Even more regularly than John Huston and Samuel Goldwyn (and with an overall higher success-to-failure ratio), Volker Schlöndorff reaches for books with literary prestige. On its original release, I was disappointed by Schlöndorff's Oscar-winning film of Günter Grass's greatest novel The Tin Drum, but thought that he improved upon a famous novel by Germany's other post-Word War II Nobel Prize-winning author, Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,. Finally being able to see Schlöndorff's first movie, I think that it a more-than-creditable adaptation of Austrian novelist Robert Musil's troubling and prophetic The Young Törless. Marguerite Yourcenar's Coup de Grâce is less cinematic than it seems, and the screen adaptation threw off the balance of the novel in the adaptation by Schlöndorff's then-wife Margarethe von Trottathat made her role the central one.

The Prix Goncourt-winning novel by Michel Tournier known in English as The Ogre and The Erl-King and in German as Der Unhold sprawls as much (albeit in fewer pages) asThe Tin Drum. Reading it (many years ago), I didn't think it was particularly filmable. The book has lots of interior monologue, though the parts that Schlöndorff (and Tin Drum scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière,) chose to film are strong in imagery, most notably that of St. Christopher carrying a child to safety.

The very unheroic Abel Tiffauges (like Schlöndorff at a later age) lived in a Jesuit boarding school. As a child, he only had one friend, wose death he believes he indirectly caused by wishing that the school would burn down so that he wouldn't be punished. That the school ignited just then convinced Abel he had special powers… and that he should be careful what he wished for.

The adult Abel (John Malkovich) is a mechanic with no discernable adult friends or romantic liaisons. His hobby is photographing children (no, not naked ones!). He is unjustly accused by a petulant girl of being her assailant (no, not rapist), but disaster again saves him, and he is enlisted in the army rather than tried for assault.

The war is soon lost, and Abel is shipped off to East Prussia as a POW. He becomes a gamekeeper for the vast hunting grounds of Fieldmarshall Hermann Goering.

Abel's complicity with evil as a servant of Goering is only the beginning (though a very scenic one). He manages to get transferred to a castle that has been requisitioned from a count who is himself a Nazi officer though contemptuous of Hitler, played by Armin Mueller-Stahl (Shine, Utz, Lola) and turned into a boarding school for the Aryan elite run by the SS. His ability to resonate with children is exploited by having Abel tour the surrounding area (on horseback) finding young boys to enroll in the SS school. It is in this capacity that he comes to be labeled by parents whose children he has snatched away for the Nazi training academy the ogre.

In the movie, even more than in the book, Abel does not understand that the boys will be cannon fodder as the Red Army advances. Rather than grappling with the official anti-Semitism (as in the book), Abel simply saves and shelters (and finally serves as a St. Christopher for) a Jewish boy who was somehow escaped a concentration camp. He is unable to convince the cadets to surrender and the Götterdammerung destruction of Abel's Valhalla would seem to me to have enough explosions to satisfy the typical young male American movie-goers, I would think, although American release of this 1996 movie was delayed (the fate also of another European movie shot in English with an excellent John Malkovich performance, Ripley's Game).

Tournier's grim fairy tale is clearly about innocence. However, Tournier's Abel is less easily redeemed than the one fashioned by Carrieèe, Schlöndorff, and Malkovich. Abel is used, but I regard his obliviousness as culpable, not least in that Count von John entrusts his journal to Abel when the count is arrested for being a part of the plot to assassinate Hitler. The movie's Goering is bloated and petulant, but more sympathetic than monstrous. The bravura cinematography of Bruno de Keyzer ('Round Midnight ) makes the Nazi rituals disturbingly mesmerizing (for the audience, not just for the Hitler Youth). (Not that I think that Schlöndorff, or the others who worked on the movie have any sympathy for Nazism; indeed Schlöndorff,'s horror at what Germans of his parent's generation did is a leitmotif of his oeuvre.)

The very restrained performance by John Malkovich ()an actor certainly capable of laying on mannerisms!) makes it impossible to imagine anyone else playing the man-child Abel. Playing a not-well-socialized Frenchman within the black-shirted heart of the Nazi regime, Malkovich is appropriately deracinated, picking up some German, otherwise speaking English rather than French (Schlöndorff, is completely fluent in all three, but, as far as I know has directed movies only in German and English, though he was an assistant to Louis Malle and Alain Resnais before starting to direct movies).

The supporting cast is also excellent. It includes Marianne Sägebrecht (Bagdad Café), who does not have much to do but provides another benign presence within the SS academy. Michael Nyman's music does not stick out much, so I can't call it "outstanding," but it is very effective.

There is less magical realism than in "The Tin Drum," and a similar focus on a misfit who is unable (rather than unwilling, as Oskar was) to grow up and finds the trappings of fascism fascinating (to borrow Susan Sontag's adjective)… and survives amidst chaos and evil. The way nonparticipant observers of evil are complicit with evil is clearer in The Young Törless (and Lost Honor) than in either "The Tine Drum" or "The Ogre." Perhaps, I am too accustomed to having the music and screenplay dotting every "I," tell me what to feel or think about what is shown, though it seems to me that the end of the movie "Ogre" is telling me that Abel has redeemed himself in protecting and ferrying a Jewish child out of the flames and through the marshes, and I resist this seeming exoneration. Abel sees some of those he "recruited" (or stole) being killed in battle, the destruction of the castle and of many more of his cherished boys, and the hatred for Jews by the end, but still does not seem to understand what his role in all that has been.

----

lLthough I am glad that the DVD is available, having learned much from what director Schlöndorff has to say on Criterion DVDs, I regret that he does not have a chance to comment on his intentions and experiences in filming "The Ogre." The disc has no extras at all, alas.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD