Christabel

Our Price: $9.99
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $9.95 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD details

Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada

DVD details

DVD: Region Code 1.0
Audio: English (Unknown)
Running Time: 120 unknown-units
Audience Rating: Unrated

DVD Reviews of Christabel

DVD Review: Edited for DVD
Summary: 3 Stars

CHRISTABEL easily rates a solid 4.5 stars if not for THIS version's missing a full half hour of story. Recommended instead is the full-length 147 minute edition found on MILL CREEK ENTERTAINMENT's BOX OFFICE GOLD 50 MOVIE PACK.

SYNOPSIS:
CHRISTABEL (TV-UK-1988) - Elizabeth Hurley, Stephen Dillane
Uniformly excellent, thought-provoking BBC-TV movie based on Christabel Burton Bielenberg's autobiography chronicles her marriage just prior to WWII to a German national and relocation to first Berlin and then a home in the Black Forest.

In a study of contrasts and just one stark scene of many, a friend of English-born Christabel (a niece of two Lords) and her husband Peter has been convicted in a failed 1944 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. As he hangs just two feet off the floor, conscious and slowly suffocating from a piano wire garrotte, there's a shift to a children's church choir singing "Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht" as Christabel looks on.

Several Allied carpet bomb raids are given a civilian view, as terrified Berliners huddle together -sometimes unprotected- while clusters of eight explosive devices fall. "Christabel" is one of the most effective films in portraying such horrors. Surviving losers in war must go on with their lives despite poverty, hunger, homelessness and widespead destruction. Here, we expereince that reality also.

This remarkable motion picture eschews politics to concentrate on the lives of PEOPLE, specifically non-combatants, often the most fragile and first to be lost during all-out war.

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.

DVD Review: Worth seeing if you enjoyed the book
Summary: 4 Stars

I loved the book (called "When I was a German" in the United States) upon which this television movie was based. The first half of the film barely follows the events of the book, but by the end manages to convey at least some of the book's highlights. Elizabeth Hurley changed a lot physically after she appeared in "Christabel" - it's really hard to recognize her here.

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 Hitlers 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 Bielenbergs historical memoir, The Past Is Myself, looking back on the years 1932-1945, was the source for this depiction of life in Germany during Hitlers 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 Germanys shifting political climate. I 1939, as the situation became acute; Peter joined a military organization planning to remove Hitler from power.

Genres DVDs

DVD Video

Bestsellers in Genres DVDs

Santa Buddies
BUENA VISTA HOME VIDEO; Release date: 2009-11-24; DVD
Best price: $14.92
Price in other shops: ~~$29.99~~

Angels & Demons (Single-Disc Theatrical Edition)
SONY PICTURES HOME ENT; Release date: 2009-11-24; DVD
Best price: $11.99
Price in other shops: ~~$28.96~~

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (Single-Disc Edition)
Release date: 2009-12-01; DVD
Best price: $9.99
Price in other shops: ~~$29.98~~

Monsters, Inc. (4-Disc Edition) [Blu-ray]
BUENA VISTA HOME VIDEO; Release date: 2009-11-10; DVD
Best price: $18.25
Price in other shops: ~~$40.99~~

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Widescreen Edition)
Warner Brothers; Release date: 2009-12-08; DVD
Best price: $9.99
Price in other shops: ~~$28.98~~

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Blu-ray/ DVD Combo + Digital Copy & BD-Live) [Blu-ray]
Warner Brothers; Release date: 2009-12-08; DVD
Best price: $15.99
Price in other shops: ~~$35.99~~

Up (Single Disc Widescreen)
Example Product Brand; Release date: 2009-11-10; DVD
Best price: $12.70
Price in other shops: ~~$29.99~~

Star Trek (Single-Disc Edition)
PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO; Release date: 2009-11-17; DVD
Best price: $8.49
Price in other shops: ~~$29.99~~

Up (4 Disc Combo Pack with Digital Copy and DVD) [Blu-ray]
BUENA VISTA HOME VIDEO; Release date: 2009-11-10; DVD
Best price: $16.99
Price in other shops: ~~$45.99~~

Star Trek (Three-Disc +Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]
PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO; Release date: 2009-11-17; DVD
Best price: $18.00
Price in other shops: ~~$39.99~~

Similar DVDs, VHS Video, Audio CDs

Cromwell
Sony; Release date: 2003-10-07; DVD
Best price: $8.36
Price in other shops: ~~$14.94~~

The Graduate (40th Anniversary Collector's Edition)
TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT; Release date: 2007-09-11; DVD
Best price: $14.36
Price in other shops: ~~$24.98~~

The Secret Garden
Warner Brothers; Release date: 1997-11-19; DVD
Best price: $5.06
Price in other shops: ~~$12.98~~

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
Twentieth Century Fox; Release date: 2003-04-01; DVD
Best price: $7.90
Price in other shops: ~~$14.98~~

Christabel
by L. Bielenberg
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1989-02-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.75
Price in other shops: ~~$9.95~~

Waking the Dead: The Complete Season Three
Warner Brothers; Release date: 2009-01-20; DVD
Best price: $20.35
Price in other shops: ~~$34.98~~