The Counterfeiters (+ BD Live) [Blu-ray]
The Counterfeiters (+ BD Live) [Blu-ray]
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 08/05/2008 Run time: 116 minutes Rating: RA deft blend of suspense and docudrama, Stefan Ruzowitzky’s sixth feature focuses on history’s largest counterfeiting operation. Before World War II breaks out, Salomon Sorowitsch (the compact yet steely Karl Markovics), a Russian-born Jew, lives the good life in Berlin. He forges documents, like passports and banknotes, and sketches beautiful women to the romantic strains of tango records. Sorowitsch’s dolce vita comes to an end when he’s sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. Once Reich officials decide to deploy imprisoned printers, craftsmen, and bank officials to counterfeit foreign currency, they draft Sorowitsch for “Operation Bernhard” and ship him to Sachsenhausen. Though he and his colleagues receive preferential treatment, the threat of execution hangs over their heads at all times. First, they master the pound; then they tackle the American dollar. At this point, communist co-worker Adolf Burger (The Ninth Day’s excellent August Diehl) suggests sabotage. As he explains, they’re extending the conflict and increasing the death toll, but the entire team will suffer if they fail, even their SS supervisor, Freidrich Herzog (Downfall’s Devid Striesow), whose career depends on it. As Jews, however, they stand to lose more than their jobs. Based on Burger’s book The Devil’s Workshop, Austria’s Ruzowitzky (Anatomy) sheds a compassionate light on the guilt and complicity of survivors. Though The Counterfeiters plays more like a prison camp movie than a Holocaust drama–Stalag 17 comes to mind–that doesn’t make it any less significant, just less wrenching than some of its counterparts. –Kathleen C. Fennessy
Stills from The Counterfeiters (click for larger image)
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
User Ratings and Reviews
1 Stars Pathetic Little Drama
I thought German/Austrian people had had a long history of film-making, watching this pathetic little drama unfold made me think otherwise. It is about a counterfeiter called something or other who is forced to make fake dollar/pounds bills at a - yawn!! - concentration camp. The sets were of such poor quality and cost-cutting so evident that it was really shocking. I had an almost claustrophobic feeling; as if some amateur actors got together, selected an abandoned warehouse in erstwhile East German town, discussed a script whilst drinking beer and eating sausages rolls and presto, they get an Oscar. I wouldn’t even dare to compare it with classics like Schindler’s List. This movie is almost obscene! It leaves you so totally cold and untouched! It is even worse than our Bollywood Musicals starring ugly Shah Rukh Khan or Lilliput Aamir Khan!
5 Stars To Live Another Day?
“The Counterfeiters” is based on the true story of the largest counterfeiting effort in history. During WWII, the German’s attempted to counterfeit the British Pound and the US Dollar using Jewish concentration camp captives in a last ditch attempt to sustain their war effort. This German film won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2007 and contains some amazing performances, especially by Karl Markovics as Solomon Sorowitsch.
As we enter the picture, Sorowitsch is living large making big sums of money as a master forger of fake documents, currency and passports in Berlin in 1936. Ultimately, Sorowitsch doesn’t escape the grip of the Nazi’s and winds up in a concentration camp. When the Nazis decide to launch Operation Bernhard, they round up Sorowitsch and other Jewish printers, ship them to another concentration camp and accelerate their counterfeiting efforts.
“The Counterfeiters” doesn’t focus on the conditions of the Holocaust to the degree other great Holocaust/WWII pictures do like “Schindler’s List” and “Life is Beautiful”. The movie does paint a sufficient and horrifying enough picture of the treatment and conditions Jewish prisoners lived through. But the brilliance of this picture is the moral conflict that Solomon and the other prisoners face. Their efforts enable them to prolong their lives (and suffering), one day at a time, but also raise the specter that should the effort the Nazi’s enlist their help succeed, they will face the same consequences as their other family members, friends and relatives. While we empathsize with Sorowitsch and his plight, the picture creates a more ambivalent and conflicted sense of him than I expected. While Solomon uses his situation to bargain for other prisoners, notably one with TB, we also see a duplicitous and self-centered side.
It is when another camp prisoner, Adolf Burger, attempts to sabotage the efforts to counterfeit the dollar, that the brilliance of this film really takes shape. What is the right choice for these traumatized and tormented individuals? Survive even if it means helping their captors and tormentors? Resist and undermine the counterfeiting operation while surely facing certain death sooner? The conflict is not only with the enemy, but is also within the ranks of these prisoners, simmering below the surface until it finally reaches its boiling point.
“The Counterfeiters” is a tremendous piece of film-making. It is emotionally wrenching and morally thought provoking — a great piece of art that will linger with you for a long time after watching it.
4 Stars Close to perfection, amazing nonetheless
It’s interesting to see how in times of despair, comradry fails. A film about concentration camps with the most interesting of characters playing the lead. This film is more about counterfeiting and proposes a great reason Germany dominated the war. They counterfeited British currency to four times the actual worth and had in mind to do the same with the Dollar. What just happens then is a never heard before story of the world’s history. Strongly recommended film. The Counterfeiters did something I never thought it would from the off set. Highly recommended. It’s like the Pianist with not as much as emotion.
5 Stars A tense, fascinating true tale about a group of skilled Jewish counterfeiters, Nazi brutality and corrupt German self-interest
Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is a professional criminal, a master counterfeiter and a Jew. He winds up in a brutal Nazi labor camp because of all three. Sally also is a survivor. He’s not idealistic about Judaism, he knows how prisons work and how to survive. His goal is simple: Do whatever it takes to stay alive and try to use every bit of guile and opportunism he has to get more food and to escape the work designed to kill the inmates. He winds up being jeered as a Jew but painting heroic portraits of SS officers and their families.
One night you might say his luck changes. He’s transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and encounters Sturmbannfuhrer Freidrich Herzog (Devid Striesow), the man who arrested him. Now Herzog is in charge of Operation Bernhard, a top-secret project endorsed by Himmler: Find a way to counterfeit British pounds that are so perfect they won’t be detected. These counterfeits will be used by the Nazis to flood Britain and destroy its economy. Sorowitsch and a group of Jewish prisoners — skilled typographers, printers, artists, paper experts — are taken to a top-secret, walled section of Sachsenhausen and put to work. If they succeed, they live, for a while. If they fail, they die. They succeed so well with the pound that the Nazis decide to use the stuff to buy their own war needs. But now the prisoners also have the task of counterfeiting American $100 bills. Same deal: Succeed, live; fail, die. One prisoner, Adolph Burger (August Diehl), says he will sabotage the project by deliberately showing it down. It makes for a tense moral dilemma. Burger is prepared to be shot. He’s also prepared to take the others with him. The others, naturally enough, don’t agree.
For Sally the pragmatist, all he knows is that they are alive while others just beyond the wall are dead. They all can hear the pleading and the gunshots. By working, Sally and the others have better food, showers once a week, softer beds and some shaky security as long as their project is needed. They still endure brutal treatment by their SS guards, but at least they’re alive. Sally intends to survive, but he probably surprises himself as he finds ways to help some of the other prisoners and to delay the project enough to matter but not enough to see people shot. And it should be said that Sally the expert is in a position to have the material and presses he needs to finally produce a perfect counterfeit, something he was never able to accomplish before. His British pounds are so good they’re accepted by the Swiss and verified by the Bank of England.
The Counterfeiters is an intriguing mixture of tense thriller and Nazi brutality. It is a taut story permeated with the fear of death, arbitrary and pointless. You’re suspected of having tuberculosis because you cough? An SS guard simply takes you out to the courtyard, makes you kneel and fires a bullet in your brain. No matter how useful you might be, you’re still just a Jew.
The movie is based on Adolph Burger’s memoirs, but was significantly tweaked, with Burger’s approval, by the director/screenwriter Stefan Ruzowitzky. Karl Markovics as Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch gives an excellent performance. Markovics is a tough-looking actor who probably has had the best role of his career. Sorowitsch is based on Salomon Smolianoff, a wily Russian career criminal and master forger.
Right after the war says Burger, “I told my friend Salomon, `Please promise me you will never counterfeit again.’ He promised me he wouldn’t do it any more. So we shook hands, and I have never seen him again.” Now 91, Burger still gives talks to schoolchildren about the horrors the German’s wreaked and, sometimes, about counterfeiting.
5 Stars Be really good at something
I am not going to praise the acting, cinematography, direction and everything else about this movie that is really super - the movie got an Academy Award. What I do wish to say is that coming up with the idea to make a movie on the Nazis and the counterfeiting exercise is brilliant and original. I think most other aspects of World War II have been repeated over and over again in too many different ways (The excellent HBO series “Band of Brothers” did come to mind).
The other point I wish to make (and which the movie illustrates so well), is that it is very important to be really good at something and to build a reputation on that ability. This fact is true in everyday life and also in the case of Salomon (Sally) from the movie.
I liked the way Sally’s compassion for fellow prisoners and also the strong feeling of self preservation is depicted throughout the movie.
Filed under: Blue Ray Movie Reviews