Last Years of Third Reich Cinema

The final week of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “From Caligari to Hitler” series brings the monumental spectacles that highlighted the last years of the Third Reich cinema.

The first to screen is Veit Harlan’s 1945 “Kolberg” (screening tonight at 9:45 in Bing Theater), said to be Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’ pet project and conceived in 1941. It dramatizes the resistance of the citizens of Kolberg, Prussia, to Napoleon’s advancing armies in 1806.

Once again, Harlan demonstrates his shameless, peerless skill at rabble-rousing. In “Jud Suss,” he whipped up a whirlwind of anti-Semitic frenzy in calling for the banishment of Jews from Germany; in the handsome, stylish “Kolberg,” he makes an equally emotional plea to the German citizenry to make limitless sacrifices for the Fatherland’s preservation.

Hans Albers (1892-1960), one of Germany’s most popular screen actor at the advent of World War II, can be seen in Josef von Baky’s celebrated 1943 Agfacolor “Munchausen” (Friday at 3:05 and l0:05 p.m.) and in Helmut Kautner’s 1944 “Great Freedom No. 7” (Saturday at 9:45 p.m., following the 8 p.m. screening of “Titanic”).

This “Munchausen” is talky, but it eventually casts its spell with its exquisite settings and charm and poignance as Albers’ Baron grows weary of his eternal middle age.

In the superbly designed “Great Freedom No. 7,” is set in Hamburg’s rowdy St. Pauli waterfront district where Albers, a seaman working as a cabaret singer, is tormented by his love for a beautiful woman (Ilse Werner) much younger than he.

Herbert Selpin’s “Titanic” (1943) is a terrific, fast-moving entertainment, a floating “Grand Hotel” with superb Beaux Arts interiors and a spectacular finish. Predictably, the one officer aboard who senses danger in the attempt to make a record-setting run from Liverpool to New York is a German (Hans Nielsen); yet there could be no more fitting metaphor for the pride, folly and ruthlessness of the Third Reich than the sinking of the Titanic as portrayed here.

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