lagwmguy This film is an extremely poor saga of Hitler. If it was portrayed as a fictionalization of him then I would provide a higher rating albeit marginally so. Hitler is much more complex character than the film, and possibly any film, can provide. It's embarrassing to actually watch this awful film given the historical inaccuracies. I understand the need to take liberties for sake of piecing a film together and making the characters more believable. However, those who have studied the lives of Hitler and his closest political/economic/social/military advisers, find this film completely avoidable. The film "Downfall" (2004) is much more historically accurate and captures the essential core of Hitler as the man he was. I highly recommend Downfall knowing it only shows the last few days of Hitler and his Third Reich.

Robert J. Maxwell I have to draw a distinction between aesthetic properties and informative values when it comes to this movie.On the one hand, looking at the movie from an educational point of view, it may be of genuine value. Surveys consistently find that Americans, especially young Americans, are a people without history. Focus groups following the release of "Pearl Harbor" ten years ago discovered that an alarming percentage of the intended audience thought that John F. Kennedy was president when the attack occurred. A student at a famous Midwestern university complimented Barbara Tuchman for her lecture of the origins of World War I because he'd "always wondered why the other was called World War II." A survey done in 2010 found that one in five Americans didn't know which country the United States had won its independence from. I could go on but won't. I'll conclude by saying that for far too many of us, this movie, which identifies the guy named Adolf Hitler and suggests the role he played in the story of the 20th century, is invaluable.Now, as a polished piece of movie making, it's plain terrible. First, Richard Basehart is badly miscast. But then anyone would have been miscast in trying to play a figure from a patriotic cartoon in 1943. There is no "character arc." Hitler begins as a scowling, trigger-tempered character who berates everyone around him, lusts openly to dominate the world, and is beset by indistinct but definite Freudian problems that he steadfastly denies. The only time he smiles -- rather than smirks -- is at the end, when he is completely loony and is ordering divisions around on a map after he's been told they don't exist.There really isn't much about his conduct of the war. It's more about his inability to love and his paranoia with regard to subordinates. Here's an example of what I mean.He enters the office of his personal physician and asks gruffly, "So how is your patient today?" "You look pale. The fight with Hindenberg must have been strenuous. Are you still suffering from the headaches?" "I'm not HERE to talk about THAT!" Some of the material is highly conjectural. Hitler develops an affection for his niece, Geli, and when he fails in his attempt to make love to her, she threatens to let the world know that he is not a real man. This is a big mistake on Geli's part. It's also a big mistake on the part of Adolf. Anybody who is physically unable to get it on with the lovely, sixteen-year-old Cordula Trantow, who has scarcely lost her pubescent chubbiness, is in serious hormonal trouble.But the movie denies Hitler any sign of humanity. (His beloved German shepherd, Blondi, never appears.) He has Geli murdered. He tolerates the presence of Eva Braun only because of her loyalty to him. It's not clear whether he ever gets it on with Eva Braun or not. I think, that if the mores of the time had permitted it, the movie would have given us a homosexual Hitler. As it is, his intolerance for smoking is ridiculed and it's mentioned that he eats nothing but vegetables -- not like a real man, who prefers his meat ripped from the quivering flank of the nearest antelope.The movie is a trembling and insane wreck, rather like Himself after the assassination attempt. Yet I urge everyone under the age of forty to see it. It will help them to distinguish between Hitler and Charlie Chaplin, if they should ever hear of Charlie Chaplin.

sol In what's without a doubt the best interpretation of Nazi Dictator Adolph Hitler, until it was eclipsed by Bruno Ganze portrayal of Hitler in the 2004 WWII classic "Downfall", Richard Basehart gives the performance of his life as the psychotic and later suicidal German Fuhrer who at one time was the most powerful man on earth. That's until the roof and walls caved in on him and his so-called "Thousand Year Reich" that came apart in the spring of 1945.The film "Hitler" goes mostly into Adolph Hitler's very personal life that had to do with his relationships with his teen-age niece Gila Raubal, Curdula Trantow, and later his personal photographer's young assistant Eva Bran, Maria Emo. The two women who most reminded Hitler of his late mother Klara Hitler who died of cancer when he was still a teenager back in the winter of 1907. The movie brings out that Hitler had a very strong attachment to his mother that kept him from having any kind of serious relationship with women in his future years as both an adult as well as German Dictator.The film "Hitler" starts out with the 1923 failed Beer Hall Putch in Munich that turned out to be a godsend for Hitler who besides having some two dozen of his fellow Nazis killed by the local police was himself captured tried and convicted of high treason and sent to Lansberg Prison where he ended up serving only a year behind bars! If anyone else would have tried to do the same thing when Hitler was in power he or she wouldn't have gotten off so easily. It was while in Lansberg Prison that Hitler wrote what was to be the Bible of the Nazi Party "Mein Kampf". In fact "Mein Kampf" was a blueprint for Hitler's future plans when he took control of Germany! But no one took it seriously until it was too late which eventually lead to WWII and the loss of over 50 million lives!Between Hitler's steamy and odd-ball affairs with Gila Raubal and Eva Braun we also see his climb to the leadership of he German Nation in becoming it's ultimate and all powerful leader or Fuhrer but at the price of hundreds if not thousands of fellow Germans. Many like his good friend and WWI army buddy the commander of Hitler's dreaded Brown Shirts the SA Ernst Rohm, Barry Kroeger. It was Rohm's misfortune to stand in the way of the German General Staff who felt him to be a threat to their power with his two million strong army of Brown Shirts. It was the German Army General Saff that got Hitler, who at the time was only the German Chancellor, to do Captain Rohm in together with his top lieutenants on "The Night of the Long Knives", June 30-July 1,1934, in order to gain their support. With the German Army now solidly behind him Hitler now had the means to accomplish his goal of conquering the entire world or end up dead, which he did, doing it!We get to see Hitler go from almost conquering all of Europe only to end up some 100 feet under the streets of Berlin in his reinforced steel and concrete bunker with only a few loyal Nazis like Propaganda Minster Joseph Goebbles, Martin Kosleck, and soon to be wife-"The Bride of Adolph Hitler"-Eva Braun at his side. With death staring him in the face Hitler rewards Eva Braun in becoming his wife as the two end their lives, with bullet and cyanide capsule, as their world, the Third Reich, goes up in flames together along with them. The film ends abruptly without the usual "The End" or closing credits implying that Adolph Hitler, and his many crimes, are somehow still with us. Remarkable performance by Richard Basehart as the Nazi Dictator Adolph Hitler that has been almost forgotten over the years by the movie going public with the film almost never being broadcast on TV or available on VSH tapes or DVD disks. Now with the film being shown on TCM on what turned out to be the 65th anniversary of Hitler's death people will finally be able to see just what a buried gem it was all these some 40 years that it was kept from the public and laid on the shelf collecting dust.P.S Despite his notorious and racist reputation especially in his dislike of those not being like himself, of the white Aryan race, Adolph Hitler's autobiography "Mein Kampf", which has been banned in both Germany and his native Austria, has become one of the biggest best sellers in Third World country's like India China, where its only available for research purposes only, as well as the Muslim World! In fact even here in the West, Europe and the USA, more books and movies have been published and made about Adolph Hitler then those of his WWII adversaries British Empire Prime Minster Winston Churchill US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet Primer Joseph Stalin combined!

Andy Sandfoss Richard Basehart is OK as Hitler, even if a bit over the top. The rest of the cast is horrible, frankly. The film is an attempt to render Hitler from a psychological perspective, but the insights it offers are cartoonish oversimplifications at best, and can't make up its mind what Hitler's "problem" was. At one point it is implied he was impotent, at another point it is suggested he was homosexual. And always the business about his mother. The film offers more speculation than fact. The time frame of the film is a bit skewed too. Nothing of Hitler's youth is presented for a supposed psychological study. The year 1934 takes up nearly half the film; World War II gets at most ten minutes start to finish. In the end you have no more understanding of Hitler's personality, or his appeal to Germans, than you did at the outset. Which marks the film as a failure.