U-turn

Give Das Boot the boot

Would a feature film from Germany denying the Holocaust get four-star reviews? Certainly not: fibbing about the Nazi camps, all agree, is beyond the limits of artistic license. But what if the movie is not about the deportation of the Jews but willfully distorts other parts of the Nazi campaign?

What about a German film that dramatizes World War II as a "regular" war without Third Reich genocidal ideology? What if it portrays the German navy as passive, almost unwilling, participants, though Churchill said, "The U-Boat attack was our worst evil," and historian William Shirer reported that, by summer of 1942, "German U-Boats were sinking 700,000 tons of British-American shipping a month," making Hitler confident of world victory.

I'm talking about the flagrantly revisionist Das Boot (1981), Wolfgang Petersen's high-seas adventure that follows a German U-Boat command as it floats about the North Atlantic in 194l.

Nazis, what Nazis? You mean a few crazies back in Berlin. No, the honorable German navy in Das Boot never call themselves Nazis, not once. A bunch of really good guys, they never mutter anything anti-Semitic (or mention Jews at all). And they have nothing blasphemous to say about the French and English. In fact, you have to listen hard to figure out who they're fighting.

And their commander? A bearded loner who listens to French music, refuses to "Sieg Heil" when he meets real Nazis, tunes the radio away from Berlin propaganda, and actually says of Himmler (with no repercussions), "Nothing but hot air comes out of that fat slob."

That's correct: in Das Boot, the real Germans in the war disapprove of the Nazis. They fight when they have to, but they're far more worried about being blown up than torpedoing their supposed enemies.

Unsurprisingly, the film was embraced back home, perhaps the first World War II movie since The Bridge (1959) to characterize German military as likable victims instead of goosestepping Fascists. But the film was also a box-office smash in the USA, getting six Oscar nominations and the endorsements of amnesiac reviewers.

In 1997, Das Boot has risen again, marching back into circulation via Petersen's Birth of a Nation-length director's cut. Critics again seem willing to accept its calculated de-Nazification.

Gary Susman's three-and-a-half-star Phoenix review noted approvingly, "It wasn't about Nazi ideology but about the way soldiers in a unit handle the ordeals of wartime."

Jay Carr in his four-star Globe review read the film as "anti-war" and declared, "What Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front was to World War I, Das Boot was to World War II."

(Actually, All Quiet was a famously pacifist, army-hating work written by a German Jew. In 1933, the book was banned and publicly burned by the Nazis, and Remarque went into exile. Das Boot is a fetishist militarist novel, 500-plus pages of U-Boat male adventure fantasy. The author, Lothar-Günther Buchheim, volunteered for the navy in World War II and served on mine sweepers and submarines in His Majesty Adolf's Service.)

James Verniere, Herald critic, also gave Das Boot four stars. To his credit, he qualified his overpraise: "If the film has a flaw, it is its suggestion that these men are noble German soldiers doing their duty, hating their Nazi masters, and sympathizing with their victims. . . . But history has taught us this is as simplistic as the German-as-Nazi-killer stereotype."

My view? Would an African-American want to spend a day at the movies with the lovable KKK? I'm Jewish, and Das Boot is pernicious. I have trouble watching it because, frankly, I don't want my Nazis "humanized." I want them blown away, and it takes more than three hours before the Swastika-flying U-Boat finally, happily, sinks forever.

MY QUICKIE Q&A with director John Waters about Pink Flamingos:

Q: The official first screening of the film was at New York's Elgin Theater. Didn't it open secretly in Boston?

A: New Line booked it into a Boston gay porn theater. I went berserk because I wanted a more focused release. I called David Lochary, one of the stars, to come up from P-Town and see it. He reported, "Everyone in the theater was having sex. There was more action in the bathroom than on the screen."

Q: The bourgeois Marble family have a poster on a wall of the wild 1968 movie Boom! Isn't that wrong for their sensibility?

A: It's early product placement, giving Boom! a plug. It's my favorite bad movie in the history of cinema, and Liz Taylor's outfits are truly drag-queen heaven. I showed it at the Dallas Film Festival, where the audience loved it, like a Rocky Horror.

Q: What's the scoop on Pink Flamingos' Singing Asshole?

A: I won't say his name. He's married. He lives in Baltimore. For his scene, I gave him a bottle of liquor to loosen him up. He did it as a yoga exercise. Years later, there was a private party at a Boston disco and they wanted the Singing Asshole to perform live. Asked, he replied, "The muscles aren't what they used to be." Graciously, they sent him $100 for "even thinking about it."