‘Ohm Kruger’ Fascinates--and Repels

Emil Jannings’ “Ohm Kruger” (“Uncle Kruger”), which screens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Dorothy Collins Brown Auditorium as part of the “From Caligari to Hitler” series, is one of the most astonishingly hypocritical movies ever made. As art it is ponderous but as propaganda it is endlessly fascinating.

Jannings, who was widely regarded as the greatest actor in the world when he won the very first best actor Academy Award, later became an ardent Nazi and, in 1940, head of UFA. At that point, he starred, produced and largely directed this talky and tedious 1941 historical drama on South African (Transvaal) Republic President Paul Kruger and the Boer War as an anti-British tirade.

In this free adaptation of Arnold Krigger’s novel “Man Without a People,” Jannings clearly never perceived a parallel between the Nazi aggression that precipitated World War II and British imperialism in South Africa. Nor did he find any irony in making a hero of Kruger just at the time Germany occupied Holland. As for the native African population, Jannings’ Kruger never gives a thought to them as a conquered, colonized people; to him they’re just child-like creatures in need of his heavy paternal hand--especially when British missionaries are passing out rifles to them while singing “God Save the Queen”!

When Cecil Rhodes (Ferdinand Marian) is trying to persuade Kruger of the wisdom of Britain and Germany avoiding war and of divvying up South Africa’s gold mines (opened in 1886), one cannot help but be reminded of the role oil has played in the Persian Gulf War. Yet the most stupefying sequence of this film comes toward the end, when Jannings depicts, of all things, a concentration camp in which the British are starving Boer women, including Kruger’s own wife and daughter-in-law.

You have to come away with this film with pessimism renewed in regard to the capacity of individuals and nations in learning the lessons of history.

“Ohm Kruger” will be preceded at 8 by “Heimat,” a 1938 version of the Hermann Sudermann play starring Zarah Leander, and will be accompanied by a lecture on propaganda and censorship.

Among the other films screening this week in this LACMA series is Reinhold Schunzel’s delightfully durable “Viktor und Viktoria” (1933), which was remade in 1981 by Blake Edwards as “Victor/Victoria.” Renate Muller is the lovely singer, desperate for work in the depths of the Depression, who accepts a job as a female impersonator, which in effect makes her a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. Edwards put a crucial spin on the material by making the singer’s female impersonator mentor gay. “Viktor und Viktoria” screens Saturday in Bing Theater at 8 p.m.