All The World's A Stage - The Work of Ralph Fiennes

[Mary Frances]

It's Pronounced RAFE FINES
Schindler's Demon Makes A Name For Himself

Entertainment Weekly
March 4, 1994

In Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg's masterful contemplation of the Holocaust, the face of evil has gentle eyes and a runny nose, cherubic cheeks and a quiet voice. And though the movie is at heart a story of unlikely heroism, it is that improbable-looking villain, Nazi commandant Amon Goeth, who follows you home after the credits roll and the audience files silently from the theater. For Goeth could give even Lucifer pause. This was a man who would stand on his balcony, bare-chested and bloated, aiming his rifle at children; a man responsible for the murder of 4,000 Jews his first month as a commander of the Plaszow labor camp.
Like the Holocaust itself, he is unfathomable. Yet in Schindler's List, Amon Goeth is rendered human by Ralph Fiennes, a heretofore obscure British actor who has emerged from the London fog to become the most talked-about thing in the most talked-about movie of this year's Oscar race. Reviewers have been fraying their thesauruses to praise him, and so far, Fiennes' performance has earned him a prize from the New York Film Critics Circle and an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

"Spielberg emphasized that he didn't want any obvious Nazi stuff," says Fiennes, 31. "I do not want to excuse Goeth, but ultimately he was human... He was a kid in diapers at one point, and he had all this potential to be something, and he went the wrong way. That, to me, is tragic." Says Schindler's Embeth Davidtz, who plays Goeth's battered maid, Helen Hirsch: " Ralph didn't make [Goeth] a monster. He found this little boy squashed inside this Nazi overcoat."

Who is the guy behind the bad guy? If you said "Ralph Fiennes," you're wrong. His name (it's Welsh) is pronounced Rafe Fines. The eldest of six children, he was born in Suffolk and grew up in Ireland, where his father, a farmer-turned-photographer, moved the family when Fiennes was 6. Fiennes studied painting at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, switched to acting, and left the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991 to pursue a film career from London, where he lives with his wife, actress Alex Kingston. Before Schindler's List, he had only two big-screen roles, both disappointing - first as Heathcliff, opposite Juliette Binoche's Catherine in 1992's failed reworking of Wuthering Heights, then as the Bishop's son in Peter Greenaway's strange 1993 religious parable, The Baby of Macon. "[Macon] is odd," says Fiennes, in his soft, elegant accent, "and not everyone- well, in England it got devastatingly bad press." Neither movie was ever released in the U.S.

Nonetheless, Spielberg was moved to audition Fiennes for the part of Goeth after watching his performances in Wuthering Heights and the ITV production A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. "I think that Steven saw what I was attempting in Wuthering Heights," says Fiennes, "a much brutal, very unsympathetic portrait of Heathcliff. I think he probably saw in that elements that could work for Amon Goeth."

Several weeks in Los Angeles promoting Schindler's have baked Fiennes' nose to a bright red, and his fair British skin has turned splotchy. Except for his ice-blue eyes, all those elements of Amon Goeth have melted away - including roughly 25 pounds he gained by way of alcohol, cake, and weight-gain powders. "That seems to be a thing," says Fiennes. "At some point [every] actor has to put on his weight... I think that having the sense of going to seed, as well as being accurate to Goeth, just felt right. It gave me a whole new sense of how to move. When you carry around a bit of a tummy on you, it just changes you."

Before and during the shooting in Poland, Fiennes spent months searching for signs of Goeth's humanity. He watched a documentary interview with Goeth's former mistress and read Tom Segev's 1987 study of SS officers, Soldiers of Evil, which included details of Goeth's privileged but neglected childhood. His inhumanity, however, was easier to find; one of the Schindler Jews who had worked as Goeth's secretary at Krakow recalled that Goeth once nonchalantly interrupted his dictation of a get-well note to his father to shoot a prisoner from his window. "It may sound glib," says Fiennes, "but I think the killing of human beings that capriciously is like the [grown-up] version of the little boy with the air rifle who is blasting at sparrows or smashing wasps with a fly swatter. And obviously, it was something that turned him on."

It is, in fact, Fiennes' dark and unexpected sensuality that ignites many of his scenes. "I think he's sexy [in the film]," says Davidtz, who had to soothe her face with ice after the beatings she took during their brutal scenes together. "There's something about anyone in conflict that's exciting." These days, the contrast between Fiennes' magnetism and his character's viciousness is flustering some who can't figure out exactly what they're excited about; witness out-there actress Sylvia Miles (Crossing Delancey), who presented him with the Best Supporting Actor honor at the New York Film Critics Circle awards, and declared - presumably by way of extolling his work - that she'd "love to be commandeered by this commandant!"

Fiennes himself is being commandeered toward starring roles by Creative Artists Agency, where he signed after leaving Paradigm agent Clifford Stevens recently. He has already completed Robert Redford's Quiz Show, due is September, in which he plays Charles Van Doren, the intellectual exposed as a fraud in the 1950s game-show scandals. For the film, he dropped the weight he put on as Goeth (with help from a trainer supplied by Redford), but he retained his way with villains. "I think Ralph brought a wonderful remorse to the role," says Rob Morrow (Northern Exposure), who costars as investigator Richard Goodwin. "He's taken the monster side of Van Doren and made him human and accessible, and you feel for him."

Fiennes' next role may not be another sinner: Producer Robert Evans (Chinatown) has made him an as-yet-unaccepted $1 million offer to play the title role of his upcoming movie resurrection of The Saint. "He's going to be a great romantic leading man," Evans says. Hollywood, however, seems more smitten with Fiennes than he is with it. For now, he'd rather suffer jet lag than give up London for Los Angeles. "I don't think I'm quite ready," says Fiennes, "basically because I can't afford it."

[Mary Frances]

http://www.reverseshot.com/legacy/aprilmay03/scary.html

Spielberg Symposium

SCARY STORIES

by Jeff Reichert
Reverse Shot Magazine
April/May 2003

The last time I saw Schindler's List (before sitting down to compose this piece) was back in the winter of 1994, shortly after the film’s release. I was working as an usher at the local multiplex where it was occupying two of our six screens (at that time a rarity for films outside of the summer months, and of the non-animated variety), and was treated several times daily to streams of audience members pouring from the theater backed by the strains of Itzhak Perlman’s violin, overcome with emotion, perhaps having experienced the same kind of turning point that Spielberg claims he had while making the film. I imagine that most of those many, many people had never seen a film that dealt in such weighty matters, and certainly not in such a direct fashion. I had read the reviews, and was well aware of the frenzy that drove audiences to purchase a ticket for a film that was mostly considered something that "should" be seen rather than something desirable to see-the type of acclaim Schindler received can conflate desires and needs, no matter what the film is ostensibly "about." Working at the theater provided a vast potential to gather first-hand evidence to corroborate the kind of emotional catharsis critics across the country were experiencing and subsequently working through in the process of writing about this— “the film,” the cinematic event of the year, a film which only looms larger over American cinema of the Nineties with each passing year.

I can’t claim to have avoided emotional reactions similar to those of the critics and audiences during and after viewing. Prior to this, my only “experience” with the Holocaust came from a crudely made 30-minute documentary an 8th grade teacher showed us after school, and only after receiving a signed note granting parental permission. It was filled with images of emaciated corpses, frightened survivors, and liberated camps—traces only of the violence that the cameras arrived too late to capture and in which Schindler’s List traffics. The documentary made an impression, but for the young teenager I was, the vaguely queasy images of the aftermath were easily eclipsed by the shock and violent immediacy of Schindler’s List. In the years following, schooling taught me to question this physical response to visceral imagery, wariness ensued, greatly enhanced by distance from the source, and disappointment in Spielberg’s subsequent films. Huge admiration for his triumphant triumvirate, A.I., Minority Report, and Catch Me If You Can (though skeptics might argue the degree to which Spielberg is aware of how good any of these films are) leads me back to Schindler, the film many mark as the milestone in his career which “allowed” for the creation of these later “mature” works. This preamble is necessary as it is exceedingly difficult to talk about his films without framing the personal context of viewing, as so many have ensconced themselves at the level of pop mythology that the personal/historical and critical responses become inextricable. What follows is something of a salvage mission, going back to it, would I find what had affected me there before, or would the years between preclude that possibility?

While re-viewing Schindler I was first struck by how similarly the concentration camp sequences affected me while watching, and then after by the complete difference in intellectual fallout. In ‘94, I was stunned by the sheer force and brutality of the images—the stylistic employed allowed an access to the material that I was unaccustomed to. Blood, drained of color, dribbling out of innocent bodies seemed a far cry from the relatively clean (perhaps even enjoyable?) violence perpetrated in Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, and Jurassic Park. In retrospect, they feel like nothing more than flip sides of the same coin. Going after the Holocaust in the “documentary” fashion employed circumvents many of the kinds of images one might have reasonably expected, and creates room for the shock effects of the violence that left many viewers in tears, but still undercuts his aims. Spielberg merely traded in one set of narrative codes for another, albeit one which exists in a register most viewers closely align with “truth” and the “real” —there’s not a point in the film that moves beyond the effable to the abject (except perhaps a fleeting moment towards the beginning of the film as a group of jeering Nazi soldiers cut off a Jew’s payess). Spielberg’s referencing strategies don’t get him anywhere either—nods to filmmakers he admires are peppered about all his films (here he cribs Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Elem Klimov’s Come and See, and Andrzej Munk’s Passenger, among others I’m sure) which in lighter times served as nothing more than cinematic signposts for the elect. Here, they force a reading of Schindler as not just a film of the Holocaust, but as an unconscious attempt at the end film of Holocaust narrative representation—grandiose aims and perhaps part of the film’s ultimate undoing.

Though there may not seem to be room for more scholarship on Schindler’s List (it received a full working-over by several Israeli scholars in the Yosefa Lashitzky-edited essay collection Spielberg’s Holocaust, in addition to the pages of accolades, anti-accolades, post-accolades, etc.), two major presuppositions circulate in Schindler scholarship, both of which are worthy of serious questioning: (a) a tragedy on the order of the Holocaust is impossible to represent and (b) a Holocaust film made within the Hollywood system is doubly damned due to reliance on certain conventions and codes, and thus always-already beyond any possibility of approaching this tragedy. The latter seems specious as labeling Schindler’s List a Hollywood product and moving on ignores Spielberg’s complicated relationship with the industry; he’s set, broken, subverted, and generally mucked around with the rules of engagement for Hollywood film for the past 20-odd years, creating a highly personal body of work too complicated to describe as the mere channeling of ideology and its attendant codes. I think most scholars who base their arguments around the former point are actually questioning the degree to which it is possible to depict the Holocaust (as an uttered act), and not taking into account the slippery possibilities of representation, especially in the cinematic medium. For them, depicting the sheer enormity of the Holocaust is an act akin to physicists trying to imagine the outside of the Universe or the time-before-time—impossible. But that doesn’t mean that a representation that functions like the space occupied by such thinking, the void where language breaks down isn’t a highly productive substitute. In fact, it is this space, this possibility, and the inability to speak properly of it that opens up room for the true horror Spielberg is after. The problem I found on returning to Schindler’s List is that the Holocaust, as it is represented here, fails to move beyond the physical responses of shock and fright into this realm of horror, or into any real awareness of the full implications of the Holocaust machine. “As it is here” is the crucial point of distinction—I don’t believe it impossible to represent the Holocaust, it just needs to be done right.

In trying to analyze my response to the shocks (not horror) of Schindler, I tried to think of films that had gone further towards this productive space beyond language and came quickly to the work of Robert Bresson. His films Au hasard Balthasar, Mouchette, Une Femme douce, L’Argent (and many of the others, come to think of it) circulate around characters playing the victim at the hands of an uncaring society (though it sounds banal, it never is), but the sad magic of Bresson is how he pushes the individual destruction, often through suicide, of each member of this motley crew of outcasts into the realm of an epic inexpressible loss for all of humanity. When at the end of Mouchette, the titular heroine fails in her first attempt at suicide, picks herself up, climbs the hill and rolls towards the lake below again, the effect is unforgettable. When her second attempt fails forcing a third and successful try, the effect is unspeakable. If the world holds nothing for this young girl, what could it possibly offer the viewer? Or, in Au hasard Balthasar, after innocent Marie heads off to reconcile with her rotten boyfriend, Bresson cuts to a shot of him with his cronies running from their hideout, flinging clothes and laughing. Inside, Marie is naked, huddled in a corner, slightly shivering. Combining the images in my mind today still hits like it did when I first saw them; I don’t know, and didn’t see, what happened inside the house, but does one need that to be rocked by the sequence? Narrative gaps like these are central to Bresson’s project—his films provide us with nothing less than the image of ourselves prostrate before another kind of narrative construction (one promising an illusory coherence), and with that image, the freedom to react to those he supplies; to experience the horror of implications, those acts that are unspeakable. If the Holocaust is supposedly unspeakable, why is it so easy to talk about Schindler’s List? Perhaps it’s because all the violence is localized, the source can be found, and Spielberg offers an alternate option in Oskar Schindler, the savior. In Bresson’s universe, there is no way out. Though I’m tempted to wonder what Bresson might have done with this same narrative, I know he’s crafted smaller-scale versions in almost all of his later films.

On the level of narrative construction, I think Spielberg is incapable of wreaking the kinds of violence that Bresson handles so easily. Spielberg is a maximalist and showman, so it may be somewhat unfair to criticize him in this fashion. He does point towards the solving of an equation that may have redeemed his project, but sadly never completes the math as in his masterful endings of A.I. and Minority Report (finally linking life, simulation, and the realm of the digital, piecing together strands woven throughout both films resulting in a confusion of these categories both fascinating and horrifying). Here, he begins to construct the bridge between capital and the Holocaust, but leaves the structure unfinished. Jews start out early in the film bearing punishment for a control of capital imaged by the Nazi regime, morph into laborers for the system they were once said to have controlled, and end up bought and sold as commodity, completely reversing the earlier relation. What’s missing is the next piece: Jewish labor for Nazi production had as its end result the death of the labor itself. This is important as it underlines a most disturbing implication about how the Final Solution was implemented: it was a distinctly capitalist “solution” and its orchestration could not have happened without it. Spielberg has Amon Goeth drop a remark about Marx’s Judaism, but a true sense of the full workings of capital is absent here. The fall from grace of simple laborer Yvon in Bresson’s final film L’Argent begins with a shot of a few francs being dispensed from an ATM which sparks the action and turns every shot and edit into currency in a series of narrative exchanges, all of which work to his detriment. His descent at the hands of capital (material understanding of capital as a root cause for societal ills is a dirty little secret of Bresson’s filmography only starting to peek out through the smoke created by critics howling about transcendence and spirituality) from family man to lonely serial killer is wholly unnecessary, undeserved, and horrifying. In Schindler, Spielberg mimics factory production with a shot of exhumed corpses piled on a conveyer belt leading to the bonfire, but he still denies an important step. It is in the fateful “shower scene” where things break down. Mass killing is the missing link, the one act he cannot bear to show us, or even strongly imply (a quick shot of a billowing smokestack doesn’t manages to carry this weight). He’d rather linger on a highly eroticized shot of Helen Hirsch, pulling her shift off and revealing the nakedness underneath, than follow that body through production (gassing) and into the inferno.

If there were such a thing as a “pure” viewing experience (even my response from years ago was mediated in certain ways), Schindler’s List might rank as one of Spielberg’s best films. The early scenes of Schindler in Nazi society are as glossy and stylish as anything in Lubitsch, and Spielberg’s mastery of narrative craft helps him keep this unwieldy beast afloat and immensely watchable for over three hours. Oskar Schindler’s acts make for a great story, but to be honest, function as little more than a framing device for the horror to which Spielberg attempts to bear witness. He ends up creating powerful reactions to be sure (the piles of tissues I gathered from the theater are certainly a testament), but with this material, his aim is much higher. Late in the film Schindler speaks about business matters to Stern: “Do I have to create a whole new language?” he asks. “I think so,” is the reply. Spielberg might have been served by this advice. Schindler’s List is shocking, but the universe it should have occupied is horrific (like Bresson’s). Though Spielberg may have fallen short here (and similarly in Amistad and Saving Private Ryan), he brought a truly incisive critical vision to bear in A.I.—an apocalyptic masterpiece about the limits of humanity completely intertwined with the kinds of questions around capital that Schindler never answers. For me, the critics who lauded Schindler’s List, and the audience members I saw exiting the theater in tears, were right about Spielberg, they were just a few years early. ++

[Mary Frances]

Steven Spielberg Faces the Holocaust

By Bernard Weinraub
New York Times
December 12, 1993

As a youth, Steven Spielberg says, he was ashamed to be a Jew.

Moving from Ohio to Arizona to California, the Spielbergs were often the only Jewish family in the neighborhood. "I was embarrassed, I was self-conscious, I was always aware I stood out because of my Jewishness," the director recalls. "In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible." His family had direct ties to the Holocaust: relatives died in Poland and Ukraine.

Now, nearly 30 years later, at the age of 46, Mr. Spielberg has marked his own voyage as a Jew -- and as a film maker -- with "Schindler's List," his riskiest, most personal film. The director was offered the project a decade ago but admits that he was frightened of undertaking the Holocaust then. He wanted to wait, he said, until he got older. The film, which has already received some glowing early reviews, opens on Wednesday.

Based on Thomas Keneally's prize-winning 1982 book, the movie stars Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, an enterprising German-Catholic businessman, rogue and Nazi Party member who moved to Cracow after the German invasion of Poland. He earned a fortune on bribes and black-market deals. But as he began to absorb the horror surrounding him, Schindler built a factory-camp to protect his unpaid Jewish workers. By the war's end, Schindler -- who was by no means a saint -- had bartered his vast fortune to save the 297 Jewish women and 801 Jewish men reported to be on his list of workers. He died virtually penniless in 1974.

The book was given to Mr. Spielberg in 1982 by his early mentor, Sidney J. Sheinberg, president of MCA. It was Mr. Sheinberg who in the late 60's had seen Mr. Spielberg's first, short film, "Amblin," about two hitchhikers, and signed the director, then 20, to a contract.

"When I made the first deal with Steven," Mr. Sheinberg said, "it was because of the sensitivity of those characters and the relationships on the screen. People say, 'Gee, isn't he capable of only doing dinosaur sci-fi pictures or adventure yarns?' Well, the answer is no."

"Schindler's List" is like no other Spielberg movie -- and the director is so nervous about it that he has asked his family and staff not to tell him their reactions. Made almost entirely in black and white, documentary-style, at a length of more than three hours, "Schindler's" -- with a cast of thousands, and set in and around Cracow -- is the first major Hollywood film seeking to depict the enormity of the Holocaust. Perhaps its only parallels, in terms of scope and the enormity of the subject, are "The Sorrow and the Pity" and "Shoah" -- both epic documentaries about the Holocaust made by European directors.

Up until now, the Holocaust seemed a subject too harrowing and far too uncommercial for any studio to tackle. Only a director who has become the most successful film maker in history could get a studio, Universal, to spend even the relatively modest $23 million to tell the story of the genocide of Europe's Jews.

But why did a man who made his name and considerable fortune with frothy entertainments -- most recently "Jurassic Park," now approaching the $900 million mark worldwide -- decide to take on such a formidable subject?

His previous forays into serious material certainly could not have encouraged him. His 1985 film "The Color Purple," based on Alice Walker's book about the misfortunes of a black woman, was widely criticized as shallow; writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby dismissed it as "insidiously entertaining." The Timing What's Now Left Except an Oscar?

Cynics in Hollywood -- and there are many -- believe that Mr. Spielberg makes films like "The Color Purple" and now "Schindler's List" primarily to take home an Oscar, a form of recognition that has thus far eluded him. (He did received the Academy's highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg producer's award -- for his body of work -- in 1987.)

What better way to goad the Academy into giving Mr. Spielberg the coveted best picture or best director statuette, these cynics say, than to make a long, sober black-and-white film about the Holocaust?

The director denies this absolutely.

"I don't deal with that; it's not true," he said tightly. In interviews Mr. Spielberg is typically friendly, upfront and talkative, a smile fixed on his face as he answers questions. Discussing criticisms, however, his eyes narrow and he bites his lip. "There's nothing self-serving about what motivated me to bring 'Schindler's List' to the screen. I don't give any credibility to other people's cynicism."

Asked if he was hurt about not having won an Oscar previously, Mr. Spielberg said: "It hurt at first. When I didn't win for 'E. T.' I felt bad. But it's not been the Holy Grail in my life. I'm not bitter about it. It's not something I obsess about or dwell upon."

Nor does he admit to worrying about his popularity -- or lack thereof -- in Hollywood. The word in Hollywood is: What Steven wants, Steven gets. Some executives, who are understandably unwilling to speak for the record, say Mr. Spielberg is not especially popular, for several reasons. One is jealousy over his extraordinary success. Another is his reputation for sometimes being abrasive, hard-edged and demanding, and perhaps still too interested in money despite his enormous wealth.

Mr. Spielberg shakes his head at such criticisms. "I don't feel the jealousy, I don't feel the envy, only when I hear about it. I have a feeling that the people who say these things about me are the ones who see me socially and drink my Evian water with me and call themselves my friends," he said with a wan smile. "But that's Hollywood." The Balance Seeking a Model For the Hero

Ask why he chose to bring "Schindler's List" to the screen, and he will say that while it represents what he sees as his "roots," "I wasn't seeking out Jewish material."

"What appealed to me about the book was that it was so factual, so detached. It was the detached look at the Holocaust that didn't try to eke out an emotional cry from me."

He is perched on the edge of a chair, sipping black coffee near a fireplace in his meticulous, cedar-beamed office at Amblin Entertainment, a mini-studio on the Universal lot. His office is decorated Southwestern-style, replete with Indian blankets.

"It was a dry, dry book," he said of "Schindler's List." "I thought if I could take the approach with a motion picture, I could present it almost like a series of events and facts and dates. And the emotionality would be much stronger."

Mr. Spielberg said of Oskar Schindler: "He changed from a great Gatsby to a great rescuer, and it fascinated me. He was like an agent, like a Michael Ovitz, on top of the mountain pulling strings in every fiefdom down below. And one of my role models for Schindler was Steve Ross."

Steven J. Ross, the chairman of Time Warner who died last Dec. 20, was another father figure for Mr. Spielberg, who dedicated the movie to him. The director even showed Liam Neeson home movies of Mr. Ross, so the actor could study his gestures.

"I always told Steve that if he was 15 years younger, I'd cast him as Schindler," Mr. Spielberg said. "He had the generosity of Schindler. He took more pleasure in watching other people enjoy their lives than he took in enjoying his own life."

What frightens Mr. Spielberg is that the sometimes harsh criticisms leveled against him over the years would be repeated with "Schindler's List." He's fully aware of objections to his work -- that his characters are often one-dimensional, that he manipulates sentiment, that he's a master of cliches, that he has a child's-eye view of the world.

His fear, he says, is that "Schindler's List" will be perceived as somehow trivializing the Holocaust, as diminishing the horror of what happened by turning it into a conventional Hollywood movie. Yet he did not want to make a film so graphic that audiences would avert their eyes from the screen. The Personal Fatherhood And Mortality

The decision to make the film came at a point in Mr. Spielberg's life when being Jewish has taken on more of a personal focus. The fact that Mr. Spielberg now finds himself the father of five children has, he said, deepened his sense of mortality and religion.

He was formerly married to Amy Irving, with whom he has a son, Max, who is 8. The two of them share custody. In the fall of 1991 he married Kate Capshaw, with whom he has two children, Sawyer, 21 months, and a daughter Sasha, 3 1/2 years old. Theo, a 5-year-old black child -- part of what Mr. Spielberg calls his "rainbow coalition" -- was adopted by his wife before they married; Mr. Spielberg has since adopted Theo also. Jessica, 17, is his wife's child from a former marriage.

"I'm getting older, maybe that's the most honest way to put it," said the film maker. "When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education."

Ms. Capshaw recently converted from Episcopalianism to Judaism after more than a year of study with an Orthodox rabbi. "Kate was sharing with me what she was learning, and I was learning from a shiksa goddess," he said with a laugh.

The doorways of his home and offices are now adorned with mezuzas (tiny Jewish prayer scrolls). He has a separate kosher kitchen in the basement of his Los Angeles home for his mother, Leah Adler, who cooks holiday meals there. Mrs. Adler and her second husband, Bernie Adler, own a kosher dairy restaurant called The Milky Way on Pico Boulevard. In the Beginning Hearing Stories From the Holocaust

Mr. Spielberg's father, Arnold, who lives in Northern California, was an electrical engineer, part of a team that designed the first computers. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, the family moved from Cincinnati to Haddonfield, N.J., to Scottsdale, Ariz., to a suburb of San Jose, Calif. "We were not totally accepted," Mrs. Adler said. "We were always on the periphery. Part of it was probably my fault. I didn't want to live in Jewish neighborhoods. I think I just wanted to live my life without having to account to anyone."

She was a concert pianist, and, according to her, the family was always considered strange. "I'd be playing the piano, Steven would be making films in the backyard. Of course, he wasn't Steven Spielberg then." She recalled that her son was "not terribly gregarious, not a fabulous student, but he always saw things differently than anybody else."

Steven was the oldest of four children; his oldest sister, Anne Spielberg, is a screenwriter with a credit on the hit movie "Big." "It was Steven and the three girls and me," Mrs. Adler remembered. "I actually think we were quite happy. My kids and I were like a gang. It was like four little children and this five-foot mother, and we'd all run around together."

Mr. Spielberg recalled other things. "When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands," he said. "I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews."

In Cincinnati, his grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors. In an often-told story he related how he first learned his numbers from an Auschwitz survivor, a man who used the tattoo burned on his arm to teach the young boy.

"He would roll up his sleeves and say, 'This is a four, this is a seven, this is a two,' " said Mr. Spielberg. "It was my first concept of numbers. He would always say, 'I have a magic trick.' He pointed to a six. And then he crooked his elbow and said, 'Now it's a nine.' "

In sixth grade the class viewed a documentary called "The Twisted Cross." "It was the first time I had actually seen images of the Holocaust," Mr. Spielberg said. "I had never seen a dead body before. It was almost impossible to look at.

"In a strange way my life has always come back to images surrounding the Holocaust. The Holocaust had been part of my life, just based on what my parents would say at the dinner table. We lost cousins, aunts, uncles."

It was Steven's father who lost relatives in the Holocaust. But it was his mother who repeated the stories told by Holocaust survivors, who were students of his grandmother. "Each person there had a history," Mrs. Adler said. "I'm sure it affected Steven. I remember one woman's story. The Nazis wanted her ring. She couldn't get it off. They were about to cut her finger off, but the ring suddenly fell off on its own. I guess it was her panic. It just freaked me."

As the only Jewish boy in the neighborhood, Mr. Spielberg recalled "the embarrassment and self-consciousness of having the darkest house on the block during Christmas." But his worst experience was at Saratoga High School, near San Jose. He was a senior, and his parents had just divorced.

"I got smacked and kicked to the ground during P.E., in the locker room, in the showers," he said. "Pennies were thrown at me in the study hall in a very quiet room of 100 students. People coughed the word 'Jew' in their hand as they passed me in the hallway. We couldn't stop it. So my mom picked me up in her car every day after school and took me home." Celebrating a German A Good Man In a Very Bad Time

With "Schindler's List," as with "The Color Purple" and later "Empire of the Sun," about a boy's wartime experiences in China, Mr. Spielberg is attempting to leave behind white-bread types and the suburbs of his youth. Mr. Keneally as well as Kurt Luedtke, who won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay for "Out of Africa," struggled for several years to adapt the book. Steven Zaillian, who wrote the screenplay for "Awakenings" and recently wrote and directed "Searching for Bobby Fischer," was commissioned to write a version. It was this screenplay that led Mr. Spielberg to make the movie.

"I wanted to focus on Schindler, and Schindler alone, and imagine events almost entirely through his eyes," Mr. Zaillian said. Although Mr. Spielberg frequently reached beyond beyond Schindler to describe the lives of people like Itzhak Stern (played by Ben Kingsley), a Jewish accountant in Schindler's factory, the film generally stayed within the boundaries of the Schindler story.

Virtually every major movie star wanted to play Schindler -- including Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson -- but Mr. Spielberg finally selected Mr. Neeson after he saw the Irish actor on Broadway last December as a loutish sailor in "Anna Christie."

"Liam was the closest in my experience of what Schindler was like," said Mr. Spielberg. "His charm, the way women love him, his strength. He actually looks a little bit like Schindler, the same height" -- both 6-foot-4 -- "although Schindler was a rotund man. If I had made the movie in 1964, I would have cast Gert Frobe, the late German actor. That's what he looked like."

Before filming began, the director spelled out his approach to Mr. Neeson, who veers between leading man and character roles. "Before we started," Mr. Neeson said, "Steven said, 'There's going to be no Spielberg bag of tricks here.' He threw away all his cinematic conditioning. He got rid of all the colors he has amassed over the last 20 years and painted his canvas totally white."

Mr. Neeson cited one scene in which Schindler stands on a balcony with the savage S.S. Commandant, Amon Goeth (played by Ralph Fiennes) to barter Jewish lives.

"Steven kept wondering how to shoot it and finally said he was going to do the opposite of what you'd expect," said Mr. Neeson. "He placed the camera inside the house, while we were outside, and sometimes we'd walk in and out of the frame. It was very brave and quite a genius thing to do. He kind of threw away the scene, but by doing so made it much more important."

Mr. Spielberg recalled that "when we were making 'Schindler,' Liam came up to me one day and asked me if I could ever make another Indiana Jones movie where the Nazis are cartoon villains. I said, 'Never, never.' Right now I can't conceive of anything that's simply entertainment." The Bottom Line The Question Is, Will It Be a Hit?

No matter how well the film does -- and it is debatable whether audiences, especially during the holidays, will flock to see a film on such a horrific subject -- "Schindler's List" will certainly not turn into another Spielbergian gold mine. Mr. Spielberg has made the two top-grossing films of all time, last summer's "Jurassic Park" and the 1982 movie "E. T., the Extra-Terrestrial."

His 30 films over 25 years include phenomenal successes such as "Jaws," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and, with George Lukas, the Indiana Jones trilogy. In September, Forbes magazine listed him as the second richest person in the entertainment industry (Oprah Winfrey was first), with an estimated income this year of $42 million.

Universal officials are almost embarrassed to talk about the commercial possibilities for "Schindler's List." Thomas P. Pollock, chairman of the MCA Motion Picture Group, said, only half-kiddingly, "I feel like Sam Goldwyn who said, 'This is such an important film, I don't care if we ever make any money so long as every man, woman and child in the country sees it.' "

[Mary Frances]

Extras In the Shadows

By Frank Rich
New York Times
January 2, 1994

Negative words about "Schindler's List," Steven Spielberg's Holocaust movie, are verboten in polite company. Everyone from President Clinton to the nation's movie critics has called it a masterpiece, with some enthusiasts pointedly reassuring readers that, at 3 hours 5 minutes, the film is not a moment too long. "Schindler's List" is the culture's new Messiah: the antidote to the terrifying 1993 Roper Organization poll in which 22 percent of the American public expressed doubt that the Nazi extermination of the Jews actually happened.

So why, I asked myself, did this particular American Jew find "Schindler's List" more often numbing than moving? And why am I skeptical that Holocaust ignoramuses will even see it, let alone be swayed by it?

The problem is not that Mr. Spielberg, a giant talent, has made an inept, insincere or vulgar film. "Schindler's List" is not "The Color Yellow." Its only fabulously cheesy scene is a finale in which the righteous German war profiteer Oskar Schindler (played by Liam Neeson) gives a sentimental speech to the Jewish factory workers he saved, and they look up at him awestruck, as if he were the levitating mother ship in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Other sequences are stunning, especially the horrific passages of hand-held, pseudo-documentary camera work that depict the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto and the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

But if such atrocities are made exceptionally vivid by the director's cinematic brilliance, their emotional power is muted by the anonymity of the film's Jews. Mr. Spielberg has found hundreds of evocative faces to populate his simulated Holocaust, but their souls are skin-deep. The only major Jewish character in the script, Schindler's accountant (Ben Kingsley), is a type -- "king of the Jewish wimps," as one of the movie's few tough critics, Ilene Rosenzweig of the Jewish newspaper The Forward has put it. The others, who have the generic feel of composites, are as forgettable as the chorus in a touring company of "Fiddler on the Roof," or, for that matter, the human dino-fodder of "Jurassic Park." They blur into abstraction, becoming another depersonalized statistic of mass death. Since Schindler is also presented as a psychological blank, no wonder the unhinged Nazi commandant (Ralph Fiennes) runs away with the movie.

I cried at Mr. Spielberg's graphic depiction of genocide anyway. Weaker Holocaust dramatizations than this one have pushed my buttons. Like anyone who is Jewish, knows Jews or simply knows history, I can automatically flesh out the human ciphers in "Schindler's List" with characters and associations of my own. This may be the case for much of the large and, I imagine, heavily Jewish audiences who have made the movie a hit so far, in major American cities where remedial education about the Holocaust is less needed than any place this side of Israel.

But what happens when "Schind ler's List" is released in the great American malls, not to mention other countries, where Jews are sparse? Will teen-agers check it out? Will audiences who have never heard of "Shoah" or "Europa, Europa"? They might do so more readily if Mr. Spielberg's movie were not self-indulgently overlong -- by a good hour. (This same syndrome afflicted Spike Lee's "Malcolm X," which ended up preaching mainly to the converted.) The film might also more effectively draw indifferent audiences into its historical nightmare if the Jews on screen were as individual and intimately dramatized as Anne Frank or even Meryl Streep's Sophie.

What is most worrisome about the wild overpraise of "Schindler's List" is the complacency it invites. The hype is already taking on a life of its own, wrapping the movie and the Holocaust in a neat, uplifting Hollywood ending that allows everyone to sleep easier. As this comforting litany has it, some 1,100 Jews on Schindler's list did survive, after all; the Nazi sadist did get his just deserts; Schindler's heroic example may inspire others to resist future Nazis; a hit movie will eternally preserve the Holocaust in the world's memory.

And there's a happy ending for Mr. Spielberg, too: Having come of age as a Jew, he may get a prize greater than a fountain pen -- the Oscar he has so long and unjustly been denied.

"Schindler's List" is good news for everyone, it seems, except its shadowy and often nameless extras, the six million dead.

[Mary Frances]

Seeing 'Schindler' Plain

By Caryn James
New York Times
January 23, 1994

IF YOU'VE READ EVEN A FRACTION OF WHAT HAS been written about "Schindler's List," you might be led to this improbable question. Steven Spielberg: idiot savant or misguided bar mitzvah boy? More than a month after its release, "Schindler's List" is drawing large audiences and touching them deeply, but among critics and commentators it is still struggling to shake off the burden of being a Spielberg movie. Early reviews were nearly unanimous raves, but a sneaky condescension showed through. The wonder, these rapturous reviews hinted, was not that a powerful film had been made about the Holocaust but that Peter Pan had made it.

It took a few weeks for the backlash to set in, as the discussion moved from the entertainment pages to the op-ed pages and talk shows. The old Spielberg rap -- too entertaining for his own good -- came back to haunt him. Why did he make a movie about a righteous Nazi? this argument goes. Why did he make a movie about survival when the Holocaust was about death? If you read and listen enough, it will appear that you can't see "Schindler" without seeing Spielberg.

In one sense, of course, you can't. Few directors could have gotten this film made, and no one else would have made it the same way. But if Martin Scorsese had directed "Schindler's List," as he once considered doing, would praise have come with the same element of surprise, as if he were the monkey who'd typed out "Hamlet"? And would this surprise have been translated into claims so extravagant that the film sounds like the rebirth of cinema, the redemption of history and the pinnacle of Western art rolled into one?

Reactions to "Schindler" involve nothing as high-minded as analyzing a director's body of work. This is the cult of celebrity creating a scrim through which a film is viewed.

Mr. Spielberg is not the only well-known director whose background has become a dead weight attached to his film this season. If "Philadelphia" had been made by some lightweight director, instead of the rigorous Jonathan Demme, critics would not have complained so much about its melodrama. If someone other than Oliver Stone had made "Heaven and Earth," someone who had never directed a story about Vietnam, it would not been greeted with the same tired sense of deja vu.

But nowhere has the director's personality created more interference than with "Schindler," a work that is defiantly not about Hollywood glitz. (Does anyone really think Mr. Spielberg made this only to win an Oscar?) On a second viewing, in fact, the history is more lucid and the characters more individualized than they seem at first, when the experience of watching the film is simply overwhelming.

The relentless narrative drive with which Mr. Spielberg depicts the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto, for example -- some people in hiding, others shot in the snow, thousands herded into a camp -- adds the visceral power of fiction to a technique borrowed from documentaries about the Holocaust. As with documentaries, the viewer is put in the position of being overcome by the savagery on screen and then is made to witness more of it, then to endure even more, until the enormity of the Holocaust becomes the inescapable point. But such narrative strategies are not ordinarily associated with Mr. Spielberg, and the film's effectiveness has been viewed by many as the dark side of the sunny emotional manipulation in "E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial."

These straight-on views of the Holocaust are the most compelling sections of the film, the ones with the greatest claim on the viewer's emotions. And if Mr. Spielberg was given too little credit for the immense artistic leap that led him there, he was given too much credit for depicting Oskar Schindler as a full-blooded character.

Schindler (Liam Neeson, in a charismatic but opaque portrayal) is the weakest part of the film. To solve the mystery of his change from Nazi roue to protector of Jews may be impossible. But it is possible to depict a complicated enigma, as Thomas Keneally did in his novel. On screen, Schindler seems less an enigma than a black hole at the center of the story.

"It was Oskar's nature to believe that you could drink with the devil and adjust the balance of evil over a snifter of cognac," Mr. Keneally writes in "Schindler's List." Mr. Spielberg and the screenwriter, Steve Zaillian, present Schindler drinking with the devil, the Nazi Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes); they show Schindler's Jewish plant manager, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) at first refusing to drink with the devilish Schindler, then sharing a drink after Schindler's sympathies have changed. Schindler's nature and contradictions are visualized but not explored, and reviewers jumped in to fill the void, attributing mysterious qualities to the underwritten character. It doesn't diminish the film -- it might even make the praise more convincing -- to admit that "Schindler" is not perfect. Like most enduring films, "Schindler's List" has an emotional greatness that subsumes its flaws.

It would be a shame if the Spielberg factor influenced anyone's expectations about the film. And it is no insult to Mr. Spielberg to say that the best way to view "Schindler's List" is to ignore the fact that he is behind it, and let it speak for itself as a profound work of art.

[Mary Frances]

If Good Guys Finish Last, Try Villainy

By Ellen Pall
New York Times
March 20, 1994

FROM THE DAY THE SERPENT slithered through the Garden of Eden to the night the Velociraptors jumped the fences at Jurassic Park, from Dr. Caligari to the Wicked Witch of the West, as far back as Milton's Lucifer and as recently as Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, villains have gripped the popular imagination with a force no mere hero can hope to match. Who even remembers what compass point Glinda the Good Witch came from? What child ever trick or treated as C3PO when Darth Vader masks could be had? For every Eliot Ness or James Bond, there are three Godfathers -- or Goliaths, or Godzillas. It's a sad fact of fiction, or maybe of life, but villainy is profoundly fascinating: it sweeps us up and seduces us with its power.

Playing the bad guy can offer an actor an irresistible lure. A role as the heavy in a film can revive a flagging career (though that can backfire) or change a specialized image (though some actors, like Alan Alda, can't shake a nice-guy tag no matter what they do).

Bad guys are showy. They give performers a chance to display the kinkier, perhaps more arresting, aspect of their range. This year alone, three actors playing villains are up for Academy Awards: John Malkovich for his role as the obsessed assassin in "In the Line of Fire," Laurence Fishburne for his portrayal of the rage-driven, abusive Ike Turner in "What's Love Got to Do With It" and Ralph Fiennes for his performance as the brutal Nazi commandant Amon Goeth in "Schindler's List."

Bad guys are memorable, too. Take Mr. Fiennes, who until last year was virtually unknown in the United States. No one who has seen his bone-chilling Goeth is likely to forget him. Ditto David Thewlis, whose brilliant, sadistic, self-destructive Johnny in Mike Leigh's recent film "Naked" is as vivid as a lightning bolt.

And history shows that playing the right creep at the right time can turn a career around. Think of Glenn Close before "Fatal Attraction," Kathy Bates pre-"Misery," even Anthony Hopkins, never a household name in America until Hannibal Lecter. Sharon Stone played a dozen innocuous roles before vaulting to fame on her trusty ice pick in "Basic Instinct." Small wonder that this season new villains, from serial killers (Kathleen Turner in John Waters's forthcoming "Serial Mom") to evil moms (Jamie Lee Curtis in "Mother's Boys") to power-crazed capitalists (Paul Newman in "The Hudsucker Proxy") are stalking a movie theater near you.

The lasting appeal of villains stems in part from the audience's identification with them, says Harvey Greenberg, a psychiatrist and the author of "Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch," in part from relief that they (not audience members) are doing the evil. Our attraction to them doesn't mean we'll rush from the theater and "do dark things," he says. If anything, what is dangerous is to "look away" from evil. "If you disavow your own dark potential," he says, "sooner or later, you'll get depressed, or you'll project the evil on some convenient enemy."

To an actor, whose stock in trade is his ability to roam the far reaches of the self at will, a role as a villain can be a kind of inner safari, a rugged but marvelous expedition. Lena Olin, who portrays the vicious hit woman Mona Demarkov in the playfully film-noirish "Romeo Is Bleeding," knew as soon as she read the script that she wanted the part.

"Mona is so outrageous," said Ms. Olin, best known heretofore for her smoldering performances in such movies as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Enemies, a Love Story." "She's truly immoral. She knows what she wants, and she goes for it and doesn't miss one chance. If you hit her, she will hit you back much worse. For me to explore that part of myself was irresistible. She was so much fun, so over the top."

Jeremy Irons is another actor with a penchant for bad guys: he has played Claus von Bulow in "Reversal of Fortune" and a pair of sadistically twisted twins in "Dead Ringers," among other sinister characters. "It is, of course, enormous fun playing villains," he said. "One of the great things about acting is that you're able to go into areas that would make it intolerable to live with yourself if you behaved like that in life."

Most actors, he went on, like most people, are basically good guys. But "inside us are those bad guys who'd love to have a day out." Enjoying a villain on the screen -- or acting the part before the cameras -- "is like playing truant with your soul."

All the same, it's a rare actor who thinks of his own character as "the bad guy" while playing him. Mr. Irons feels that his first "real villain" is Scar, the scheming animated lion whose voice he supplies in Disney's "Lion King," set for release in June.

"I've played enigmatic characters," he allowed, but "never a character who glories in evil." Even Scar, whom Mr. Irons compares unfavorably to Iago, "doesn't see himself as a villain always." He paused. "And the hyenas adore him."

Since so few movies feature powerful, colorful, positive female characters, playing the bad person can be particularly attractive to actresses -- a rare opportunity to escape secondary roles. Kathleen Turner made her startling film debut as the femme fatale in "Body Heat," in 1981. Since then, she has played quite a few nasty characters, in "The War of the Roses" and "Prizzi's Honor," among other movies. From the dearth of strong, morally positive roles for women in current mainstream films, Ms. Turner has concluded that many in Hollywood believe that any smart, powerful woman must, ipso facto, be bad.

"Women are so very often cast as the support mechanism -- the loving wife, or the object of desire, or the victim, which I refuse to play," said Ms. Turner, who instead portrays a housewife-turned-murderer in the comedy "Serial Mom," due next month. Her all-understanding husband in the film is played by Sam Waterston, who just last month did a change-of-pace role in the Showtime movie "Assault at West Point," in which he played a foaming-at-the-mouth bigot. "At least if you're doing the bad stuff, you are acting, not reacting. And that's rather nice," Ms. Turner said.

All the same, Mr. Waters's script initially gave her pause.

"Quite honestly, I could hardly get through it," she said. "I was like, 'She what? She puts a poker where?' I would throw the script down and say to my husband, 'You're not going to believe this one!' " But having played the part, she added, "I'm in love with 'Serial Mom.' She just tickles me pink."

For a well-known actor stuck playing one wonderful human being after the next, a role as the bad guy can be a refreshing change, like a dash of bitters in a sweet cocktail.

"Actors and actresses who are usually leading ladies and men love to play villains," said the casting director Juliet Taylor. "It gives them a chance to flex their muscles, to feel they really are actors rather than just movie stars."

This doesn't always work out, of course. Playing a criminal in "A Perfect World," Kevin Costner earned his best reviews ever -- but the movie sank at the box office. When all-American Tom Cruise was cast as the elegantly evil European vampire Lestat in "Interview With a Vampire," due for release late this year, a bitter outcry erupted among admirers of the Anne Rice novels on which the script is based. And Macaulay Culkin's turn as the bad son in "The Good Son" won him little praise and few fans.

Some actors seem to be made of Teflon when it comes to having the villain label stick to them. Alan Alda played Caryl Chessman (in the 1977 television movie "Kill Me If You Can"), and a homicidal psychiatrist (in the 1992 film "Whispers in the Dark"), not to mention a bevy of arrogant, abrasive or sleazy types in such films as "Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Manhattan Murder Mystery" and HBO's "And the Band Played On," which will be broadcast on NBC late this month. Yet he is almost universally thought of as a person who simply oozes decency.

Mr. Alda admits that he is, in fact, a nice guy. "But that doesn't mean I don't also have other sides," he pointed out. "It's children's stories to think there are princes and princesses and evil witches."

Praising Mr. Fiennes's performance in "Schindler's List," he said: "I would love to play a Nazi. I always wanted to play Hitler when I was younger." But, he added, he would not play him "villainously."

"You look at early films of Hitler, he doesn't look like he thinks he's a bad guy. In fact, he presents a kind of spiritual presence. Because how could he get anywhere? Who would believe him" if he presented himself as a villain? "I suppose there are some totally villainous people who act villainous. But I don't even think they're successful at holding up 7-Elevens."

THINKING UP THE RIGHT actor to play a heavy can be fun for the casting director, too. "It's always more fun to cast a role that has range and dimension than to go over that same list of leading people time and time again," said Ms. Taylor. As the casting director of "Schindler's List," she brought Mr. Fiennes to the attention of Steven Spielberg. In selecting a villain, she said, it is especially important to find an actor whose natural qualities, overlaid with his role, will give the character depth. The part of the Nazi Amon Goeth presented a particular challenge.

Mr. Fiennes, she said, "in addition to being a wonderful actor, has a kind of translucent quality, a sensitivity in his face that makes it more surprising that this evil is coming out of him."

While the challenge in playing Goeth was to avoid having a cartoon Nazi, cartoons themselves revel in bad guys. "Among the animators, villains are the most desirable parts," said Andreas Deja, who animated Mr. Irons's character in "The Lion King." Mr. Deja is something of a specialist, having also created the nasty Gaston for "Beauty and the Beast" and the scheming Jafar in "Aladdin." "Villains are usually much more expressive than the prince or princess or hero, who just have to be nice and convincing. Villains go through a bigger range of emotions."

Mr. Deja based his visual rendering of Scar partly on Mr. Irons ("There was a certain eerie, icy quality about him that I wanted to keep") and partly on one of three live lions (leashed but not caged) brought into the Disney studio by a trainer. For Gaston, he tried to create "the ultimate macho chauvinist," searching for likely models in the health clubs of Hollywood. He had no trouble finding subjects.

"They're all over the place, flexing their muscles in the mirror," he said. "How they adore themselves!

"With animated villains," he went on, "although they usually are designed to look like bad people -- or bad animals -- there has to be an appeal, something fascinating. Though you might be scared of the character, you still want to look at it. So even though he's a villain, you try to design something beautiful."

Finally, playing a bad guy can bring unexpected perks. Jason Robards, who plays a heavy in "Philadelphia" (he is the patrician lawyer who fires an underling with AIDS), got a special kick out of his role as Al Capone in the 1967 Roger Corman film "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre." Through no effort of his own, he said, laughing, "all the guys on the set would do anything for me -- Big Al and all. Everybody would come out and ask, 'Can I get you coffee?' I didn't have to do anything but walk around with a hat and a scar on my face."

[Mary Frances]

Note: References made to Schindler's List in text.

Hollywood's Kindest Cuts; Invisible Film Editors Start to Emerge From Director's Shadow

By Bernard Weinraub
New York Times
August 20, 1998

Michael Kahn still remembers his nervousness when Steven Spielberg hired him to edit ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' in 1976. On his first day on the job, after editing a scene, Mr. Kahn awaited Mr. Spielberg's reaction.

''Why did you cut it that way?'' Mr. Spielberg asked Mr. Kahn.

''Well, it just felt right,'' said Mr. Kahn.

''That's good enough for me,'' said Mr. Spielberg.

Mr. Kahn, an Academy Award winner for ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' and ''Schindler's List,'' has edited every Spielberg film over the last two decades, including ''Saving Private Ryan,'' for which several critics singled out his work. Asked about his editor, Mr. Spielberg had one terse but telling comment: ''He's got rhythm.''

As one of Hollywood's foremost editors, Brooklyn-born Mr. Kahn is a veteran member of a select group whose work, while extremely important in the creation of films, is unknown to most moviegoers.

''The director is like the architect -- it's his or her vision -- and the editor is the builder,'' said Mr. Kahn, sitting in his editing room at Dreamworks. ''With Steven, it's like building a beautiful house.''

He continued: ''Do editors feel undervalued? Of course. Editors sit quietly in the dark and do their work. You have to like having no ego.''

Similarly, Alan Heim, editor of classics like ''Network'' and ''All That Jazz,'' for which he won an Academy Award, said, ''People think you're in a dark room all day, eating potato chips, removing the bad stuff and leaving in the good.''

''Actually, the editor is a storyteller,'' he said. ''The editor restructures and rewrites and rebalances the story by juxtaposing images. What was in the script in the first place -- and what the director's vision was at the beginning -- is never quite the same as the reality of what comes out on the screen.''

In some ways, the expense of movies, and the increased number of large-scale action and ''event'' films, like ''Saving Private Ryan,'' has made the editor's role even more important than it was in the heyday of the studio system.

''Editors have been undervalued because of the nature of what we do and how we do it,'' said Donn Cambern, president of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, whose editing career includes ''Easy Rider'' and ''Romancing the Stone.'' ''We're away from the shooting stage, from the lights, from the celebrities.''

He added: ''In the last few years, though, there's been an extraordinary awareness of the editor's role. I see it at film festivals. I see it from students at U.C.L.A. and U.S.C. I see it from people in and out of the industry. There is a high level of fascination as to what editors do.''

What editors do is assemble film that has been shot and, in the words of Mark Goldblatt, a top editor, ''actualize the director's vision: interpret the filmed material presented to him by the director and put it together, mold it, and create a motion picture that will ultimately find its shape in the final release version.''

''In fact, you're building the entire picture based on many, many different shots with different performances,'' said Mr. Goldblatt, whose films include ''Armageddon,'' ''The Terminator'' and its sequel, and ''Rambo.'' ''You might pick 1 line of dialogue with 10 or 12 choices of that line. Whether you pick a close-up or a medium shot or a wide shot creates a different psychological feeling.''

Whittling a Film Out of 230 Hours


Creating the right rhythm and balance for a film can prove herculean. Walter Murch, who received Oscars for editing and sound mixing for ''The English Patient,'' was given 1.25 million feet of film -- which works out to be just under 230 hours -- on Francis Ford Coppola's ''Apocalypse Now.'' The finished film ran 2 hours 25 minutes. Mr. Murch has said that editing, even on an average film, ''is not so much a putting together as it is discovery of a path.''

At one level, an editor's job is to shape what has been filmed and make it coherent in the ''first cut,'' or editor's version. Then the director takes over, working hand in hand with the editor. (There have been several prominent editors turned directors, including David Lean and Robert Wise.) At another level, though, the editor's choices are indelible and have a powerful impact on the final film.

Mr. Kahn, for example, said that, in the creation of ''Saving Private Ryan,'' he was near the film set on the Irish coast, where the prolonged opening sequence of the D-Day landing was shot, and at an abandoned British Aerospace building in Hatfield, 45 miles north of London, where other scenes were shot.

''Steven would come in any time and run footage; he was shooting as I was editing at the same time,'' said Mr. Kahn, who began his career by editing more than 140 episodes of ''Hogan's Heroes,'' and who won an Emmy for the television series ''Eleanor and Franklin.'' ''There were a lot of options. So the next day, he would see the cut scene to see if he had everything he needed.''

Mr. Kahn said the two decided to break convention for the grueling opening battle, to show as little of the entrenched German soldiers as possible but focus instead on the almost horrific impact the Germans had on Americans landing on the beach.

Similarly, a battle near the conclusion of the movie was a striking display of Mr. Kahn's skill: he kept alternating between a G.I. being brutally killed by a German soldier and an American who is frozen with fear in battle.

''How you intercut is so important because there's rhythm, there's pace, there's emotional drama taking place,'' said Mr. Kahn. ''If you're on something too long, then you lose power in the next scene. There's rhythms within a scene, and there's rhythms that are going to move the scene forward.''

Mr. Kahn cited another example from ''Schindler's List,'' in which Mr. Spielberg heightened the drama by intercutting. In one scene, Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, is sitting in a nightclub listening to a singer. This is contrasted with a scene in which the German concentration camp commandant, played by Ralph Fiennes, is sexually coercing a Jewish woman who is both a prisoner and his housekeeper.

''Each scene would have been lengthy, but by intercutting Steven raised the emotional level, especially when you heard the nightclub music while Ralph Fiennes was with the woman,'' said Mr. Kahn.

'Don't Be Afraid To Be Wrong'


Mr. Kahn said editing a film for Mr. Spielberg was almost a visceral exercise. ''You don't do anything from knowledge, but from feeling, intuition,'' he said. ''I do something a certain way to see how he reacts. I keep noodging him. I try to convince him. He's very open with me. He often says: 'Look, I'll give you my notes and ideas, and do what you want with it. Don't play safe. Don't be afraid to be wrong because if you're afraid, you won't try things and be innovative.' ''

Why editors often feel undervalued is partly rooted in their history and, perhaps, their personalities.

Richard Chew, one of the editors of ''Star Wars,'' ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' and, more recently, ''Waiting to Exhale'' and ''Hope Floats,'' said that as significant as editors were in the creation of films, they were often ignored even within the movie industry.

''Maybe it's our fault,'' said Mr. Chew. ''We tend to be more self-effacing. We're not as articulate and certainly not as egotistical as directors.'' He laughed.

But Tina Hirsch, whose films include ''Dante's Peak'' as well as several television mini-series, observed: ''At first, the film editor was, literally, the director's secretary. A film was shot as it were a play. Each scene was a single master shot, and the secretary would assemble them for a 10-minute movie.'' Later, editors sometimes worked in studio hallways with Moviolas, the editing machines that have been superseded somewhat by digital systems.

Some editors, like Mr. Kahn on ''Saving Private Ryan,'' use the Moviola instead of digital technology, in which films are edited on computers. Mr. Spielberg is one of a handful of filmmakers who still use the old-style Moviola on all films.

''Steven likes the smell of film,'' said Mr. Kahn. ''He likes to feel it, hold it. He doesn't want to look at a monitor. He also likes the idea of the Moviola. This is how so many great movies were made.''

Using the Moviola, editors ''made their marks on each piece of film and cut it physically, and then you went to your next piece of film,'' said Mr. Heim, editor of ''All That Jazz.'' ''You put the pieces on pins in a bin, and then you splice these pieces together, and you have your first cut.

''In the new method, everything is digitally loaded into a computer. You splice it together electronically, using a key stroke. The benefits are speed and the ability to make many choices and look at alternatives instantly.'' But ''the image is not as good to look at,'' he said, ''and it's more difficult to make certain performance judgments. It's hard to see peoples' eyes, and most editors use eyes a great deal.''

There are other differences. ''We used to make one decision a minute, now we make 30 decisions,'' Ms. Hirsch said of the new digital technology. ''The impact of that is a much more intense working situation. There's no dip in concentration. Time is more limited.''

By several accounts, though, the actual result of using digital editing, while accelerating the process, is not especially different from the Moviola days.

(Editing is one of the few jobs in movies that have traditionally been available to women. The top editors in recent decades have included Dede Allen, who made ''Bonnie and Clyde'' and ''Dog Day Afternoon''; Verna Fields, who edited ''American Graffiti'' and ''Jaws''; Ann V. Coates, who made ''Lawrence of Arabia'' and other David Lean classics, and Thelma Schoonmaker, who edited a number of Martin Scorsese's films.)

That Ambivalent Relationship


Perhaps the most delicate issue for editors is their relationship, sometimes ambivalent, with the director. Mr. Chew said that working with first-time directors like Forest Whitaker (''Waiting to Exhale'') and Tom Hanks (''That Thing You Do'') was especially satisfying. ''Maybe because they're actors and realize how collaborative the process is, they welcomed and acknowledged the editor's contribution to the picture,'' he said.

Other directors are far less forthcoming about their editors, Mr. Chew said. ''Very seldom have I worked on a film where the director is in the editing room every day that I'm there,'' he said. ''By and large, they come in, look at what I've done, give me some notes, and they're gone.''

''Nothing annoys an editor more than to hear a director giving interviews saying, 'I'm really busy editing my film now,' '' Mr. Chew added. ''What the director means to say is that he hasn't shown up in the editing room that day to see what the editor has done because he's too busy taking all these meetings looking for his next project.''

Generally, though, editors and directors are collaborators who understand each other's role and talents. Mr. Kahn said that his experiences editing Mr. Spielberg's films, especially some recent ones, had affected him personally.

''With 'Private Ryan,' I felt like a soldier, and with 'Schindler's List' I felt like a Jewish prisoner,'' he said. ''I took it hard. It was very intense. When it was over, I'd talk about it and start crying. Steven was very nice about it. He said, 'I'm going to put you on a comedy to lighten you up a little bit.' So he put me on 'Casper.' That lightened me up.''

[Mary Frances]

http://www.variety.com/article/VR117256.html?categoryid=5&cs=1&query=Ralph+Fiennes

News Shocker: N.Y. critics are downright civil

By Todd McCarthy
Variety
January 7, 1994

I've been recalling the stories of how John Simon and Manny Farber enacted a High Noon critics' showdown; how Rex Reed quit after some slight, real or imagined; how Michael Sragow always showed up wearing a T-shirt with his 10-best list printed on it; how one critic continually harped in meetings that another didn't practice serious criticism; and how the formidable Pauline Kael used to sit at one end of the table surrounded by her numerous acolytes (although rumor had it this year that Pauline, reportedly supplied with the latest cassettes by the studios, continued to put "the word" out from rural retirement).

So imagine my shock when my first National Society of Film Critics meeting the other day turned out to be a tranquil, at times even jocular affair at which the only darts thrown were aimed in the easy direction of Michael Medved. Not that the 19 voting members present in New York were in complete harmony -- far from it, although "Schindler's List" received more unified support here than it did at any of the previous critical conclaves. It's just that, as is the case at Los Angeles Film Critics voting meetings, the reputedly more cantankerous National crowd didn't take differences of opinion personally, and all the critical factions seemed to get their way somewhere along the line.

The big news coming out of the year-end awards announcements, of course, was the unprecedented "Schindler" sweep of best picture honors from the four major critical groups -- the National Society, N.Y., L.A. and the National Board of Review.

Spielberg's long-in-coming anointment by the East Coast critical fraternity (there was only one woman present among the 19 voting members of the National Society) was another part of the story. But it might not have happened -- a couple of critics remarked, only partly in jest, that the group could be accused of placating "Schindler's" most unhelpful champion, Medved, if it voted the best director award to Spielberg rather than Jane Campion. (In fact, New York scuttlebutt has it that Rupert Murdoch's favorite film critic is being groomed by his boss to run for public office. If so, film criticism's gain would be the public's loss.)

HAVING BEEN A PASSIONATE PARTISAN of "Unforgiven" last year, this season I again found myself backing many of the winners. "Schindler" was my choice for picture, director and supporting actor (Ralph Fiennes) -- winners all -- as wellas for screenplay, which did not. "Schindler" has also been winning the cinematography honors (sharing them in L.A. with "The Piano"), and while I gave Janusz Kaminski my second-place vote, I persist in rallying behind Conrad Hall's work in "Searching for Bobby Fischer." It stands out for brilliantly providing a visual correlative for the child's intensely focused point of view.

I also voted for David Thewliss, whose corrosive, inexhaustible lead performance in "Naked" emerged victorious, and I can't argue with Holly Hunter, who has swept all the awards for best actress, although I think an equal case can be made for Ashley Judd, as "Ruby in Paradise" is unthinkable without her.

The weakest category is undoubtedly supporting actress. While I admired the overlooked Joan Allen in "Ethan Frome," some of the actresses' work in "Short Cuts" and "The Age of Innocence" and the startling Anna Paquin in "The Piano," no one stood out in this area this year.

My choice for best foreign-language film, "Farewell My Concubine," sailed through the first three critics' voting sessions. It led after one inconclusive ballot at the National Society but lost ground on the second as another Chinese film, "The Story of Qiu Ju," came from behind to win.

WHAT ANY CRITICS THINK is of questionable relevance where the Oscars are concerned, and Daily Variety does not indulge in crystal-balling or playing favorites where the Academy Awards races are concerned. However, this could be the occasion to clear up one matter that is continually misreported and conjectured about in the media, that being which critics group has most often indicated which film would win the Academy Award.

In the 18 years since 1975, the New York Critics and the National Board of Review have each been in accord with the Academy for best picture on seven occasions, although the N.Y. group has agreed only once since 1983, on "The Silence of the Lambs." The L.A. organization has paralleled Oscar's taste six times, but just once since 1984, for "Unforgiven" last year. The National Society and the Academy have seen eye-to-eye only twice in 18 years, on "Unforgiven" and "Annie Hall."

For four years running -- from 1985-1988, encompassing "Out of Africa, ""Platoon,""The Last Emperor" and "Rain Man"-- the Academy picked a film that wasn't favored by any of the critics groups. If "Schindler's List" goes on to win the Oscar, there will be a number of critics out there worrying that their taste has become disturbingly mainstream and conventional.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,307813,00.html

FALL FEATURES, GREAT AND SMALL

Entertainment Weekly
Issue #185-186
August 27, 1993

They called themselves Schindlerjuden-''Schindler's Jews.'' During World War II, when the Jewish population of Krakow, Poland, was being eliminated, they worked for German war profiteer Oskar Schindler. For three years, the handsome, cognac-sipping factory owner charmed, bribed, and cajoled the powerful Nazis around him in order to save his workers from executioner Amon Goeth, who ran the Plaszow camp where 40,000 to 80,000 Jews died. The 1,200 on Schindler's list survived. In 1982, Australian writer Thomas Keneally turned the stories of the Schindlerjuden into the novel Schindler's List, and Hollywood came calling. Though Steven Spielberg quickly purchased rights to the book, the project went through two other directors and three writers before he finally decided to make the movie himself-as a three-hour drama shot in documentary-style black and white, no less. ''Schindler was a rare character-amidst all this evil was the emergence of this inexplicable goodness,'' says MCA president Sidney Sheinberg. But the magnitude of the story's Holocaust setting stymied the first two screenwriters. Novelist Keneally tossed in the towel after giving the script a lengthy first pass. Kurt Luedtke (Out of Africa) toiled over his draft for four years before calling it quits. At one point, Spielberg backed away from directing the film and decided instead to produce it, but his plans to use Sydney Pollack behind the camera came to nothing. Martin Scorsese, too, was in, then out. Last year, when writer Steven Zaillian (Searching for Bobby Fischer) turned in a script that met with Spielberg's approval, the director put it on his schedule, getting Sheinberg's okay to supervise postproduction of Jurassic Park from Poland. ''A lot of people at Universal thought he was crazy,'' says Sheinberg. ''I didn't. Steven is the most organized man on earth.'' By the time cameras rolled in Krakow, Spielberg had spent a year trying to find his perfect star. ''Harrison Ford was a little too old to play 34,'' says veteran Spielberg producer Gerald Molen. ''Costner wanted it. But Steven wanted (someone who could personify) Oskar Schindler for the role.'' Spielberg found him in Irish actor Liam Neeson (Darkman, Husbands & Wives), 40, whom he saw on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Working with 119 actors and 30,000 extras, Spielberg completed filming three days under his 75-day shooting schedule and within his lowest budget ($23 million) since 1985's The Color Purple. The only thing he didn't anticipate was stepping into a controversy. The World Jewish Congress protested his plans to shoot at Auschwitz/Birkenau-''within the perimeter of what is the largest graveyard in the world,'' says Molen. ''Steve met with them in New York, respected their objections, and we devised a way to shoot outside the gate. We built our own barracks and backed trains into Birkenau.'' With Schindler's List complete, the first verdict comes from the Universal brass, and it's an unexpected one, given the director's known ability to put the squeeze on the emotions of his audience: ''It looks like it was directed by Ingmar Bergman,'' says one surprised exec. ''It's almost underplayed. Will he get credit for not being manipulative?'' Buzz: Good question, and probably the one that will determine Schindler's fate. If the critics back it, Spielberg could finally win his Oscar.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,308985,00.html

Entertainment Weekly
Issue #201
December 17, 1993

How much is the presidential seal of approval worth at the box office? Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is about to find out. During a speech he gave on Dec. 1, President Clinton gave a thumb's-up to the upcoming Holocaust drama, saying, ''I went to see Schindler's List. I implore every one of you to go see it.'' So, will Universal use the blurb to promote the film? A spokeswoman says the studio hasn't decided, but one insider thinks it's a bad idea: ''The lines between Hollywood and Washington blur all the more when Presidents start reviewing movies,'' says movie analyst Martin Grove. ''I'm sure Universal hopes moviegoers listen more attentively to Clinton than the legislature does.''

[Mary Frances]

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,300930,00.html

Oscar Watch

OUT OF THE SHADOWS

Entertainment Weekly
Issue #207
January 28, 1994

Ralph Fiennes - He won acclaim as the cold-blooded Nazi in Schindler's List (Best Supporting Actor, NewYork Film Critics; Golden Globe nominee) and will next be seen in the Robert Redford-directed Quiz Show. Fiennes seems intent on making the most of his white-hot status. He recently dumped the agent who landed him both Schindler's and Quiz Show and moved over to the glitzy Creative Artists Agency. A harmonious departure? ''He may think it's harmonious. I think it's atonal,'' says former agent Clifford Stevens of Paradigm. As for what lies ahead for Fiennes, Stevens adds obliquely, ''I hope he gets everything he deserves.''

Part of a longer article about the Best Actor nominees for the Oscar. Click on the above link to read more about them.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/villains/article/0,28804,1614710_1614709_1615036,00.html

EVIL CHARACTERS

Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth
#22 of 25

By Richard Corliss
TIME
2007


Ralph Fiennes playing Amon Goeth in Schindler's List, U.S., 1993
Everett

The role of Goeth, commandant of the Plaszow death camp in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film, seems to allow for little subtlety; the man shoots Jews for target practice. But now this capricious monster strides into the basement of his barracks mansion and sees his maid, the lovely Jewish internee Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz). Though he had chosen her as window dressing for the mausoleum he runs, her strength and grace have touched him. For a crucial moment, as we see on Fiennes' face, evil pauses to consider itself. Could I have a decent feeling? Could I love this base creature, this beautiful thing, this Jewess? Just as quickly, and subtly, Fiennes' face tells us no. Goeth's fists flail out, not so much at Hirsch as at the recognition that he is doomed to solitude by his wickedness.

Part of a list of 25 of Greatest Movie Villans. Click on the above link to read about the rest.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980191-1,00.html

The Man Behind the Monster

By Richard Corliss
TIME
February 21, 1994

Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plaszow death camp, strides into the basement of his barracks mansion and sees his maid, the lovely Jewish internee Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz). He had chosen her as window dressing for the mausoleum he runs, but her strength and grace have touched him. For a crucial moment, on the face of actor Ralph Fiennes, evil pauses to consider itself. Could I have a decent feeling? Could I love this base creature, this beautiful thing, this Jewess? Just as quickly, and subtly, Fiennes' face tells us no. Goeth's fists flail out, not so much at Hirsch as at the recognition that he is doomed to solitude by his wickedness.

More than anything else in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, this potent, poignant scene illuminates the moral stupor of the totalitarian heart. And the performance has made an instant star of an actor previously known only in Britain. Already Ralph Fiennes (the name is Welsh and rhymes with safe signs) has a Golden Globe Award, a New York Film Critics Circle citation and, as of last week, an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his work in Schindler's List. In September moviegoers will see him as Charles van Doren, that fallen savant of '50s TV, in Robert Redford's much touted Quiz Show. After that, who can say? Spielberg can: "If he picks the right roles and doesn't forget the theater, I think he can eventually be Alec Guinness or Laurence Olivier."

He is already -- and this is creepy, considering the quicksilver brutality of his Goeth -- a burgeoning text symbol. Doughy and dark in the movie or slim, handsome and smiling in person, Fiennes, 31, is the improbable hunk.

The real Amon Goeth was no hunk. But he was an artist of evil -- grandly deranged, creatively sadistic. He would set his dogs on children and watch them be devoured. "The people he whipped," Fiennes says, "had to keep count of the strokes. If they lost count, the whipping started from the beginning."

How could anyone live inside this monster's skin for the three harrowing months of filming? Perhaps for so mesmerizing a role, the question must be, How could any actor not want to? "In playing Amon," says Fiennes, who put on 28 lbs. for the part, "I got close to his pain. Inside him is a fractured, miserable human being. I feel split about him, sorry for him. He's like some dirty, battered doll I was given and that I came to feel peculiarly attached to."

Fiennes is as reluctant to discuss his personal life as he is ready to analyze Goeth's. But it is no state secret that he was born in Suffolk, eldest of the six children of Mark Fiennes, a farmer turned photographer, and his wife, Jini a novelist and travel writer who died last year. His family moved often, and the boy was educated by Episcopalians, Catholics, Quakers and his mother. After graduation from London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he rocketed through the British repertory system. Then he attracted the best kind of attention: Spielberg's.

The director saw Fiennes in the TV film A Dangerous Man: Lawrence of Arabia and then in a remake of Wuthering Heights. "His Heathcliff," Spielberg says, "was a feral man, a kind of grownup Wild Child." He met Fiennes and tested him for Goeth. "Ralph did three takes. I still, to this day, haven't seen Take 2 or 3. He was absolutely brilliant," the director says. "After seeing Take 1, I knew he was Amon." In Fiennes' eyes, Spielberg says, "I saw sexual evil. It is all about subtlety: there were moments of kindness that would move across his eyes and then instantly run cold."

During last winter's grueling shoot in Poland, Fiennes vacuumed up nuggets of Goethiana from every source: newsreels, Thomas Keneally's Schindler novel, testimony by the Schindler Jews. But he needed no research to feel the chill of hatred in his bones; simply by appearing in his Nazi uniform he enlisted volunteers of bigotry. "The Germans were charming people," a sweet-faced woman told him. "They didn't kill anybody who didn't deserve it."

When Fiennes, in full Hauptsturmfuhrer regalia, was introduced by Spielberg to Mila Pfefferberg, a Schindler survivor depicted in the film, the old lady trembled. "Her knees began to give out from under her," Spielberg recalls. "I held her while Ralph enthused about how important it was for him to meet her -- and she vibrated with terror. She didn't see an actor. She saw Amon Goeth."

In that malevolently malleable face, the world's filmgoers are seeing Goeth. And soon, in what looks like the blooming of a brilliant career, they may even get to see Ralph Fiennes.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York

[Mary Frances]

http://www.independent.ie/unsorted/features/monsters-inc-54388.html

Monsters Inc

Independent.ie
February 10, 2007

H. Lecter is regularly described as the scariest and most memorable screen villain of them all. Thanks to the storm of publicity around the film, Hopkins' Oscar and that effortlessly stylish muzzle, Hannibal probably is the most famous movie bad guy, but the scariest? I hardly think so.

Just take a look at Norman Bates in the original 'Psycho' (1960), and you have a far less camp and far more believable killer, whose insanity is all too convincing.

Or what about Alex, Malcolm McDowell1s depraved mugger and rapist in Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' (1971)? Or Ralph Fiennes' unforgettable portrayal of Nazi sociopath Amon Goeth in 'Schindler1s List' (1993)?

Then there are too great turns from the effortlessly villainous Robert Mitchum, as obsessive convict Max Cady in the original 'Cape Fear' (1962, and not the awful Scorsese remake), and as the Reverend1 Harry Powell in Charles Laughton's beautiful feature, 'The Night of the Hunter' (1955).

By comparison with that lot, Lector is a mere cartoon, who goes about his ghastly business with altogether too much actorly relish. I do not suggest such monstrous people do not exist; merely that meeting them would probably be a lot less entertaining.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_B_hanukkah06.32a5802.html

'Schindler's List' survivor lights candles on Riverside menorah

By IMRAN VITTACHI
The Press-Enterprise
December 5, 2007

RIVERSIDE - For Leon Leyson, the memory of pulling 12-hour shifts without pay in Oskar Schindler's factory was better than what he'd left behind in a place called Plaszów.

"How could I claim that he was exploiting us? If it weren't for him and his company, we would be dead," Leyson, a Holocaust survivor and the youngest person on Schindler's famous list, said of the late German industrialist.

Schindler was credited with saving 1,200 Jews from the Nazis. He risked his life by bribing Nazi officials to spare them and put their names on an employment list at his enamel works and munitions factory in German-occupied Krakow, Poland. His story was made into a best-seller, "Schindler's Ark," and the 1993 Oscar-winning movie "Schindler's List."

Leon Leyson, 78, of Fullerton, lights a giant ice menorah during Riverside's third annual Hanukkah Festival of Lights on Wednesday. Leyson worked in German industrialist Oskar Schindler's factory during the Holocaust.
Leyson, now 78 and a resident of Fullerton, on Wednesday night served as guest of honor at the third annual Hanukkah Festival of Lights menorah-lighting ceremony in downtown Riverside. Standing on a raised platform above the steps of the old Riverside County Court House, Leyson lit two candles on a giant menorah carved from ice. A line of city and county officials and other Inland dignitaries, three rows deep, passed him the torch he used to light the wicks.

They signified the first two nights of the eight-day Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. It commemorates the victory almost 22 centuries ago of some Jewish farmers, the Macabees, against a Syrian-Greek king bent on wiping out Judaism.

"It just takes a little light to push away the darkness," said Rabbi Shmuel M. Fuss, who leads the Chabad Jewish Community Center in Riverside, which organized the event. The courthouse steps were chosen because they symbolize how American justice protects freedom, Fuss said.

"Our strifes, our struggles, our disputes and our crimes ... the light shines on them here -- the light of justice," said Riverside County Supervisor Bob Buster.

Fuss said the ceremony could not be arranged for Tuesday, the first night of Hanukkah, because the Riverside City Council was meeting that night. Mayor Ron Loveridge attended Wednesday's ceremony.

Leyson told the crowd of about 150 people that to celebrate Hanukkah under the Nazi regime was punishable by death.

He was a teenager in early 1944 when Schindler put him to work at his factory. The Polish-born Leyson was then known as Leib Lejzon.

Two of his older brothers were killed by the Germans. Before being sent in 1943 to the Plaszów concentration camp, near Krakow, the Lejzon family was confined to a section of Krakow that the Nazis had turned into a ghetto.

If life inside it was "hell," as Leyson put it, the year he spent at Plaszów was "the end of the world."

The camp's commandant was Amon Göth, played in the movie with sadistic effect by actor Ralph Fiennes. Leyson, a retired Huntington Park High School teacher, said the real Göth was crueler than the one portrayed by Fiennes. Leyson recalled witnessing the commandant personally execute a forced-labor foreman at the camp.

Killing seemed to be second nature to Göth, Leyson said. To him, Göth's were "cold eyes with nothing behind them."

Staff writer David Olson contributed to this report.

Click on the link above to listen to Leyson's story.