You remember The Boys From Brazil? It took the view that Hitler's problem was that he was spoiled by his doting step-father/uncle. In this one, Poitier discovers that Darin became a Nazi because of his horrible drunken abusive father. His mother wasn't abusive but she was no picnic.
Barry Gordon plays Darin as a child. This was just a year after the little fellow played Jack Benny as a kid on his show. I hope the guy playing his father wasn't really hitting him. In one scene, the father, a butcher by trade, menaces his son with a large cow's liver which he shoves in his face.
Extreme racism has never been classified as a mental illness simply because it's so common. There are so many Nazis and people who may as well be Nazis, it's hard to imagine that they're all former abused children. Some of them seemed to have perfectly nice families who publicly disowned them after they revealed themselves to be Nazis in the press.
And, I won't give it away, but things don't go all that well in this movie, either.
Available on the Criterion Channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment