The 100 Best War Movies: #96. Conspiracy (2001)

 

“Conspiracy” was made by HBO. It was directed by Frank Pierson.  It stars Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich. He won an Emmy for acting.  Screenwriter Loring Mandel also won an Emmy.  It was nominated for Outstanding TV Movie and Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth were nominated for Best Supporting Actor.  Tucci won a Golden Globe.  He is the only American in the movie.  The house where the conference took place was used for exterior shots, but the inside of the house was replicated on a sound stage. 

                The movie starts with shots of servants preparing the house (which had been confiscated from a Jewish family) as though its Downton Abbey and the King is coming.  Fifteen government officials arrive and wait for the grand entrance of Heydrich.  They are all Nazis and by the time introductions are over, you will have heard “Heil, Hitler” 35 times.  Heydrich was director of the Reich Security Home Office.  He is there to get advice from them, but he is very much in charge and steers the suggestions to what he wants.  Around the table is an assortment of bureaucrats, toadies, psychopaths, and buffoons.  There is a “storage problem” when it comes to Jewish people.  Not everyone is on board with an extreme solution.  Some of the bureaucrats speak against it, risking Heydrich’s steely glare.  Dr. Kirtzinger (David Threlfell) insists that Hitler has told him there would be no extermination.  Heydrich responds that Hitler will continue to say that, wink, wink.  Dr. Stuckart (Colin Firth) feels the Nuremberg Laws (which he wrote) should not be expanded.  He favors sterilization.  The biggest ass-kisser makes the case for using the Jews for slave labor, but no one listens to him because nobody likes him. There is some discussion of forced emigration, but even the U.S. doesn’t want them.  (I have to admit, they are not wrong here.)  The problem is just going to get worse because soon the German army will have finished off the Soviet Union.  (They don’t see Stalingrad coming later that year.)  The discussion moves from evacuation to extermination.  The Jews need to be “physically eradicated”.  Eichmann gives an update on the efficiency of gas in killing large numbers of Jews in disguised showers.  Almost all of the guests bang on the table to show they are impressed.  “Keep the trains rolling!” says the smirking Heydrich.  By the end, everyone is on board with exterminating Jews by way of death camps.  To hell with the military’s need for the trains.  The movie closes with Heydrich and Eichmann listening to a record by Schubert, a Jew.

ACTING:  A                         

ACTION:  N/A                     

ACCURACY:  B      

PLOT:  A                  

REALISM:  A                      

CINEMATOGRAPHY:   A

SCORE:  none                      

BEST SCENE:  Heydrich and Kitzinger speak outside 

BEST QUOTE: Heydrich:  We will not sterilize every Jew and wait for them to die. We will not sterilize every Jew and then exterminate the race. That's farcical. Dead men don't hump, dead women don't get pregnant. Death is the most reliable form of sterilization, put it that way.

                The acting is stellar, especially by Branagh and Firth.  The actors stayed in costume and in character throughout each day of shooting.  The movie was shot in long segments that required memorization of long stretches of dialogue.  This helps give the movie the feel of a play.  The set did not have movable walls, so Super 16 mm. film was used to get an intimate vibe.  If it wasn’t for the daylight, this could be a horror movie.  The dialogue is certainly horrific.  And some of it comes from the malevolent, yet charming, Heydrich.  He takes Kirtzinger and Stuckart aside to threaten them with toeing the line.  It was dangerous to be a moderate in Nazi politics. 

                It is chilling to see this reenactment of a meeting that resulted in the killing of millions of human beings.  It is informative because although most people are familiar with the Holocaust, few are knowledgeable about how it came about.  The implementation did not come from Hitler.  He supported the idea of a “final solution”, but it was underlings who implemented it.  The movie makes it clear that organized extermination was not agreed on until this meeting.  It might surprise some to see that there was a disagreement about what to do.  However, the dissenters were not prepared to risk their careers over details.  In the end, bureaucrats and soldiers joined in streamlining the worst war crime in history.

                How accurate is it?  We do have the transcript, but Eichmann edited it to take out some comments that even Heydrich felt went too far, on paper.  Given the template, it is possible to create dialogue that accurately represents the discussion.  In reality, Heydrich opened the conference with an hour summary of where the Jewish problem stood at the beginning of 1942.  Then there was 30 minutes of discussion.  The movie gives the impression that the Final Solution was agreed to at the conference.  In fact, the extermination was already underway.  The meeting was aimed at getting everyone on board to make the extermination more efficient.  The movie has more dissension than actually was evident from the transcript.  Kitzinger does not speak in the transcript.  His role as the moral dissenter is historical license.  Stuckart did not disagree with Heydrich as forcefully as in the movie.  He did make a case for sterilization, but it was more a legal exercise and Heydrich did not have to threaten him to get him to on board.  The movie is better viewed as a summary of measures that were insufficient to genocide and a preview of the extermination camps.