What you see as the film opens is Hitler in the bunker.  What you hear is
the funeral march from "Siegfried."

You see Eva Braun and you hear the "Siegfried Idyll."

Now Hitler is playing with the model of an enormous building project and
the music is the "Entrance of the Gods."

In case you don't get the point, Hitler is actually *talking* about Wagner,
saying that "his total control over Bayreuth is what I have over Germany."

"Compared to you," Joel Gray tells Hitler, "Wagner was a minimalist." (Gray
is Goebbels.  Of course.)

Welcome to "The Empty Mirror," Barry Hershey's first feature film, coming
to your neighborhood theater in mid-May.  It's a psycho-biography of
Hitler, the English actor Norman Rodway playing the title role, the film
intercut with footage from Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will."

How is the film? Not good:  the whole business is awkward and poorly
executed -- it tries to present Hitler as a *person* but still comes across
as cartoonish psychobabble.  So why bother with it? Because it's a major
escalation of the strange, careless trend to condemn Wagner, using the old
guilt-by-association strategem.

I may not know much about Wagner, but I had a memorable shared history with
Hitler (at his instigation, not mine) and I am very much bothered, even
offended, by the Hitler-liked-Wagner/Wagner-was-an-antisemite/Wagner-is-
just-like-Hitler equation.  It's just so simplicistic and *wrong*.

As "The Empty Mirror" points out, Hitler was a great fan of Homer.  I will
never read the "Illiad" again!  The pox on the "Odyssey." Now I am a much
better Holocaust survivor, right?

Here's a quirky idea:  the film credits John Frizzell for the "original
score." Suppose I don't know this Wagner fellow at all, so I come to these
conclusions:  Frizzell is a pretty promising composer and he is damn Nazi
because his music is used for a film on Hitler!

Ganz genug already!

Janos Gereben/Ottawa
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