PRISONER OF PARADISE
½ (one and one half stars)
Bland Holocaust doc.
In German and English, with subtitles. Running time: 97 minutes. Not rated (disturbing images). At the Quad, 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
THE tale of a Utopian paradise that was really a cruel Nazi hoax is fascinating; the life story of one of its more famous prisoners, less so.
After an early, teasing glimpse of the airbrushed illusion that was the Theresienstadt ghetto near Prague, documentarians Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender zero in on Kurt Gerron, the Jewish entertainer who helped propagate what narrator Ian Holm calls “a grotesque and shameful lie.”
Theresienstadt, a concentration camp for prominent Jews, was presented to the world as a happy-shiny place, thanks in part to a shockingly deceptive 1944 film Gerron seemed distastefully thrilled to direct, “The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews.”
But before we get to the meat of “Prisoner of Paradise,” we must follow a tiresome series of crumbs about Gerron’s life, told in formulaic fashion via a combination of archival footage and talking heads.
Amid a number of largely irrelevant anecdotes, we learn about Gerron’s summers by the lake, trips to a sanitarium, etc., and generally get the impression this corpulent, cigar-chomping Berliner lived the high-life.
He was a household name in Germany, with a varied career as a cabaret star, a character actor (he starred with Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel”) and later as a prolific movie director.
While peers such as Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang fled to Hollywood when Hitler came to power, Gerron refused to leave, apparently too caught up in his work to notice what was going on around him.
That is, until February, 1944, when he was sent to Theresienstadt.
There he was tapped to transform the horrific ghetto into a filmed paradise, before eventually being sent to his death.
Clarke and Sender have thoroughly researched this vaguely repellent man, yet he never comes into focus – their objectivity only serves to make “Prisoner” frustratingly superficial.