‘Schindler’s List’ turns 30: In praise of this landmark film
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Steven Spielberg had tackled serious subjects before, but none of his previous work had the power and artistic vision of “Schindler’s List,” which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Based on the book by Thomas Keneally, “Schindler’s List” relates the true story of Nazi party member and war profiteer Oskar Schindler, who ended up saving 1,000 Jews from the Nazi death camps during World War II. Shot in black-and-white-save for a little girl wearig red coat- ‘Schindler’s List” is often a difficult watch, but it’s message of “Never Forget” is particularly relevant today with the rise of anti-Semitism and the white power movement. The epic stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ben Kingsley as the Jewish manager of Schindler’s factor and Ralph Fiennes, terrifying as a ruthless Nazi commandant Amon Goth.
The reviews were laudatory and despite its length — 3 hours 15 minutes — “Schindler’s List” made over $322 million worldwide. Nominated for 12 Oscars including best actor for Neeson and supporting for Fiennes, “Schindler’s List” won seven Academy Awards including best film, director, cinematography, adapted screenplay and for John Williams’ haunting score.
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In 2004, Spielberg told “Today”: “Let’s call it what it is. I didn’t take a single dollar from the profits I received from ‘Schindler’s List’ because I did consider it blood money.” He created the Shoah Foundation in 1994-it has been at located USC since 2006- to both videotape and preserve interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses. Currently, the Institute is home to 56,000 audio-visual testimonies.
And now three decades after “Schindler’s List,” another Holocaust-themed movie, Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” has received stellar reviews and numerous awards including Cannes’ Grand Prize of the Festival and is a strong contender for Oscar nominations
Even before “Schindler’s List,” there were several Holocaust films which connected with audiences and critics. Alain Renais’ 1956 “Night and Fog” was one of the first films to return to the death camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek. The 32-minute documentary visits these camps ten years after their liberation; Renais brilliantly juxtaposes color footage of the stillness of these abandoned camps with the black-and-white film shot there during the war. Francois Truffaut wrote in a 1956 Cahiers du Cinema that “Night and Fog” was “the most noble and necessary film ever made.”
The first Hollywood narrative film to examine the Holocaust was George Stevens’ 1959 “The Diary of Anne Frank,” based on the book by the young girl who died in the Holocaust, and the 1955 Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name. Newcomers Millie Perkins and Diane Baker star as Anne and her older sister Margot. Joseph Schildkraut and Gusti Huber reprised their stage roles as Otto and Edith Frank. The well-respected, moving drama earned eight Oscar nominations including best film, director and supporting actor for comic Ed Wynn in one of is rare dramatic roles. Shelley Winters received best supporting actress-she also donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The film also won Oscars for black-and-white cinematography and art direction and set decoration.
Sidney Lumet directed the stark, unsettling 1964 “The Pawnbroker.” He revealed that he was influenced by “Night and Fog.’ Rod Steiger is riveting as a German Jewish Holocaust survivor who witnessed the death of his two children and the rape of his wife in the camp. Now 25 years later, he operates a pawn shop in East Harlem. What he witnessed and went through in the camps have left him a shell of a man who is beyond bitter. The New York Times found it a “remarkable” picture: a “dark and haunting drama of a man who has reasonably eschewed a role of involvement and compassion in a brutal and bitter world and has found his life barren and rootless as a consequence. It is further a drama of discovery of the need of man to try to do something for his fellow human sufferers in the troubled world of today.” Steiger received his first best actor nomination for “The Pawnbroker”
Meryl Streep won her first best actress Oscar for her poignant, heartbreaking performance in 1982’s “Sophie’s Choice” based on the best-seller by William Styron. Janet Maslin in the New York Times called her worked “bravura” adding Meryl Streep “accomplishes the near-impossible, presenting Sophie in believably human terms without losing the scale of Mr. Styron’s invention. In a role affording every opportunity for overstatement, she offers a performance of such measured intensity that the results are by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking.”
Streep plays a Polish survivor of Auschwitz with a deep dark secret who is now living in boarding house in Brooklyn with her mentally troubled boyfriend (Kevin Kline) and a young, impressionable writer (Peter MacNichol). And once you see her secret-especially her voiceless scream of horror-your heart will sink. Alan J. Pakula directed the classic which was also nominated for adapted screenplay, costume design, cinematography and Marvin Hamlisch’s exquisite score.
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