REVIEW:
A FILM TO END ANTI-GERMAN HATRED
Move Over Spielberg -- Here Comes "The
Basket"
Reviewed by Michael A. Hoffman II
Several years ago I became so exasperated with the flood of anti-German
films and television programs that I began to compile a list of them, which
eventually grew to several hundred such films and evolved into a pamphlet
("Hate Whitey: The Cinema of Defamation").
How does one cope with this tsunami of defamation? The only genuine antidote
is a film that would tell the truth about the Germans. I have good news:
after years of waiting and hoping, finally one has emerged, produced locally,
here where I make my home, in the Northwest.
"The Basket"
(http://www.thebasket.net) is a gem
of a film from North by Northwest Productions, which up until last year,
had only made commercials and industrial films. It is set in 1918 outside
Spokane, Washington and concerns two German war orphans, Helmut and Brigitta
Brink (played by Robert Karl Burke and Amber Willenborg), who spent six months
in the Brownsville Internment camp before being offered a home in rural
Washington by a local minister.
Few Americans know that during World War I, American jingoism led to a wave
of anti-German bigotry and hysteria. Sauerkraut had to be called Liberty
Cabbage and German-Americans were hounded, hunted, beaten and persecuted.
In "The Basket" Helmut and his older sister are faced with the prejudice
of the time. Helmut is beaten at school. Brigitta's sewing service is boycotted
by townsfolk. Both are threatened with a return to the internment camp.
In a pivotal scene, Brigitta is confronted by an American soldier who has
returned from the front, the son of one of the area wheat farmers. His leg
has been amputated as a result of his war wound. "Look at what Huns like
you did to me!" he screams in agony at her.
Had this been a Steven Spielberg opus, Brigitta would have genuflected before
the soldier in abject self-hatred and said something like, "I will make
reparation for the sins of my people."
But in "The Basket," she answers with passionate conviction, "No, it was
not the 'Hun' who did this, but soldiers like you."
She establishes a sane equivalence: German soldiers are no different from
Americans. Both fight and die under orders of their superiors. War is the
enemy, not the people trapped by it.
While compassionately wiping the feverish American soldier's forehead with
a cloth, the German girl informs him that both her parents were killed by
Americans (we view their deaths in a flashback sequence).
In other words, Brigitta bears no hate and neither should the American. Later
her brother Helmut angrily tears down a storefront recruiting poster showing
an ape in a German army uniform, underneath which is the caption, "Join
Today--Fight the Hun."
In Spielbergian cinema, heroism and victimhood are reserved only for the
Allies. Germans are the incomprehensible, unfathomable "Other," who are never
humanized. War is glorified because one side (the Americans) represent absolute
goodness and moral necessity while the Germans are absolutely evil and at
the same time, anonymous.
In "Saving Private Ryan," Spielberg used an old trick of war propaganda,
he humanized the American troops by taking us to their campfires, where we
overheard their stories about wives and lovers left behind, learning their
fears and misgivings. But he never accorded the same treatment to the Germans,
because he did not want his audience to discover their humanity, lest they
comprehend the tragedy of war.
In "The Basket" the angelic German youths are not only fully human, they
are possessed of the nobility of forgiveness and compassion, and the German
virtues of hard work and self-sacrifice.
The movie is leisurely and low key. It takes its time to tell its story,
which is also about German opera and American basketball. Points are not
telegraphed or hammered, they are conveyed with nuance as soft and warm as
the golden light of the wheat fields of the Palouse region of Washington,
a landscape magnificently photographed by cinematographer Dan Heigh.
There is little that is low budget about "The Basket." It stars the notable
movie actors Peter Coyote and Karen Allen as well as Coeur d'Alene's own
Ellen Travolta (the sister of John Travolta and a fine actress in her own
right).
"The Basket" is having its premiere at the AMC River Park Square 20
theatres(http://www.amctheatres.com), in downtown Spokane (at Main and Post).
I hope everyone in the north Idaho and eastern Washington area will make
the effort to see this film and especially to encourage youngsters--who are
taught by our public schools and Hollywood to despise Germans--to view it.
The extent of its future distribution will depend on how well it does in
Spokane, although, happily, a German distribution company has already bought
the rights to it for theatres in Germany, and it should be issued on
videocassette in the U.S. in about a year.
I spoke with the talented Don Caron, who co-wrote the screenplay and composed
the film's powerful music. He told me, "Hollywood says that nobody wants
to see this movie."
This is just what we would expect from Tinseltown's monopolists. But like
it or not, "The Basket" is the beginning of a trend away from the caricatured
and polarizing theme of Holy People Who Can Do No Wrong As They Make War
on Wickedness.
I don't think it imprudent to surmise that it is cartoonish distillations
of history like the "Indiana Jones" melodramas and the slick, much ballyhooed
"Private Ryan" epic, which have contributed, in part, to the rise of the
mindless approval Americans have accorded the recent, taxpayer-funded mass
murder of Iraqi and Serb civilians.
An anti-war movie from independent film makers, challenging this hatred and
militarism, has been overdue. Now it has arrived, a harbinger that better
times are coming.
Score one for genuine peace and understanding, thanks to "The Basket."
{Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated
Press]
Links:
This review is online at
http://www.hoffman-info.com/thebasket.html
The "File on Steven Spielberg: Master of Indoctrination" is online at:
http://www.hoffman-info.com/spielberg.html