Made deep into the war in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Germany’s Ufa Studios, Josef von Baky’s Münchhausen (1943) was the most spectacular, and enduring, narrative film from the Nazi period. As Harvard professor Eric Rentschler demonstrates in his book The Ministry of Illusion, it’s also an open-ended work that could be claimed both by followers of Hitler and by those who opposed the Third Reich.

Tall and proud, Hans Albers’s Baron von Münchhausen is a virile swordsman who travels the world in triumph, an 18th-century prototype of a Nazi übermensch. But he’s also ironic and self-reflexive, suspicious of military strength, and, in the end, tired of it all, tired of his almost-immortality. A pacifist defeatist? Whatever its meaning, Münchhausen succeeds as a big-budget fantasy movie, with its lavish scenes at the Russian court at St. Petersburg (Münchhausen becomes lover to Catherine the Great), in the waters of Venice (Münchhausen visits his old pal Casanova), and, best of all, in its grand sci-fi climax, when the Baron and his high-rising balloon land on an Ufa-constructed moon. In German with English subtitles. (b&w/100 minutes)