Christabel
by Adrian Shergold
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DVD details
Actor: Geoffrey PalmerDirector: Adrian Shergold
Primary Contributor: Elizabeth Hurley
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown)
Running Time: 120 unknown-units
Audience Rating: Unrated
DVD Reviews of Christabel
DVD Review: A 3-star edited version of a 5-star BBC miniseries
Summary: 3 Stars
While the edits in this DVD version of a 1989 miniseries aired on Masterpiece Theater in the US aren't blatant, to anyone familiar with the original version, they are striking by their absence. And the material that has been cut makes the plot much richer without detracting from the suspense of the plot.
The story hews closely to the biography of Christabel Bielenberg ( available as When I Was a German, 1934-1945: An Englishwoman in Nazi Germany or The Past is Myself, with a followup volume, The Road Ahead), an Englishwoman who marries a German lawyer and makes her home in Berlin in the early years of the Nazi regime. Her husband and their circle of friends deplore the Nazis (anti-Hitler conspirator Adam von Trott, later executed, is one of their circle) and the plot revolves around Christabel's growing recognition that it isn't possible to just live one's private life -- or leave -- when confronted with the kind of evil that the Nazis represent.
Even this edited version presents a kind of viewpoint that is rarely seen of 'ordinary' educated Germans facing the conundrum of how to react to evil and forces us to question how we would have fared in a similar situation. As Protestant pastor Martin Niemoller famously wrote, when the Nazis took away the communists, social democrats, trade unionists and Jews, people didn't speak up because they didn't fall into those categories. "Then," Niemoller wrote, "when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out." This film looks at a group of people who did speak out.
Dennis Potter's imaginative touches (such as the scene where Christabel imagines, in a nightmare, parachutists invading her home and bayoneting her elderly father) make this a rewarding movie to watch, while the recurring echoes of the song to which Christabel listens dressing for her wedding in the opening scenes recurs throughout, sometimes offering an odd or jarring commentary on the scene.
All in all, this is an excellent film of a little-known story. But it deserves to be seen in full, so for anyone who hasn't yet discarded their VHS player, I'd urge you to get the complete version.
More Christabel reviews:
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Description of Christabel
Based on a true story, an English girl marries a German lawyer in the 1930s and they try to live a normal life as they can in Hitler's Germany; when Allied bombs start falling on German cities, Christabel takers her two young sons to a village in the mountains. Then she learns that her husband and some of his friends have been arrested for plotting to assassinate Hitler. She travels to the prison where he is held; wondering if telling the commandant that she knows Winston Churchill will help her husband or seal his fate. Christabel Bielenberg's historical memoir, "The Past Is Myself", looking back on the years 1932-1945, was the source for this depiction of life in Germany during Hitler's rise. Daughter of middle-class English-Irish parents, Christabel became a German citizen in 1934 when she married German law student Peter Bielenberg of a prominent Hamburg family. The couple raised their two sons amid Germany's shifting political climate. I 1939, as the situation became acute; Peter joined a military organization planning to remove Hitler from power.Bestsellers in DVD
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