Speer Goes to Hollywood
Speer at home in Heidelberg. © Copyright Andrew Birkin, all rights reserved.
Vanessa Lapa | Israel, 2020 | English/French/German (English subtitles) | Documentary | 97m | 2K DCP | IMDB | Distributor/Sales: Realworks | Festival marketing sample: Berlinale 2020
(This review replaces one that was originally written on 27 February 2020.)
Description: Albert Speer, Hitler’s War Munitions Minister was charged in Nuremberg with the same four counts and convicted of the same two counts as his underling Fritz Sauckler, yet he escaped with a 20 year prison sentence while the latter was hanged. Suffering abhorrent conditions of overwork and internment, a third of the 12 million slave labourers in his factories perished. On his release, Speer wrote a bestselling memoir, Inside the Third Reich, which minimised his complicity and helped rehabilitate his reputation. Fluent in both French and English, Speer charmed television interviewers when promoting his book.
In 1971, scriptwriter Andrew Birkin, an English protegé of Stanley Kubrick’s, was tasked with developing a screenplay adaptation of the memoir for Paramount. He recorded about 44 hours of conversations with Speer as they worked through various drafts. Together with footage from the trials, these recordings form a backbone of this film. The suave and polite Speer is heard trying to persuade Birkin to reconsider scenes and details that make him look bad. Revealing clips and stills of Speer enjoying his retirement country life and his entreaties of Birkin to enjoy refreshments or to join him for a restaurant meal at the end of their sessions are used to great effect. Birkin’s cousin, Carol Reed, with whom he consults, is far less sanguine and is deeply skeptical of the script draft he has seen. In the end credits we are told that Paramount dropped the project. A year after Speer’s death a TV movie adaptation of his memoir was released. There is no suggestion that Birkin had anything to do with this version.
Merits: Lapa, who previously worked on The Decent One, a documentary on Heinrich Himmler, spent a decade unearthing rarely used archival footage for both films. This impressive effort will be greatly appreciated by anyone who has seen many holocaust documentaries recycle the same imagery,
In The Decent One, Lapa used actors voicing candid excerpts from Himmler’s personal letters and diaries to structure that film. Similarly, to prove Speer’s attempts at obfuscation, charm and deceit, she used the recordings of Birkin and Speer’s conversations in Speer Goes to Hollywood. When I first saw this film at its Berlinale premiere I was under the erroneous impression that I was hearing the actual recordings of Birkin and Speer. This impression was repeatedly reenforced by footage of an audio cassette winding as they speak. The end credits disclose that voice actors were used. Moreover, there appears to be some controversy on how these recordings were transcribed and what they prove.
While it remains indisputable that after the war Speer did whatever he could to save his skin and whitewash his legacy, is it too simplistic to end it there? Without excusing the terrible crimes of which he was guilty, the experience of Birkin and others who have spent considerable time with him suggests that Speer was no psychopath but terrifyingly human. How many of us, if offered the astonishing opportunities that Speer was, would resist being drawn into making the abhorrent moral choices that he had? Perhaps a more nuanced approach would have resulted in a more compelling documentary.
Rating: Concentration camp imagery.
Programming considerations: The actor voicing Speer speaks in a heavily accented English that is at times difficult to understand. Consider sourcing a version with closed caption English subtitles.