contribute to telling the story.
The Counterfeiters is a masterpiece of story telling, exceptionally honest to the craft of communication, a movie that captures emotion so well that any human being can see and feel it for his or her own purposes. It touches that deeply, it's no wonder it won an Academy Award, and among Academy Awards I'd place it well above the average. If Holocauste movies can be considered a genre, this is one of the best made. For cinematography, editing, sound, writing, acting, use of music, a ten by all measures.