Cartoon evil

I thought that serious movies and TV shows had gone beyond making their villains cartoonish! Robert Carlyle playing Hitler looks like someone out of a Monty Python skit, what with the over-the-top anger, the tiny mustache and the slightly oversized clothes. Chris Larkin playing Goering does not look like the former athlete and World War I hero that Goering was.

Evil is more easily dismissed if it is portrayed as being cartoonish. Evil is perpetrated by people like us, and it should be realistically portrayed as such so as to be able to resist it.

J. Gregory Keene

Lake Forest

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Why are people making such a big deal about the new CBS miniseries, especially since there have been made-for-television and feature films about Hitler before, and with such brilliant actors as Anthony Hopkins (“The Bunker”), Alec Guinness (“Hitler: The Last Ten Days”), Derek Jacobi (“Inside the Third Reich”) and Noah Taylor (“Max”)? I am Jewish, and I don’t see what all the commotion is about. Hitler might have hated my people and committed genocide against us, but that doesn’t mean history, no matter how evil or cruel, should be sugarcoated, or coated in general.

I am looking forward to watching this CBS movie, because Robert Carlyle is an excellent actor.

Jeremy L. Vandow

Oceanside, N.Y.

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There was a major omission in the mention of the actors who played the Roman emperor Caligula in “Taking a few cues from history’s villains” (March 9). John Hurt and Malcolm McDowell were preceded by the greatest and most true-to-historical Caligula of them all: Jay Robinson, who played the evil despot as the supercilious young maniac he most certainly was in “The Robe” (1953), as well as in its less historically accurate sequel, “Demetrius and the Gladiators” (1954). Twentieth Century Fox rushed the sequel into production largely because Robinson’s stunning, skin-crawling portrait in “The Robe” of absolute power corrupting absolutely blew co-stars Richard Burton, Jean Simmons and Victor Mature off the screen.

Larry Alexander

Sherman Oaks