Charlie Chaplin made a really great and funny and dangerous film about Nazi Germany, but Ulli Lommel's ADOLF AND MARLENE is nothing less of a masterpiece. This film needs to be discovered, it is as good if not better as the best Fassbinder films, I should add maybe that Rainer Werner Fassbinder produced this film and also has a starring role. Lommel himself appears as propaganda minister Joesph Goebbels and Margot Carstensen, the superstar of many great Fassbinder films, plays Marlene Dietrich, who has several scenes with Hitler, performed beautifully by Kurt Raab, in which she gives the Fuhrer hell. Michael Ballshaus did the camera work. Ballhaus later went to Hollywood and worked with Coppola, Mike Nichols and other greats. He also shot many awesome Fassbinder films, such as Chinese ROULETTE, in which Lommel plays a leading role and the newly restored WORLD ON A WIRE (also with Ulli Lommel as an investigative journalist). It's very hard to get a DVD of this gem, but I saw it in Paris recently at the Cinemateque Francaise, and the 35mm print was pristine.
Review of Adolf und Marlene
