Hitler's Children (1943)

Excellent but underrated film

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Most of the anti-Nazi propaganda coming out of Hollywood circa 1943 was set on the battlefront; this RKO programmer avoids the battlefield and limits the military to stock footage, but it's more powerful and engaging than many a contemporary war picture. Set at an American school in Berlin, it takes a while to establish why the two young leads (Bonita Granville and Tim Holt) speak in unaffected English while all around them sport comic-Nazi accents, and it's a little jarring at first to see the Hitler-youth children behaving like sitcom Americans ("Aw gee, can't we study outside?"). But once the propagandistic plot points kick into gear it becomes a real rouser, with the good American teacher (Kent Smith) trying to track down Granville through her appropriation, exploitation, and eventual sad end with the Nazis. It's surprisingly brutal in spots, and it's not afraid to have an extremely downbeat ending for its day. Director Edward Dmytryk and his DP appear to have actually studied Leni Riefenstahl for some of their compositions, and while the morality is very black-and-white (Nazi=evil, everybody else=good), for once that doesn't feel simplistic.

Browsing Hollywood's cinematic output from the early 1940s, you'll come across WWII propaganda of varying degrees. First, there's the patriotic war-time films whose anti-German messages are really only incidental to the chosen subject matter, such as Curtiz's 'Casablanca (1942)' and Wilder's 'Five Graves to Cairo (1943).' Screenwriters, in an effort to show their continued support towards the Allied cause, strove tirelessly to out-do each other with progressively more triumphant and uplifting concluding speeches, and it's often difficult not to feel inspired by their impressive words. On the more extreme end of the scale, just short of the out-and-out propaganda documentaries like Capra's "Why We Fight (1943)" series, are those films that exist solely to extol the virtues of America, and, more importantly, to condemn the evils of Germany. I'm all for patriotism, but watching 'Hitler's Children (1943)' feels like walking into a brain-washing institution to have my individual values and beliefs replaced with those of my government; the cinema had become Hollywood's own re-education clinic.Alas, the film was directed by Edward Dmytryk, and so, like all his films, it's well-made. Despite a somewhat pathetic attempt to blend Tim Holt into a classroom of young adolescents, there's no doubting that the workman-like Dmytryk could put together a scene, and Russell Metty's cinematography is impressive, even including a fogged-out 'Casablanca'-inspired airport runway. But why am I watching this film? Indeed, why did anybody go to watch this film? From a $205,500 budget, 'Hitler's Children' made a staggering $3.355 million in ticket sales, suggesting that audiences were more than willing to sacrifice their money for 80 minutes of unadulterated anti-German sentiment, however overdramatised and clichéd it may be. The problem with watching propaganda, at least for me, is that you treat every new revelation with skepticism, eyes narrowed to scrutinise the latest evil quality attributed to the Nazis. The film may (or may not) be accurate in its depiction of Lebensborn, forced sterilisation and youth corruption, but I'm not buying any of it, certainly not from a film that's so set on convincing me.Who are the Germans? Well, to this film's credit, Germany's entire population is never collectively deemed evil. Rather, the nation's immorality is attributed to the few maniacs coordinating Hitler's sinister regime, with the lower citizens cooperating either through fear or through more active coercion. These generals, smugly-satisfied lackeys to the Fuhrer, are more comically droll than fearsome, cutting short an anti-Nazi tirade by shooting down their two unarmed prisoners rather than simply disconnecting the microphone; they really walked into that one, didn't they? That perfectly innocent children are being tainted from birth is genuinely a frightening (and later a notably Orwellian) idea, but not one that the film explores as effectively as it should have, instead content with concocting a forced romance between a fiercely patriotic German (Holt) and his German-born American sweetheart (Bonita Granville). Kent Smith gives the film's most natural and likable performance as Professor Nichols, an American schoolteacher who is justifiably aghast at Hitler's practices. Oh, it's all adequate entertainment, I suppose, but 'To Be or Not to Be (1942)' was so much more fun.

I found this film to be one of the most captivating and well-kept movie secrets of all time. If it is the first time you see it, you might be surprised that it was boldly made before WWII was over. The film stretches some emotions like taffy, while it is not overly-graphic, and only moderately intense. It instills in you with what seems to be a fair overview of the Nazi regime, while entertaining you with a plot of escape & a love story. To be expected, the conversation in it is surreal, typical of the film's era, but the only drawback for me is that Bonita Granville (age 19 when the film was made), who plays Anna Miller, passed in 1988 and actually stopped making major films after 1950. I did not realize what a beautiful girl she was until I discovered her in this picture a few weeks ago. A film for all generations (I was born 20 years after WWII).

Okay, I saw this title coming up on TCM and I had to watch it. What the heck could a movie called Hitler's Children be like? Well, it's your typical WWII love story. Nazi meets girl; Nazi loses girl; Nazi gets girl and they both die.I understand this was propaganda for the American audiences during the war but really. To call the acting wooden is an insult to all trees and Alec Baldwin. Even Otto Kruger and Tim Holt seem to sink under the weight of the story.Edward Dmytryk directed one of my favorite movies, The Caine Mutiny, as well as a great Chandler story, Murder My Sweet. But you had to be a member of the Hollywood Ten to think this movie should ever be released. Oh wait, Dmytryk was a member of the Hollywood Ten.I give this movie a two because it tells a little bit of the horrors of the Nazis though obviously they didn't know everything that the Nazis were doing. But surely by 1943 people knew the Germans were doing worse things then sterilizing women.There's just no suspense in this movie. And it's just not that you know how the movie will end after watching the first five minutes. Maybe the bad acting kept reminding me its only a movie but I think a typical Hogan's Heroes episode had more tension.Didn't Hollywood have enough talent to make a better movie than this? At least Leni Riefenstahl made Triumph of the Will. Now that was a propaganda. Maybe she was a Nazi and maybe she wasn't. But where was Hollywood's Leni Riefenstahl?