They know they’re likely to be caught and that their actions amount to little more than “throwing sand in the gears” of the Nazi machine. It’s a crude but effective form of home-front propaganda that infuriates the authorities. He and his wife place the cards in doorways or on staircases. The first one warns mothers that Hitler could well kill their sons too. He writes postcards in laborious long hand. Once he has scribbled under a picture of Hitler in a book that the Fuhrer is a liar, the next step is to share this information as widely as he can. Gleeson plays him with melancholy gravitas. He’s not a member of the Nazi party and has hitherto kept his reservations about it to himself. Otto is foreman in a factory, good with his hands but very taciturn and with only limited education. Their grief at the death of their son drives them into their own form of resistance against Hitler. ![]() They’re determinedly ordinary: an inconspicuous lower middle-class German couple, living in a drab apartment block. They’re similar to Ethel & Ernest, the British husband and wife in Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel. In Fallada’s story, adapted for the screen by director Vincent Perez, Otto Quangel (Brendan Gleeson) and his wife Anna (Emma Thompson) are the couple resisting against Hitler in their own idiosyncratic way. The Hampels inspired Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone (also known as Alone In Berlin). It is based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, a couple who left hand-written notes dotted around early 1940s Berlin, attacking the Nazi regime, after Elise’s brother was killed in the war. This is a decent but dour film about decent but dour people making their own small-scale but extremely poignant protests against Hitler. ![]() Dir: Vincent Perez, 103 mins, starring : Brendan Gleeson, Emma Thompson, Daniel Brühl, Mikael Persbrandt
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