‘Enemies’ Remake: New Cast, Familiar Theme

Rod Serling’s haunting drama “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” resurfaces Sunday with a fresh cast and 1990s gloss, a production somewhat arresting because of its subject matter yet flawed.

The occasion is a Showtime movie directed by Joan Micklin Silver, with Armin Mueller-Stahl, Elina Lowensohn, Don McKellar, Chad Lowe and Charles Dance featured in this Holocaust story that initially aired 37 years ago on the late, great “Playhouse 90.”

The setting is bleak. Serling sank his characters in Nazi-conquered Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto just prior to the famed 1943 uprising, miring them in squalor, disease, terror, death and hopelessness.

The Showtime staging becomes its own ghetto, ironically, projecting very much the insular, confining quality of an antique TV play, as Rabbi Adam Heller (Mueller-Stahl) has only his faith to sustain him against the Nazis. He appears overmatched when a cruel German officer (Dance) takes a sexual interest in his daughter, Rachel (Lowensohn), and when his son, Paul (McKellar), returns after escaping from Treblinka, irrevocably scarred and resentful of his aging father’s passivity.

The story’s inherent power as a human tragedy and morality tale is almost a given, its final chapter played out in the dank sewers beneath Warsaw where the rabbi must make an agonizing Sophie’s choice. Yet “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” is also largely predictable. The young German soldier Lott (Lowe), for example, is en route to a moral crossroads that you see coming almost from the time you set eyes on him. And the erratic Paul’s treatment of his sister, even taking into account his deep emotional wounds, is inexplicable.

Looming apart from all of this is the fundamental issue of remaking this story, one whose theme was unusual for television of an earlier age, but which today becomes just another Holocaust study that merges in a blur with the many others that have preceded it.

* “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” airs at 8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime. The network has rated the film TV-PG (may not be suitable for young children).