Television Reviews : ‘Sins of the Fathers’ Litter Cutting Room Floor

“Sins of the Fathers,” a two-part drama airing at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on Showtime, is undermined by sins of the editors. It’s a lot like life. While watching it, you have only a vague sense of what’s happening.

As for the editing of this handsome but largely incomprehensible foreign production, butchery comes to mind. This appears to be a cut-down version of a longer story, one in which key scenes have been thoughtlessly omitted.

Written and directed by Bernhard Sinkel, “Sins of the Fathers” follows the evolution of an old-line German firm that is the fictional equivalent of I. G. Farben, the famed chemical trust known especially for manufacturing the poison gases used by Germans in World War I and a generation later in Nazi death camps.

The story muddles its way across 1911-48, during which the fictional Deutz family’s fortunes rise and fall with those of the Fatherland--from World War I to Germany’s economic chaos of the 1920s and early 1930s, through World War II, ending with the Nuremberg trials.

The “sins” in the title refer as much to sexual degeneracy as to the firm’s contributions to German malfeasance and its use of slave labor from concentration camps.

Almost everyone is under the sheets here except for rigid family patriarch Carl Julius Deutz (Burt Lancaster), who tends toward the obsessive. He keels over and dies one day after looking into the mirror and declaring: “Life in business--that’s what we’re here for, and pride becomes us best.” It’s a line that would kill anyone.

The firm is ultimately run by Carl’s playboy son Fredrich (Dieter Laser) and his chemist son-in-law Heinrich (Bruno Ganz) and another man who is never explained. The fuzzy mix also includes Heinrich’s wife, Charlotte (Julie Christie), who is the former wife of Heinrich’s late brother, and lover of the Jewish Max Bernheim, who will fall for Charlotte’s daughter, who is lusted after by the Nazi Sokolowski, who is a former classmate of Charlotte’s son Georg, which you learn only from reading the production notes supplied by Showtime.

At one point in Part 2, everyone pleads with Sokolowski to withdraw his “statement” to the Nazis against Max. But . . . there hasn’t been any statement.

There are individual scenes here that are well acted and powerful, but they’re disconnected. The gaping holes and interjection of unexplained characters and twists renders this potentially good story a baffling mess.

You have the feeling that half of “Sins of the Fathers” was left on the cutting room floor. The best half.