World War II (1939-45)

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      The Newest ‘Godzilla’ Film Is Stranger Than Fiction

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      Effects artists annihilate cities in movies all the time. Tokyo really was destroyed, a reality the best Godzilla stories have always taken seriously.A mighty monster stomps across the skyline, scaled and unstoppable, leaving destruction in his wake. Bridges, skyscrapers, electrical towers: Nothing can withstand his might. Every step produces a shock wave, every breath a firestorm. He swats away missiles and artillery shells like so many gnats. Civilians race before him through the streets, necks craned upward in terror. Godzilla was hardly the first movie monster, but he is undeniably the king. Across almost 40 feature films, the aquatic kaiju has gone from inscrutable menace to heroic savior and back again. Even the casual movie viewer can picture the formula: rubber-suited men wrestling above miniature model cities while puny humans look on with horror and begrudging respect. These rampages have become quaint and kitschy, safe enough to be parodied by Austin Powers and Pee-wee Herman.Yet for the Japanese audiences who saw Ishiro Honda’s “Gojira” in 1954, the sight of annihilated cityscapes would have been quite familiar. Just after midnight on March 10, 1945, a fleet of American B-29 bombers firebombed Tokyo, targeting the city’s wood-built low-income neighborhoods with napalm. The firestorm rapidly spread, and over the following hours at least 100,000 people died, “scorched and boiled and baked to death,” in the words of the operation’s mastermind, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force. Survivors recalled rolling banks of fire. Temperatures so high that metal melted and human bodies burst spontaneously into flame. By Aug. 15, this strategy had expanded to 67 cities and included the dropping of two atomic bombs. It’s been estimated that 400,000 Japanese civilians were killed and that nearly nine million more were made homeless. Honda’s film directly calls up these events. His Godzilla is a prehistoric beast, a dinosaur awoken from a subterranean chasm by underwater hydrogen-bomb testing. The monster acts with the implacable, impregnable logic of a natural disaster. His destruction of a village on remote Odo Island resembles a typhoon or a tsunami. When he finally reaches Tokyo, humans can do nothing as he rages, torching streets and crushing train cars in his teeth. Shooting in stark black and white, Honda frames the monster against a horizon of fire, like the annihilated cityscapes of the very recent past. Godzilla would go on to fight a giant moth, a three-headed dragon from outer space and King Kong. But the same traumatic kernel has always remained at the core of his appearances. At the start of Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus One,” released this fall, Tokyo has already been destroyed — by Allied firebombing. It is 1946, and the kamikaze pilot Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) has returned home to a leveled landscape. His parents are dead. So are the children of his neighbor and the families of just about everyone he meets, including the plucky thief Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and Akiko, a baby orphaned by the bombing. As it happens, Koichi had a run-in with Godzilla in the last days of the war, but he is less concerned with monsters than he is with finding warm clothing and food for Akiko, who is malnourished — and with his guilt over surviving his suicide mission. He cannot make peace with the world or with himself. As he tells Noriko, “My war isn’t over.” For all the seat-shaking power of Godzilla’s roar, there is no sound more unsettling than an air-raid siren. Yamazaki’s film resembles, at first, many postwar melodramas, depicting a generation of men so traumatized by their experiences that they do not know how to move on with their lives and a society struggling to shake off a wartime culture of death. Koichi takes a dangerous job clearing mines left behind by both U.S. and Japanese forces, a lethal embodiment of the war lingering long into peacetime. It is this work that reunites Koichi with the monster of his nightmares. In this film, Godzilla is a deep-sea beast given powers of regeneration and destruction by the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests. These powers embolden and enrage the animal; even launching its catastrophic heat ray seems to scorch the creature from the inside, making each attack a mutually destructive act. Godzilla’s assault on Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood recalls the 1923 Kanto earthquake, with each step splitting the earth and even the brushing of his tail causing buildings to crumble, crushing hundreds beneath the wreckage. Yet this is all prelude. When the army finally arrives to drive Godzilla back, the creature charges up its fiery breath, letting loose a thermonuclear blast that flattens the city, murdering thousands in an instant. The creature roars, and Yamazaki’s camera pans up to reveal a mushroom cloud blooming in the skies over Tokyo.It is an immensely discomfiting moment, and something about it reveals why Hollywood’s numerous attempts to bring the monster to America have never creatively succeeded. Beginning with Roland Emmerich’s 1998 “Godzilla,” the monster has flattened New York, San Francisco and Boston, to increasingly dull effect. Emmerich’s bombastic approach to destruction renders the action glib and meaningless. Honda shows us a cross-section of Tokyo society to underline all the life about to be lost; Emmerich’s misanthropic disaster epics, from “The Day After Tomorrow” to “2012,” marshal large casts in order to gleefully pick them off. So many Hollywood blockbusters these days end with a beam of colored light shooting into the sky and the whole world in peril. Thanks to teams of overworked effects artists, it is easier than ever to snap your fingers and annihilate entire cities, to make the deaths of thousands, even millions, seem banal. No American city has ever directly experienced the catastrophe of modern warfare, and you feel filmmakers grasping at the same examples over and over again. Zach Snyder invokes Sept. 11; “The Batman,” from 2022, ends by blowing Gotham’s levees, as if the city were New Orleans. Yet all this imagery feels cheap, deployed as a backdrop to the superheroic deeds at center stage.Tokyo really was destroyed, a reality the best Godzilla stories have always taken seriously. “Minus One” stays with the human victims as they race through the streets, horrified that their home is being destroyed, again, and so soon. Where Emmerich’s film exults in the carnage of laying waste to a city, Yamazaki’s insists on the damage, the destruction that recurs, returns, revictimizes. And he grounds it in very real terror; for all the seat-shaking power of Godzilla’s roar, there is no sound more unsettling than an air-raid siren. The writer W.G. Sebald once argued that the destruction of German cities from the air was so extensive that it left almost no imprint upon the popular consciousness. The bombing could be captured in statistics and generalizations but never as “an experience capable of public decipherment.” Faced with such mass destruction, the individual experience shrinks, until even those who live through war choose not to recall it. A similar thing could be said of our cinematic depictions. When a city is annihilated with a deadening wipe of one digital hand, it implies something foregone, even natural about the process. Indeed, LeMay’s forces modeled their firestorm on the one caused by the 1923 Kanto earthquake, and in the testimony of survivors the conflagration takes on a life of its own, a ferocious beast attacking from all sides. But there is nothing natural about the destruction of cities in wartime. Such devastation must be planned, ordered and executed, conscripting thousands to kill many thousands more. Someone has to build the bombs, and someone else to drop them from on high. There are homes below, schools and parks and hospitals, the topography of an entire life, buried under the rubble. When these images appear on our screens, it’s worth remembering: For some, this is spectacular fantasy; but for others, the horror is entirely too real.Source photographs for above: Toho Co. Ltd./Prod DB/Alamy Stock Photo.Robert Rubsam is a freelance writer and critic. More

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      In Steve McQueen’s ‘Occupied City,’ a Marriage of Art and History

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      Steve McQueen collaborated with his wife Bianca Stigter to make “Occupied City,” a four-hour documentary that brings Amsterdam’s World War II history into the present day.When the British filmmaker Steve McQueen was considering making a feature film about a free man who was captured and sold into slavery, his wife, the Dutch journalist and historian Bianca Stigter, suggested he start with a true story.She found a 1853 memoir by a New York man who was kidnapped, sold and enslaved for 12 years in Louisiana, named Solomon Northup. McQueen was immediately intrigued. “What was so interesting about it was that the script was there,” he said last week, over lunch with Stigter in Amsterdam. “I didn’t have to invent a story.”His resulting 2013 feature film, “12 Years a Slave,” adapted from Northup’s memoir by John Ridley, won three Academy Awards, including best picture.For the couple, it was just one example of a kind of creative symbiosis that has defined their 28-year relationship. In 2022, when Stigter made her first film, “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a documentary based on rare footage of a Polish village before the Holocaust, McQueen was a co-producer and “a sounding board,” she said.Over 187 days, McQueen and his team shot 960,000 feet of film showing daily life in Amsterdam.Lennert Hillege/A24McQueen’s latest film, the four-hour documentary “Occupied City,” which opens in theaters in the United States on Dec. 25, is the couple’s most extensive collaboration to date. He adapted the movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, from Stigter’s book, “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” a 560-page historical encyclopedia that was published in Dutch in 2019, and she is one of the movie’s producers.Stigter’s reference book records the geographical dimensions of that period of Nazi rule in Amsterdam — where the bombs dropped, where rallies were held — but it also memorializes places where Dutch people suffered and died: soup kitchens during the 1944 to 1945 famine known as the Hunger Winter; apartments where Jewish families committed suicide; and public squares, train stations, a theater and a day care center where Jews were held before their deportation to concentration camps.In “Occupied City,” Stigter’s text is read out in unemotional voice-over by the British actor Melanie Hyams, while the camera shows scenes from contemporary Amsterdam. But because it was mostly shot from 2020 to 2022, much of the footage captures the city during Covid-19 lockdowns.McQueen, who was born and raised in London, is both a filmmaker and a Turner Prize-winning visual artist, recognized by Queen Elizabeth with a knighthood in 2022. But he has lived a more under-the-radar life in Amsterdam, Stigter’s hometown, since the late 1990s. The couple raised their two children in the city, though they declined to discuss how they met or when, precisely, they got married.He said that he has always felt Amsterdam’s cityscape represented layers of history that must be excavated, from the 17th century, when it was the hub of Golden Age Holland, up through the horrors of World War II. “There are always archaeological digs going on in your brain as you walk the streets,” he said. He’d long wanted to make a film that simultaneously engaged the present and the past.The footage was then overlaid with a voice-over drawn from Stigter’s book “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.”Lennert Hillege/A24Around 2004, McQueen said, he was conceptualizing a film that might somehow draw the city’s World War II past into the contemporary moment.“I had this idea to physically map one image over the other,” McQueen said, “to illuminate the ghosts from the past.” He heard the tapping of keys from the next room, he recalled, where Stigter was writing the first version of her “Atlas,” and thought: “What if the past is text and the images of now are now?”McQueen set out to shoot every address in Stigter’s book — more than 2,000 locations — and the filming was planned long before any signs of the pandemic. But when lockdowns in the Netherlands began in March 2020, McQueen decided to go on undeterred.“It was like the way Dutch people still just go out into the streets and cycle when it’s raining — the weather doesn’t change the plan,” he said. “We just had to embrace it.”For two and a half years, McQueen and his crew shot on location, producing 960,000 feet of film, he said, far more than he would need, even for a long documentary. Stigter sometimes attended the filming, but not always. “It felt a little like I was in the way,” she said.Shooting was planned before the coronavirus pandemic, and carried on throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. “We just had to embrace it,” McQueen said.Lennert Hillege/A24Some of the shots show quotidian activities, suggesting that life goes on, oblivious to the past. We see a shuttered H&M store, where we learn that young Dutch volunteers once stood in line to register for the Waffen S.S. People joyfully play in the snow and walk their dogs in the Sarphatipark, where one of the final roundups of Jews took place in 1943.But filming during the pandemic meant that the life captured by the cameras wasn’t ever entirely ordinary. Sometimes, the drama unfolding in the present moment reminds us that we remain as vulnerable to catastrophe as ever, as in a scene where elderly Dutch citizens line up for Covid vaccinations.At other times, wartime themes and contemporary visuals converge in unusual and unsettling ways, like when hundreds of unmasked protesters gather on Museumplein, a central square in the museum district, in early 2021, to decry the new masking regulations. The protesters are forced out of the square by police on horseback, and using water cannons and dogs.It is ambiguous whether the footage is suggesting a link between the World War II era and Covid times. This is a touchy moral question, because protesters and far-right Dutch politicians have, in recent years, made false equivalencies between the Holocaust and the government’s Covid-19 regulations.Yet McQueen said that such onscreen convergences were merely an attempt by the viewer to “make sense out of nonsense.”“I wanted the screen to be a mirror where people saw themselves reflected back on them, so you ask: Who am I in this?” he said. “It’s more of a meditation than a history lesson.”“Occupied City,” which includes 130 of Stigter’s addresses, clocks in at 247 minutes, plus a 15-minute intermission. But this is not the end of the project for McQueen and Stigter. He was in the process of planning a future artwork, which he said would attempt to include every address in the book. For Stigter and McQueen, the process of bringing the “Occupied City” to the public — as a book and a film, and soon an artwork, as well — has been a shared labor of love, which, like their relationship, is an ongoing conversation.“I’ve been with this woman for 28 years and without those 28 years, this artwork would never have been made,” McQueen said. “It was just the case that we live together, we share our lives together, and this is one of the things that has come out of it, along with two children. It’s never been an effort. It’s only been a mutual appreciation.” More

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      ‘A Compassionate Spy’ Review: Back to the U.S.S.R.

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      The scientist and spy Theodore Hall is profiled in this warm, low-key documentary.The subject of the absorbing documentary “A Compassionate Spy” might be the brilliant atomic physicist Theodore Alvin Hall, but its star is his nonagenarian widow, Joan. Funny, candid and eager to share, this delightful woman — and her unwavering support for her husband’s espionage during World War II — sets the tone for a film that leaves no doubt as to the location of its sympathies.These will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of the film’s writer and director, Steve James, whose empathy for his subjects has always been evident. And by placing Hall’s leaking of nuclear secrets to the Soviets within the context of the couple’s romantic and robust marriage, James gently wraps the viewer in the warmth of Joan’s memories. The effect is sneakily disarming.“I felt so proud of him,” she confesses to James during one of several interviews. “Ted was trying to prevent a holocaust.” Recruited by the Manhattan Project in 1944 at the age of 18, Hall was the youngest scientist working on the development of an atomic bomb and eager to win a race against the Nazis. Later, fearing the consequences of a single country’s monopoly on such a terrible weapon, he decided (with the help and encouragement of his best friend, the poet Saville Sax) to pass classified nuclear details to the Soviet Union. Despite being subjected to F.B.I. interrogations and decades of surveillance, Hall was never prosecuted, his spying concealed from the public until a few years before his death in 1999.Ensconced in her cozy home outside Cambridge, England, Joan (who died last month) is an entertaining booster of her husband’s legacy. Recalling her close postwar friendship with Hall and Sax at the University of Chicago (in nostalgic re-enactments, we see the threesome gamboling on the grass like well-fed puppies), she cheekily hints at a youthful love triangle and reveals that Hall confessed his spying before their marriage. She was unfazed.Hall’s own feelings about the espionage — expressed in clips from various interviews, including the 1998 docuseries “Cold War” and excerpts from a VHS tape belonging to Joan — would grow more nuanced. (The film’s title comes from his citing of compassion as a “major factor” in his decision to leak.) Strangely, he admits no fear for his own safety, and even had to be dissuaded from trying to prevent the 1953 executions of the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.Noting America’s political about-face from pro-Russian propaganda (like Michael Curtiz’s 1943 movie “Mission to Moscow”) to Red-scare paranoia, James keeps his camera calm and the talking heads to a minimum. The dramatizations are nicely filmed, if a little hokey, and the overall velvety tone is peppered with piquant details, like Hall communicating with the Russians in a code derived from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”Wry, shy and fragile-looking, Hall gets off lightly here, with little interrogation of his patriotism, personal ethics or fears of a nuclear world’s potential for catastrophic error. (He candidly describes working on the bomb as “exhilarating.”) The general impression given by this warm, low-key film is that the spying was a simple act of pacifism. Countervailing voices are faint and few; anyone seeking more vigorous pushback will have to look elsewhere.A Compassionate SpyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Tony Bennett’s Commitment to Civil Rights

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      The singer witnessed racism in the military and in the music industry, experiences that informed his decision to join the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965.In explaining the roots of his commitment to civil rights, Tony Bennett often told a story from his Army days, when he brought a Black soldier as his guest to Thanksgiving dinner, prompting a furious reprimand and a demotion.It was 1945, three years before the end of segregation in the U.S. military, and Bennett, who had been drafted into World War II shortly after he had turned 18, happened to run into a high school friend and fellow serviceman in occupied Germany. As he brought the friend, Frank Smith, to the holiday meal in the white servicemen’s mess hall, an officer intercepted them in a rage, Bennett recalled in his 1998 autobiography.“It was actually more acceptable to fraternize with the German troops than it was to be friendly with a fellow Black American soldier!” Bennett recalled in the book, “The Good Life.”Bennett recalled that in that moment, the officer took out a razor blade and cut the corporal stripes from his uniform, spitting on them and throwing them to the floor. He was then assigned to dig up the bodies of soldiers in mass graves so that they could be reburied with more dignity.“For a while the whole affair soured me on the human race,” Bennett remembered in the autobiography.It was a pivotal moment for the young singer, who returned from the war focused on developing his music career. Twenty years and a whirlwind of fame later, Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, performing for marchers alongside other musicians such as Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone and Joan Baez.As his death on Friday at 96 unearthed memories of Bennett’s suave affability and charm as one of the foremost purveyors of the American songbook, it also prompted recollections of Bennett as a steadfast advocate for civil rights.Bennett’s career took off in the 1950s and ’60s, and as he joined jazz circles that included greats such as Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington, he came to witness the blatant racism that had been ingrained in the American entertainment industry. Cole, for example, could not sit down in the dining room of the club where he had been performing, Bennett recalled, and Ellington wasn’t allowed to attend the party at the hotel where he and Bennett were top billing.“I’d never been politically inclined, but these things went beyond politics,” Bennett said in his autobiography. “Nat and Duke were geniuses, brilliant human beings who gave the world some of the most beautiful music it’s ever heard, and yet they were treated like second-class citizens.”In 1965, Belafonte asked him to attend the march to Montgomery, explaining that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hoped that entertainers could help rally media attention, he recalled in the book. Bennett agreed, traveling with the singer and bandleader Billy Eckstine. He said in his autobiography that the march reminded him of fighting his way into Germany at the end of the war, comparing the hostility of the Germans to that of the white state troopers.The day before the marchers reached the Alabama State Capitol, Bennett was among the performers at a rally in a field where the marchers were camping for the night, singing from a makeshift stage built from coffin crates and plywood.When Bennett and Eckstine left the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove them to the airport. She was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.In a 2007 documentary about Bennett, Belafonte recalled that his friend brought the “spirit of the Second World War into our vision of the America of the future.”The singer’s commitment to the cause persisted. According to the 2011 biography of Bennett, “All the Things You Are,” the singer also refused to perform in apartheid-era South Africa. Coretta Scott King has said that he remained committed to the King Center, the organization she created after her husband’s assassination. In Atlanta, Bennett has a spot on the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame.In his later years, Bennett dedicated much of his charitable contributions to arts education, establishing a public high school in Queens called Frank Sinatra School of the Arts with Susan Benedetto, whom he married in 2007, and a nonprofit that funds arts programming at schools in need of support.In his final years, when discussing social justice, Bennett would often quote the singer Ella Fitzgerald, who attended the Selma-to-Montgomery march as well: “Tony, we are all here,” he said she told him.“All the tribulations, the wars, the prejudice — and everything that divides us — simply melt away,” he told Vanity Fair in 2016, “when you realize that we’re all together on one planet and that every problem should have a solution.” More

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      Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ Tells of World War II Rescues

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      A Netflix series dramatizes the efforts of Varian Fry, an American who helped save some 2,000 people from the Nazis without his government’s support.When Anna Winger, the co-creator of the new Netflix series “Transatlantic,” relocated to the vibrant French port city of Marseille last year, she found a dilapidated villa awaiting her. The “relic,” as she called it, was ideal for her purpose: the recreation of the Villa Air-Bel where, early in World War II, a dapper American named Varian Fry oversaw an extraordinary rescue operation for artists and writers, most of them Jews, hounded by the Nazis and the Vichy government of occupied France.Arriving in Marseille in mid-August, 1940, determined to help those in danger after witnessing the abuse of Jews in Berlin in 1935, Fry had to battle not only the French authorities and Nazi ideology, but also his own risk-averse United States Consulate in Marseille.Improvising at a time when the United States had not yet entered the war, Fry, a rebel in a suit, navigated a narrow path until his forced departure in late August 1941. He was determined to secure safe passage and overseas visas for the thousands of “foreign undesirables” who soon came knocking on his door.Among the some 2,000 people he rescued were the artist Max Ernst, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the German novelist Heinrich Mann.In his book “Assignment: Rescue,” written after the war, Fry wrote of Nazism that “I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all of saving even a few of its intended victims.”For many years, Winger had been obsessed with the story of “this man alone doing something very brave,” she said in an interview. In 2018, she started working on the project, and in 2020, she optioned Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Portfolio,” which became the basis for the fictionalized events in the series.Winger, who created the shows “Unorthodox” and “Deutschland 83,” lives in Berlin, where “as a Jew you think of these stories all the time,” she said. Her parents, both anthropologists, were Harvard professors and “a lot of people in the generation above them were refugees from Europe.” For her, “the impact of the emigration made possible by Fry is immeasurable in its influence on midcentury American thought.”Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022; war broke out in Europe just a few days later. With millions of refugees eventually pouring out of Ukraine, the moral dilemmas of conflict that the series explores felt particularly pertinent. “For all of us, it was top of mind and seeped into our daily lives in Marseille,” Winger said. She would go home to a Berlin dealing with a vast influx of refugees.The show captures not only the life-or-death seriousness of Fry’s mission to save refugees of another war, but also something of the louche, living-on-the-edge drama of a city that has always been a crossroads, and in 1940, unlike the northern half of France, was not directly occupied by German troops.Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022, and war broke out in Europe not long after.Anika Molbar/NetflixThe Marseille that Fry and his motley team of driven young anti-Fascists encountered had something of the freewheeling intrigue captured in “Casablanca,” another story of people suspended by war in a foreign place, aching in limbo for love and visas. Inevitably, money and sex — the currency of clandestine escape — have their place in “Transatlantic.”“We try to be true to the history but also make fun by working with it in a heightened way,” Winger said. The degree of fictionalization in the series has already caused controversy; Sheila Isenberg, the author of a book on Fry, called the show a “travesty.”Much of this pushback has been focused on the decision to depict Fry having a gay relationship. In 2019, James D. Fry, his son, wrote a letter to The New York Times stating that “My father was indeed a closeted homosexual.” He was responding to a New York Times review by Cynthia Ozick of the Orringer novel that said of Fry, “there is no evidence of homosexuality,” contrary to the novel’s portrayal of him.“We consider the letter from his son, James Fry, to The New York Times to be the last word on the subject,” Winger said via email.In the show, Fry, played by Cory Michael Smith, works closely with Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs), an American heiress who brings her money, energy and connections to the mission, as well as with Albert O. Hirschman (Lucas Englander), a German Jewish intellectual who would become a distinguished American economist.Their activities meet the stern disapproval of the American consul general in Marseille, Hugh S. Fullerton (renamed Graham Patterson in the show), who is played by Corey Stoll. Fullerton, hewing to the then-neutral State Department line, wants to keep the United States out of the war. His vice consul, Hiram Bingham IV (Luke Thompson), thinks otherwise, however, and he quietly helps Fry with travel documents, some of them fraudulent.The interactions between these characters, their relationships and ruses, their hopes and hypocrisies, form the narrative backbone to “Transatlantic.”Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs) and Graham Patterson (Corey Stoll) have a dalliance on the show, even as he is resistant to the team’s rescue efforts.Anika Molbar/NetflixOne night last spring, Winger shot scenes featuring Jacobs and Stoll in the recreated Villa Air-Bel, on the outskirts of the city. The consul, a loyal diplomat incapable of an act of rebellion against State Department policy, has a dalliance with the heiress, “that has a transactional nature to it, a question of getting people out,” Stoll said.They embrace. They argue. He wants to spend the night with her. She asks him to leave. Over and over the actors played the scene until Winger was satisfied that the exchange between the pair achieved the right degree of sparring and sexual tension.Fry and Gold may be on the same side, but they bicker a lot. To play the central character, “I spent a lot of time reading about Fry, going to Columbia University, where all his papers are,” Smith said in an interview in Marseille. “He was unassuming and demure, which I appreciate, yet he burned with a contrarian courage that led him to row against the tide.”A literary journalist, enamored of European writers and artists, Fry was 32 when he arrived in Marseille. He had been sent to France from New York by the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee (the forerunner of the International Rescue Committee), established by American and German intellectuals. With him he brought a list of people to rescue, including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Alma Mahler, who would eventually escape across the Pyrenees carrying Symphony No. 10, the last work of her former husband, Gustav Mahler.Fry thought he could get the job done quickly. But as Alan Riding wrote in his book “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris,” Fry found himself in a “no man’s land of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police and refugees galore.”Initially installed at the Hôtel Splendide, Fry quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers. Continuously hounded, detained for several days in late 1940, Fry faced off with Fullerton, the American consul, who repeatedly advised him to leave or face arrest, and in January 1941 refused to renew Fry’s passport unless he returned to the United States.To the U.S. authorities at the time, Fry was a troublemaker, his effort to protect Jews and anti-Nazis a renegade operation undermining a craven official policy.The events portrayed in the show are many-faceted, Smith said, but a core truth is inescapable: “There were civilian heroes before our government was ready to step in.”Initially installing himself at a hotel, Fry far right, quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers.Anika Molbar/NetflixJacobs, who plays Gold, a sometime pilot of impetuous courage, said she found the part fascinating for its multiple dimensions. Gold makes mistakes, and her relationship with Fry is sometimes tense. He “views her as too impulsive, while she sometimes thinks he is too cautious,” Jacobs said, and yet, Gold’s moral core is clear: “She knows what she does is the right thing to do.”Englander, the Austrian actor who plays Hirschman, another of Fry’s volunteers, said in an interview on set that filming the show made him reflect on his family’s own history.“We never spoke of our Jewish past,” he said. “Grandpa had to run away — that was all we said in my family.” When Englander came to lines in which Hirschman speaks about his past before fleeing Germany, he said: “I felt my grandfather so strongly. I needed minutes of crying and coffee and cigarettes to recover. Now, I feel a compulsion to give something to life and help today’s refugees.”Fry never ceased in his search to find ways out, until he was hounded out of the country after 389 days. He was told by the Vichy police, with the apparent backing of the American consul general, that he had “gone too far in protecting Jews and anti-Nazis,” Riding wrote in “And the Show Went On.”Back in the United States, Fry wrote a groundbreaking article for The New Republic in 1942 titled “The Massacre of the Jews.” It had little effect. The slaughter continued, with Western powers doing their best to look away.Anna Winger, a creator of the show, left, was obsessed with Fry and his story for many years before she started working on the project.Anika Molbar/NetflixWriting and teaching, Fry lived out the rest of his life in relative anonymity, and died at the age of 59. It was only in 1967 that France honored him with a Légion d’Honneur, the country’s highest order of merit.During production, Smith found himself thinking about Fry as an American hero defying his own government.“There’s a real fight in America about exceptionalism, about what it means to be an exceptional nation,” he said. “Is it loving your country unyieldingly? Or is it taking a scalpel to it and looking at it honestly. This show is asking people to look realistically at our history.” More

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      ‘The Spirit of ’45’ Review: Here Comes Nationalization

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      A documentary from Ken Loach sees the end of World War II as a brief moment of possibility for socialism in Britain.“The Spirit of ’45” is, atypically, a documentary from Ken Loach, whose tireless chronicles of Britain’s working class (“Kes,” “Sorry We Missed You”) have generally been dramas.It is also not new. The documentary had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2013 and opened in Britain shortly after that. Released for the first time in the United States, it is relevant in a perennial sense but somewhat dated. The people interviewed in this movie could not know that their despised Tories would still hold power today. (The 2016 Brexit vote — indeed, any mention of the European Union — is also conspicuous by its absence.)The film’s central idea is that Britain had reached a rare moment of possibility after World War II and the general election of 1945, when the Labour leader Clement Attlee became prime minister with an avowedly socialist agenda. Loach charts the nationalization of Britain’s health service, transportation sectors and coal mines. Britons who remember the changes share stories of how those shifts and new plans for quality housing almost universally improved their lives (although there is mention of some missed opportunities with the mines). “The Spirit of ’45” then flashes forward to show how the conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her successors rolled those policies back.As in much of his recent fiction work (including the Palme d’Or-winning “I, Daniel Blake”), Loach largely ignores counterarguments. Even viewers sympathetic to his politics may roll their eyes at how infrequently the film acknowledges trade-offs and price tags, except when the costs relate to the inefficiencies of privatization. There is a powerful historical case to be made here, but it requires engaging with nuance, not merely expressing conviction.The Spirit of ’45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Friedrich Cerha, 96, Who Finished Another Composer’s Masterpiece, Dies

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      His skill in completing Alban Berg’s “Lulu” almost 40 years after Berg’s death was considered one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century.Friedrich Cerha, an Austrian composer and conductor who was best renowned for taking on the arduous task of completing Alban Berg’s unfinished “Lulu,” and whose skill in the effort confirmed that work as one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century, died on Tuesday in Vienna. He was 96.His death was announced by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause.Mr. Cerha wrote several stage works, of which three — “Baal,” “Der Rattenfänger” and “Der Riese vom Steinfeld” — were produced by the Vienna State Opera. He composed orchestral, chamber and other music that found rare stylistic range within the broad confines of postwar modernism. He was a crucial figure in the rebuilding of the Viennese new-music scene, cofounding and then conducting its leading ensemble, Die Reihe. And he was a dedicated teacher to his students, who included the composer Georg Friedrich Haas.But at least outside Austria, Mr. Cerha was known less for his own work than for his celebrated contribution to another composer’s masterpiece.Berg had not quite finished orchestrating “Lulu” when he died in December 1935, although the opera, a successor to his earlier “Wozzeck,” had already become a cause célèbre for critics of Nazi cultural policies. He had set “Lulu” aside earlier that year to write his Violin Concerto and returned to it in the fall only to be struck down, partway into its third act, with an infected abscess.From its Zurich premiere in 1937 on, “Lulu” was staged in a two-act form that offered evidence of the work’s stature yet disfigured the composer’s theatrical and musical design. But by the early 1960s, scholars led by George Perle had become convinced that Berg had considered “Lulu” all but complete, and that the available materials, including a short score, made a realization both possible and necessary. Berg’s widow, Helene, banned any such thing, and his publisher, Universal Edition, publicly followed her lead. Privately, it did not.Mr. Cerha, meanwhile, had long been interested in the Second Viennese School, of which Berg was a part. Mr. Cerha had studied with former members of Arnold Schoenberg’s circle and had programmed a work by Anton Webern for the debut concert of Die Reihe, in March 1959. In June 1962, Mr. Cerha saw Karl Böhm lead “Lulu” at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna and found the two-act truncation painful to watch. The next day, he went to the offices of Universal Edition, asked for whatever documents they had and set secretly to work.A scene from Mr. Cerha’s completed edition of Berg’s “Lulu,” staged by the Paris Opera in 1979. Colette Masson/Roger-Viollet, via Granger The task was considerable. Nine hundred or so bars of one of history’s most complex scores were left to orchestrate, and although Berg’s intricate structure meant that material from the first two acts could be reused in the third, some imagination was still needed. It took Mr. Cerha until 1974 to finish it, before making further revisions after Mrs. Berg died in 1976.There was pressure, too — far more than most composers faced in their own work. “Lulu” already had a towering reputation, and its effective banning by the Nazis had kept it a political symbol after the war. When the Paris Opera finally staged Mr. Cerha’s edition, on Feb. 24, 1979, it offered “perhaps the most important and glamorous operatic premiere since the end of World War II,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in a front-page review in The New York Times.Mr. Cerha’s contributions were so successful that he became almost a ghostwriter: He revealed “Lulu” at its full greatness, while shying away from the spotlight.His fellow composers were impressed. Pierre Boulez, who conducted the premiere, said Mr. Cerha had worked “with great care, competence and mastery.” Mr. Perle wrote that “nowhere does one have the impression that a hand other than the composer’s has had to take over.”Gyorgy Ligeti went further, saying in 1986 that Mr. Cerha, a friend, had a “total lack of vanity, which enabled him to enter wholeheartedly into the way of thinking of a congenial yet nevertheless different composer, and to sacrifice thousands of hours, and days, of his own composing.”“No one else,” Ligeti added, “could have done that.”Friedrich Paul Cerha was born in Vienna on Feb. 17, 1926, the only child of Paul and Marie (Falbigel) Cerha. His father was an electrical engineer. Friedrich learned the violin from about age 6 and had written a few compositions by the time of Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.Like his parents, young Friedrich despised Nazism, but was conscripted first to aid the Luftwaffe in air defense and later, in 1944, into the Wehrmacht. He deserted, was caught, was sent to the front and deserted again, this time walking hundreds of miles south from Göttingen, in the middle of Germany, through the Thuringian Forest and into the mountains of Tirol, where he hid at high altitude in a hut at Lamsenjoch.The experience of fascism, and of his freedom from it, left Mr. Cerha with a lifelong reluctance to adhere to aesthetic dogmas, or even to focus solely on music; he painted, and sculpted a stone chapel in woods near his second home in Maria Langegg. After studying in Vienna at the conservatory and the university, from which he earned a doctorate in 1950, he spent three summers at Darmstadt, Germany, the hothouse of the European avant-garde, but did not lastingly embrace a single compositional school over another.“I have never fanatically advocated artistic goals,” Mr. Cerha told Universal Edition’s magazine in 2012. “I always acted from an inner conviction.”The legacy of the war is particularly audible in “Spiegel,” a frightening array of seven soundscapes for orchestra and tape that was arguably Mr. Cerha’s most important work. Dating from 1960-61, its clouds of sound resemble the far shorter, more static works that Ligeti wrote around the same time, like “Atmosphères,” and it made Mr. Cerha famous.But “Spiegel,” which he wrote without regard for practicality and did not premiere as a cycle until 1972, is also quite different, with narrative elements that add up to a terrifying hour-plus portrayal of disastrous force. In “Spiegel VI,” a maniacal march slams into nervous strings and winds, the brass braying grotesquely in the ensuing carnage; in “Spiegel V,” relentless drumrolls herald a consuming darkness — the abyss.“The pieces were invented in a purely musical way,” Mr. Cerha wrote in notes for a recording on the Kairos label. “It was only long after their completion that I understood the degree to which this work was influenced by the horrors of my war experiences and the limitless joy of freedom that I felt as a deserter in the midst of nature.”His wife, Gertraud Cerha, a musician herself, whom he married in 1951, was the keyboard soloist in the 1960 premiere of a serialist piece for harpsichord and ensemble, “Relazioni fragili.” She survives him, as do two daughters, Ruth and Irina, and two grandchildren.For some critics, the “Lulu” experience seemed to draw out a Bergian expressivity in Mr. Cerha’s style, and some of his later works — “Nacht” for orchestra, say, or his “8 Sätze nach Hölderlin-Fragmenten” for string sextet — indeed have a familiar, muted lyricism to them, though others do not. He bridled at the suggestion, however: His own works were his, alone.“That was very strange,” he told Universal Edition of this purported influence. “Before the third act of ‘Lulu’ had its world premiere, nobody ever connected me to Berg, but in the years after, this suddenly happened all the time. People detected a connection to Berg, which is of course nonsense.” More