How human can a film director portray Hitler? Derek Scally reports from Berlin on the latest on-screen Führer furore
Hitler - now there was a painter: he could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon. Two coats! Mel Brooks was the first to have a go at humanising Adolf Hitler, making the dictator an all-singing, all-dancing figure of fun in his 1968 black comedy, The Producers.
It has taken the Germans 36 years to reach the same point with the new film Der Untergang (The Downfall), depicting the dying days in Hitler's Berlin bunker.
The German production is released here next week, but has already spent weeks riding a wave of controversy about how human a film director, particularly a German director, should be allowed portray Hitler.
The man behind the latest Führer furore is producer Bernd Eichinger, who bought the film rights to a book of the same title by German historian Joachim Fest as well as the memoirs of Traudl Junge, Hitler's private secretary.
Much of the film is shot through Frau Junge's eyes, and begins with her interview for a job with a man from whom you really don't want a reference.
When a nervous Frau Junge makes a mess of her practice dictation, the dictator pats her on the shoulder and says in a kindly Austrian lilt: "I say we try that again, eh?" The first scene is unsettling in its banality but tackles head-on the taboo of humanising Hitler, a taboo Eichinger dismisses as "nonsense".
"You have to be able to look at your own history and that is only possible when you show the people who set things in motion, and that's what Hitler did to an extreme extent," he says. "I think it is time that we tell our own story with the means we have available."
The controversy surrounding the film first emerged when Eichinger said he had located what is believed to be the only recording of Hitler speaking in a normal voice, which he gave to his leading man, Bruno Ganz, one of Germany's most celebrated actors.
Ganz is competing with many former screen Hitlers, from Alec Guinness and Anthony Hopkins to the most recent, Robert Carlyle. But he turns in a startling performance, assuredly shifting gears from the familiar garrulous goon to a fatherly Hitler who apologises to Frau Junge, as he hands her a cyanide capsule, that he cannot give her a nicer farewell present.
"The great problem is that Hitler wasn't a devil with two horns, but you cannot be allowed to downplay him either," says Eichinger.
"Instead you have to minutely reconstruct the scenes and through that you can create a many-faceted picture, as many-faceted as any man is." Der Untergang is very German in its thoroughness. All of the by-now familiar scenes from the bunker are reconstructed: here's the shortest-lived wedding before Britney broke the record, there's Magda Goebbels killing her children one after another with cyanide capsules.
The film's approach - to throw as much historical detail at a cinema screen and see what sticks - is breathtaking but exhausting. As the film rolls on towards the three-hour mark - previously, Eichinger produced The Neverending Story - you start to wish Hitler would put us all out of our misery and let us go home.
Ganz delivers a world-class performance, as does Juliane Köhler as a fascinatingly delusional Eva Braun, but they are trapped in a production that is more plodding mini-series than great cinema.
The film's make-or-break scene is a quiet moment between Frau Junge and Eva Braun.
"How can a person who is so thoughtful at the same time be so brutal?" asks Frau Junge as she draws nervously on a cigarette. It's the answer the world has been waiting to hear, straight from the mouth of the future Mrs Hitler.
Eva Braun replies: "You mean, when he is the Führer?" This anticlimactic, non-answer is the moment when the growing feeling that your time is being wasted is confirmed. Rather than a well-educated hypothesis or even the kind of glib answer Eva Braun probably trotted out regularly, the filmmakers chicken out.
The film isn't without merit: that Germans have made this film breaks a taboo but shows a new level of maturity and self-criticism.
But the producer's supposed historical coup - showing a rounded Hitler interacting as a human with his inner circle - is beside the point. It was not as a human that Hitler murdered millions of European Jews and brought Europe to its knees. It is not the friendly, father-like figure portrayed in this film who seized power to become the second most written-about man after Jesus Christ.
Der Untergang would be better titled: "At Home With Hitler - See the Führer as you've never seen him before!" But getting up close and personal with Adolf teaches us that the Nazi leader didn't always shout, and not much more besides.
It is an entertaining film but also an important example of how if you have nothing to say - particularly about Hitler - it's best to say nothing at all.
Why did the producers think the world needed yet another Hitler film? David Irving, the discredited right-wing historian, gave one answer when asked two decades ago how the forged Hitler Diaries scandal could have happened. Because too many people wanted the diaries to be real, he replied.
Then, in a throwaway remark, he added: "Hitler is still big box office."