‘Essential’ World War 2 film is great director’s ‘hands down masterpiece’ | Films | Entertainment
Steven Spielberg and his wife visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (Image: Getty)
It remains as astonishing and heartbreaking a film today as the day it was released more than 30 years ago when it immediately became one of the greatest films of all time and saw audiences leaving cinemas in shock and floods of tears.
With a rating of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and 9/10 on IMDB, it is also one of the best-reviewed films ever made. And in a list of the 100 best films ever made compiled by respected film magazine Empire, it comes in at number 46 with only one war film ranking higher. Empire says Schindler’s List is “Steven Spielberg‘s masterpiece, hands down”, saying there are “no flaws to be found in his harrowing, (mostly) monochromatic depiction of Nazi persecution of the Jewish community in Kraków”.
Schindler’s List, which was released in 1993, tells the story of the Holocaust, the horrors of the Kraków getto and the Płaszów and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. While it is stating the obvious to say that no film can ever capture the sheer scale of this horror and tragedy, Spielberg depicts how Jews were herded into humiliating medical examinations and gas chambers, how children were separated from screaming parents and how they were arbitrarily shot dead in camps as well as in the streets.
Approximately six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List (Image: Universal Pictures)
The film’s central character is Oskar Schindler, a businessman running a factory who was essentially exploiting cheap Jewish workers for profit before more and more Nazi atrocities change his priorities and saving his workers becomes about far more than protecting the bottom line. He persuades the Nazis that his workers and the products they are producing are essential to the German war effort, thereby saving them from the camps.
Schindler, who is played in the film by Liam Neeson, ended up saving between 1,100 and 1,300 lives, and thousands more are alive today because of him. The film is shot almost entirely in black and white but ends in colour with many of the real people portrayed in the film and their descendants paying tribute to Schindler by each placing a rock at his grave in Jerusalem.
Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson and Ben Kingsley at the Schindler’s List cast reunion in 2018 (Image: Getty)
The film has been universally praised by critics. Writing in The Times, Wendy Ide wrote: “Spielberg employs all the emotive Hollywood tools at his disposal and the result is a remarkable film with wide appeal and real importance. Neeson is phenomenal, but matched by towering performances from Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes.”
Grant Watson, writing for Fiction Machine, said: “It brought the Holocaust to a mass non-Jewish audience at a time when survivors were dying of old age, and testimony was at risk of being lost.”
Eleanor Ringel Cater, writing in Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said: “Using every ounce of his awe some technical skill, the man who sent T-rex and Indiana Jones racing through our imagination brings us a story of human horror beyond imagination.”
And Susan Stark, writing in the Detroit Free Press, said: “Once in a very great while, a movie insinuates itself so deeply into your consciousness that it offers not vicarious experience but instead, direct experience. Steven Spielberg‘s heartfelt, monumental Schindler’s List is such a movie.”
The real Oskar Schindler
As globally famous as the name Oskar Schindler is today as a result of Spielberg’s film, he was in fact living in relative obscurity when his story was first featured on the BBC 30 years earlier.
In a BBC article published earlier this year, Greg McKevitt describes how journalist Magnus Magnusson told viewers of the current affairs programme Tonight in 1964: “You may not have heard of him yet, but one day you will. Today, he lives in Germany; sick, unemployable and penniless. In fact, he lives on charity, but not the poor-box kind. The money that keeps him and his family alive comes from the 1,300 Jews whose lives he personally saved in the last war. Many of them are pledged to give one day’s pay a year.”
Oskar Schindler holds up a photograph during an interview in 1963 (Image: Getty)
Oskar Schindler waves after his arrival at Jerusalem airport in 1962 to be honoured for saving lives (Image: Getty)
That programme itself came about because it had been announced that a film was to be made about Schindler’s life. It never materialised. But in 1980, Australian writer Thomas Keneally was window-shopping for a new briefcase in Los Angeles before returning home when the shop owner, Holocaust survivor Poldek Pfefferberg, told him his story.
Keneally told Desert Island Discs in 1983: “He knew I was a writer and he said ‘I’ve got a book for you. I was saved, but so was my wife, saved from Auschwitz by an extraordinary German, a big handsome Hitlerite dream of a man called Oskar Schindler’.”
Keneally went on to write the novel Schindler’s Ark, which in turn led to the film.
Schindler struggled with failed businesses and turned to alcohol after the war, the BBC reports. He died in 1974, aged 66 and survivors brought his remains to Israel, where he was buried in the Catholic Cemetery of Jerusalem. The inscription on his grave reads: “The unforgettable rescuer of 1,200 persecuted Jews.”
Schindler’s List won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes were nominated as Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor respectively.
Schindler’s List is streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, free to watch with a subscription. It is also available on Google Play and Sky Store from £2.49.
