Amen (2002)

We started with this point, this passivity. With this man, Stefan Lux at the beginning of the film who shoots a bullet in his head, {Looks like in his heart} in the League of Nations, to warn the world. This happens in 1936 and he doesn't have a clue as to how History will turn out. The members of the League of Nations had a half-hour recess, just to let the doctors take the body away. But the world didn't move.

Amen is based on the 1963 play "The Deputy", written by Rolf Hochhuth, A native German, Hochhuth was deeply concered about the "conspiracy of silence" in the Catholic Church at the time of the Holocaust. SS Commandant Kurt Gerstein was a real person who, while visiting Belzec and Treblinka in August 1942, witnessed the carefully guarded truth about the concentration camps where thousand of Jews were being slaughtered. When Gersein went to the Barican to report his discovery, he found very few priests would listen to him.
...
Riccardo Fontana is a fictional character created to represent all priests who fought against Nazi Persecution of Jews.

The collective crimes against humanity known as the Holocaust have been well-documented since the end of World War II, but lingering questions remain about how much was known about the Nazi mass-extermination schemes outside Germany, and what could have been done to prevent them. Political filmmaker Costa-Gavras confronts this thorny issue in this film, adapted from the stage drama The Representative and based in part on actual events. Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukar) is a German chemist whose work on various government health projects led to him being added to the scientific staff of the Nazi SS. While working on disinfection and water purification programs to stem the tide of typhoid among German troops, Gerstein creates a toxic cleanser called Zyclon B. Gerstein soon learns that the SS has found a different use for Zyclon B -- in gas form, it is being used to exterminate Jews and other political undesirables en masse. Gerstein, a man of strong Christian faith, is horrified by this revelation, and he is determined to tell the world in hope of stopping the genocide; however, in Germany, Sweden, and the United States, Gerstein's story falls on deaf ears. One man who does believe Gerstein is Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz), a Jesuit with ties to the Vatican and close contact with Pope Pius XII (Marcel Iures). Fontana urges the Pope to speak out against the ongoing massacre, but the Pope declines, believing Russia is a greater menace to the Catholic Church than the Nazis. In time, desperate to spread the word of the holocaust, Gerstein and Fontana find themselves joining ranks with Roman Jews being rounded up by Nazi forces in occupied Italy. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 130 mins
Amen (2002)

Gersein's report contributed to the authentification of the Holocaust.
Kurt Gerstein was rehabilitated 20 years later.

As Kurt talked to the priest he said he was just a Physician and thus the priest said that he could go to Argentina since he was not a Chemist, Biologist or another highly technical field. But the real person was found hanged in his cell in France...

Jan Karski-Polish Resistance met Roosevelt.
Jean Moulin

Gung Ho! (1943)

Accepted in 1943 as standard wartime propaganda, Gung Ho can be seen today as an outrageous exercise in raging machismo. Randolph Scott plays Thorwald, a marine colonel assigned to assemble a crack squadron of fearless jungle fighters for the all-important raid on Japanese-held Makim Island (which in real life was recaptured only a few weeks before the film's release). Thorwald seems determine to select the dregs of the earth for this mission: most of his squadron is comprised of misfits, barroom brawlers, borderline psychos and outright murderers. It is suggested that these sociopaths are the only men truly qualified for the mission at hand, and by film's end the squadron members-living and dead-are lauded as true-blue patriots. Once one gets past the questionable premise, Gung Ho is a fairly exciting WWII melodrama, with a particularly thrilling climax. The film is currently available in its original form and in a computer-colorized version. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 88 mins
Gung Ho! (1943)

Yes plenty of "Japs" 'em killed. The film like much during the 40s were part documentary and part action movie. I assume the documentary parts was to build the perception of a true story and to cover a variety of facts that dialogue might have taken too long to do. This allowed plenty of action scenes although not nearly as dramatic as present films.

The Japanese troops did ambush them with shooters in the tops of palm trees. They were easy targets once identified but hard to detect at first. The Japanese machine gun posts were not well placed or protected very well. The Americans trick the Japanese Zeros into bombing and strafing their own camp by painting one of the buildings with the US flag.

Yes by todays standards, this film was machismo and racist. But this is more of a reflection of the times after Pearl Harbor which was mentioned quite a few times.

Israel: Birth of a Nation (2005)

Basically a pro-Israel film, but plenty of good film stock and some that was never seen before. Narrated by Martin Gilbert.

Produced by The History Channel, Israel: Birth of a Nation documents how Israel survived its fraught infancy as a country. The film employs archival footage, much of it taken by a British military officer. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 100 mins
Israel: Birth of a Nation (2005)

In hind sight, I have to wonder why Britain wanted to establish a Jewish state and then do nearly everything in their power to prevent it by providing support to Palestinians and even trying to block European Jews from coming to the new state-up to including capturing boats and detaining the civilians in Cyprus. And Britain sent scout airplanes to check out Israeli positions-which were shot down by the Israeli air force.

Gush Etzion-January 1948
Killing and dismembering of the 35 reinforcements. Bodies not shown or pictures released publicly.

"Sha'ar Hagai" The Road to Jerusalem 1998

The Ship Altalena- threatened civil war outbreak.

Walter Eytan-delegation to Egypt peace conference.
Menachem Urman
Solly Ganor
Zvi Rasky
Uzi Narkiss

Come and See (1985)

Sean Penn even provides an endorsement of the film and how his father suggested that he watch it. While everyone can see the evils of Nazism or more broadly as fascism, I wonder if Penn understands all the complete evil that USSR did, not only during the war, even before being attacked by Hitler also.

A rare look at World War II from the Soviet side, Come and See is based on the real-life experiences of Ales Adamovich, who fought with Russian partisans in Belarus in 1943, when the Nazis systematically torched over 600 villages and slaughtered their inhabitants. Adamovich and director Elem Klimov co-authored the screenplay, which shows the horrors through the eyes of a 13-year-old peasant boy named Florya (Alexei Kravchenko). Over his single mother's protests, he joins the partisans, but they leave him behind in their camp when they set off to fight the Germans. Glascha (Olga Mironova), a lovely young girl, befriends him, but the two are caught in the midst of an air raid which leaves Florya nearly deaf. Now utterly frightened, Florya and Glascha return to his village to find it in ruins, and, in one of the film's many harrowing scenes, they wade through a swamp to locate the survivors. Now committed to seek vengeance for the death of his mother and neighbors, Florya returns to the front, but finds himself in a village that's right in the path of the Nazi firestorm. A band of partisans arrive too late to save the village but in time to capture and mete out justice to several of the Nazi officers. Awarded the Grand Prix at the 1985 Moscow Film Festival, Come and See is notable as an honest and unflinching portrait of one of the darker chapters among many in the history of the World War II. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 142 mins
Come and See (1985)

A dramatic film of the horrors of war. But the feel was almost like silent films, in the sense that everyone was over the top in acting. Both Florya and Glascha have moments in front of the lens where they over-dramatize feelings by crying and screaming and even laughing at times.

They showed how the Germans went into towns and killed everyone with children and women in one building while they throw hand grenades into the crowds and then burn it up. Later the Russians get revenge on the German Troops. Of course the atrocities that Russians did are not recorded on this film.

Well worth seeing this film, even if no special features available on this version.

Mother India (1957)

Bharat Mata (Mother India) was Indian filmmaker Mehboob Khan's remake of his own 1940 film Aurat (Woman). The intervening years had somewhat altered Mehboob's attitudes towards his characters and their surroundings. In the original Aurat, an Indian mother (Sardar Akhtar) suffers monumentally on behalf of her two sons, much to the disinterest of the rural community where she lives. In the remake, the mother (now played by Nargis) likewise suffers, but her plight now affects her entire village, even inspiring her neighbors to shed their own selfishness. What was once a wholly personal drama has been expanded to near-mythical dimensions. The ending, however, is still tragic, with the long-suffering heroine being forced to kill one of her own offspring to uphold the family's honor. Enormously popular in its native India, Bharat Mata remained in constant reissue throughout the next four decades. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 163 mins
Mother India (1957)

As a friend briefly described the film as Mother India suffers greatly but with perseverance and determination she overcomes some (not all) obstacles of life-starting with her mother in law mortgaging the farm at usury rates without understanding the terms of agreement. Even when mother India was facing moral dilemmas in having to prostitute herself, she found a way to survive on the remaining 5 acres without prostituting herself.

And the saddest part was when the husband that lost both forearms in a farming accident leaves his wife, mother and 3 kids (one more on the way). What an asshole!

The film was quite long but enjoyable for the most part and being an epic saga some of the events happened so fast you had to pay attention. The children were born with a short scene of her lying in bed with some steam rising. I did not even know it what it signified until the next scene.

It was also one of my wife's grandpas favorites.

42 Up (1999)

In 1964, England's Granada Television produced a documentary called 7 Up, in which 14 seven-year-old British children from a wide variety of social and economic backgrounds were interviewed about their ideas and opinions on the adult world. In 1971, director Michael Apted tracked down the same youngsters for a follow-up, 7 Plus 7. Since then, Apted has revisited his subjects every seven years in a series of remarkable films that allow us to watch these children grow into adults before our eyes. In the sixth film in the series, we visit eleven of the now middle-aged kids (three have chosen not to participate), as they settle contentedly (for the most part) into mid-life and contend with the growing maturity of their own children and, in some cases, the infirmity and death of their parents. Tony, who once dreamed of being a jockey, now drives a cab, does a bit of television acting, and admits to being unfaithful to his wife. Suzy, who at 21 was bitter and cynical with no intention of having kids, is now a happy mother who works part-time as a bereavement counselor. Neil, who has struggled through years of mental illness, poverty, and homelessness, was elected as a Liberal Democratic representative to the Hackney council in London and seems to have found stability. Paul, who was raised by divorced parents and suffered from poor self-esteem as a child, now has a fine home in Australia and has been happily married for 23 years. And Simon, a West Indian immigrant raised in a children's home, is happy, middle-class, and raising a four-year-old of his own. Ironically, Apted's latest installment in this compelling but low-key ongoing project was set for international release within months of the highest-profile film of his career, the James Bond adventure The World Is Not Enough. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 134 mins
42 Up (1999)

An interesting idea, but for me failed in execution. I found it more like watching someone's fairly well executed home movies. But it lacks something that gets me interested in the personas.

Lenny (1974)

Adapted by Julian Barry from his own Broadway play, Lenny manages to be both brutally frank and highly romanticized in detailing the short life and career of influential, controversial stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. The chronology hops, skips and jumps between Lenny (Dustin Hoffman) in his prime and the burned-out, strung-out performer who, in the twilight of his life, used his nightclub act to pour out his personal frustrations at great, boring length. We watch as up-and-coming comic Bruce courts his "Shiksa goddess," a stripper named Honey (Valerie Perrine). With family responsibilities, Lenny is encouraged to do a "safe," conformist act, but he can't do it. Constantly in trouble for flouting obscenity laws, Lenny develops a near-messianic complex, which fuels both his comedy genius and his talent for self-destruction. Worn out by a lifetime of tilting at Establishment windmills, Lenny Bruce died of a drug overdose in 1966. Director Bob Fosse chose to film Lenny in black-and-white, giving the film the texture of a documentary. Though a film as verbally graphic as Lenny could not have been made when the real Lenny Bruce was alive, audiences in 1974 responded, to the tune of an $11 million gross. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 111 mins
Lenny (1974)

Lenny to me comes out as an egotistical sexist that whores out his wife and then despises her for doing what he asks of her. Like much of the leftists of the time they became consumed by nihilism. Instead of finding new productive value systems, they dwell on the negativity that was portrayed at the time. Dustin Hoffman does a good job developing the character no matter how many character flaws from the original.

Other than Dustin, I found little value in the film.

Seconds (1966)

Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is a listless Manhattan businessman who lives with his wife in the New York suburbs. One day, he runs into an old friend (Murray Hamilton) whom he thought had died. The friend leads him to The Company, a secretive operation run by The Old Man (Will Geer). The Company is a high-tech service which, for a price, provides older men with plastic surgery, a beefed-up body, and a fresh start in life. To cover the "disappearance," a middle-aged male cadaver is "killed" in a hotel fire. Hamilton submits to the operation that will turn him into a "Second," and when the bandages are removed, he's shed twenty years, renamed Tony Wilson and is portrayed by Rock Hudson. The Company creates a new identity for Hamilton, relocating him in a hedonistic California beach community with an identity as a painter. Celebrating during a local wine festival, Hamilton has his revelry cut short when he learns that all his new young friends are Seconds like himself and suddenly feels trapped in these surroundings. Unfortunately, finding a way out isn't nearly as easy as it was to find a way in. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 107 mins
Seconds (1966)

For such an older film and B/W, it sure pushes the boundary of censorships. It is rates as an R for nudity but similar features have been threatened with X ratings during the 60s. While the husband and wife sleep in separate beds, the drunken hedonistic grape stomping festival is complete with full frontal nudity of quite a few beautiful young women. This was suppose to be filmed around Santa Barbara, but I never did see any event like this mentioned.

This is directed by the same director as The Manchurian Candidate (1962). John Frankenheimer also provides the commentator dialogue as the only special feature.

This film reminds me of a variety of original Twilight Zone episodes. The hero thinks that the grass is always greener on the other side, but in the end discovers the cost of living that other life is too high, and nothing is free in life.

Honest Arnie [HI-PRO] "The Used Cow Dealer" was a real business in Los Angeles according to the director. The director also says he had problems eating beef for months after the shooting of the film-understandably.

If you take away your past you don't exist as a person.

In the end a fine film exploring the horrors of joining a "Company" that is based on deception and lies. If things that are offered are too good to be true-they tend to turn out that way.

The Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

Soviet director Dziga Vertov's experimental film grew out of his belief, shared by his editor, Elizaveta Svilova (who was also his wife), and his cinematographer, Mikhail Kaufman (also his brother), that the true goal of cinema should be to present life as it is lived. To that end, the filmmakers offer a day-in-the-life portrait of a city from dawn until dusk, though they actually shot their footage in several cities, including Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. After an opening statement, there are no words in the film (neither voice-over nor titles), just dazzling imagery, kinetically edited - as a celebration of the modern city with a marked emphasis on its buildings and machinery. The Image Entertainment DVD edition of the film offers a musical score composed from notes left by the director, which adds greatly to the impact of the film. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 68 mins
The Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

The most strange aspect of this DVD is that the commentators track does not have the musical score behind it. Imagine any other film where no sound was except the commentator? So I did watch it twice to catch both the dialogue from commentator and to experience the sound track as used on this DVD. Which by and large the sound track was chaotic and dis-congruent. Some scenes are trying to show that dis-congruency. As in the various scenes of trains going in different directions and especially with the split screen shots.

Of course this is meant to be a propaganda film to glorify the Russian peoples Revolution. But for most of the film, it could just have easily been a piece about capitalism and modern life along with development of machines to help humankind to achieve more.

Kinoks{Wiki}:At the same time Vertov emphasized that his Kino-Eye principle was a method of "communist" deciphering of the world. For Vertov there was no contradiction here; as a true believer he considered Marxism the only objective and scientific tool of analysis and even called a series of the 23 newreels he directed between 1922 and 1925 Kino-Pravda, "pravda" being not only the Russian word for the truth but also the title of the official party newspaper.[1]

Man with a Movie Camera, sometimes The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia{From Wiki}

Dziga Vertov, or Denis Arkadevich Kaufman, was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s. He belonged to a movement of filmmakers known as the kinoks, or kinokis. Vertov, along with other kino artists declared it their mission to abolish all non-documentary styles of film-making. This radical approach to movie making led to a slight dismantling of film industry: the very field in which they were working. This being said, most of Vertov's films were highly controversial, and the kinoc movement was despised by many filmmakers of the time. Vertov's crowning achievement, Man with a Movie Camera was his response to the critics who rejected his previous film, One-Sixth Part of the World. Critics declared that Vertov's overuse of "intertitles" was inconsistent with the code of film-making that the 'kinos' subscribed to.

But ultimately, other than historical aspects of the movie, this film provided little insights into a developed ideology of the film producer of director. The film has many shots of a camera man filming not only other angles to a scene but also at the camera directly. Thus the Kinoks show the viewer how the film was made in many ways. Something quite similar to what Jean-Luc Godard tried to do in the movie Contempt.

According to the commentator (sorry could not catch his name):

The problem was that people reacted of the camera, so "life at is", on film, could not be recorded exactly as it was in real life.

The Kinoks were conscious of this inconsistency, between theory and practice.
... and formulated a number of methods to bypass it.
Method 1: was the use of telephoto lens to observe people from afar.
...
There existed another method, to conceal the camera, for this purpose Kauffman often used a tent or disguise the cameraman as a telephone repairman or some other noisy technician.
...
Method three: and I liked it a lot, was to use a dummy camera. A noisy but empty mechanism to distract people's attention from a smaller and a modest looking debris camera.
Method four: was a desperate solution proposed by Vertov but was not endorsed by Kaffman. If people do not know how to behave in front of the camera we wait 'til they get used to movie cameras clattering on every street corner, which he believed was bound to happen in the nearest future. And meanwhile, concentrate on the work of machines.
To counter this idea, Kauffman proposed the following: in the narrative feature, one has to know how to act. In the documentary cinema one has to know how not to act. Why don't we teach our subjects to ignore the camera? This was not a very happy idea either, and later you will see some samples of method five acting, which does not look natural at all.
...
Victor wrote: "rather than invite a few trained actors, the Kinoks are going to teach the whole population of the Soviet Union how to act for the camera.
So there remained method six: taking advantage of necessities so to speak. If we are unable to capture life as it is, let us catch life "unawares". Let them react, maybe provoke them to react. And I believe that this was brilliant idea perfectly consistent with the whole concept with "The Man with the Movie Camera" being actively involved in the reality his camera records.
...

The last technique was used by Werner Herzog in Nosferatu-1979. Although I hated the movie Werner does point out that he used that technique when filming the loading and unloading of the ships and other everyday life events. He would continue filming or even pretending at times until he felt the subjects were more involved in the manual work than in his filming.

The Cabinet of Caligari (1962)

This horror film is an updated remake of the 1919 classic tale of horror and domination. This time a deeply troubled woman must go to a spooky, ramshackle old manse after her car breaks down. The owner takes her in and then subjects her to numerous humiliating torments. Just before she is to die, the woman awakens from the nightmare and then remembers that she is in a mental hospital and that the sadistic host in her dream is really her doctor. Noted author Robert Bloch penned the script. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 105 mins
The Cabinet of Caligari (1962)

This departs from the other versions that I have seen (ie 2006 and 1919), this one is only similar in that the plot is a Reset button technique that what happens in the dream sequence is does not change "reality" except that the patient is cured during the nightmare sequence. In this film Jane is cured and there is no question that the dream sequence was just that a dream-although the same characters appear in the dream also.

Even if I had not seen the other films, I was wondering at the strange behavior of Jane including the opening scene where she seems to smile at the camera in a very personal way. Also, after learning that she is trapped, I would assume a woman in that situation would act in a more insistent and dramatic way.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

An unusually tense and intelligent political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate was a film far ahead of its time. Its themes of thought control, political assassination, and multinational conspiracy were hardly common currency in 1962, and while its outlook is sometimes informed by Cold War paranoia, the film seemed nearly as timely when it was reissued in 1987 as it did on its original release. It opens with a group of soldiers whooping it up in a bar in Korea as their commander, Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), arrives to inform them that they're back on duty. These men obviously have no fondness for Shaw, and he feels no empathy for them. While on patrol, Shaw and his platoon are ambushed by Korean troops. Months later, Shaw is receiving a hero's welcome as he returns to the United States to accept the Congressional Medal of Honor, and several of the soldiers who served under Shaw repeatedly refer to him as "the bravest, finest, most lovable man I ever met." It soon becomes evident that after their capture by the Koreans, Shaw and his men were subjected to an intense program of brainwashing prior to their release. While several are troubled by bad dreams and inexplicable behavior, it's Capt. Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) who seems the most haunted by the experience. In time, Marco is able to piece together what happened; it seems Raymond Shaw was programmed by a shadowy cadre of Russian and Chinese agents into a killing machine who will assassinate anyone, even a close friend, when given the proper commands. On the other side of the coin, Shaw is also used for political gain by his harridan mother (Angela Lansbury), who guides the career of her second husband, John Iselin (James Gregory), a bone-headed congressman hoping to win the vice-presidential nomination through a campaign of anti-Communist hysteria.

The Manchurian Candidate features a host of remarkable performances, several from actors cast cleverly against type. Frank Sinatra's edgy, aggressive turn as Marco may be the finest dramatic work of his career; Laurence Harvey's chilly onscreen demeanor was rarely used to s better advantage than as Raymond Shaw; James Gregory is great as the oft-befuddled Senator Iselin; and Angela Lansbury's ultimate bad mom will be a shock to those who know her as the lovable mystery writer from Murder, She Wrote. George Axelrod's screenplay (based on Richard Condon's novel) is by turns compelling, witty, and horrifying in its implications, and John Frankenheimer's direction milks it for all the tension it can muster. While Frankenheimer's career has had its ups and downs, The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds (1966) suggest that he deserves to be recognized as one of the most brilliantly paranoid American filmmakers of the '60s. Entertaining yet unsettling, both films indicate that things in the '60s were not what they seemed, with a resonance that still echoes uncomfortably in the present. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Theatrical Feature Running Time: 127 mins
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The DVD had some good interviews with various cast members including one with Angela Lansbury that surprisingly played the mother of Raymond Shaw. John Frankenheimer does the commentary for the film but was not very informative or even talkative compared to other commentaries.

This film definitely plays on the paranoia of the Cold War but it does take the issues seriously about communism infiltration and possible ways to carry out their plans. Of course this is in contrast with Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove and the various anti-war movies of the late 60s.

While the director states that the Senator Iselin was suppose to represent McCarthy, 'as he ruined lives', McCarthy was right that there were communists in the USA and had been there since the 30s. Also it should be noted that while he may have ruined some careers unjustly, the real Communists did things much worst as in the movie S21.

Contempt (1963)

Contempt is the story of the end of a marriage. Camille (Brigitte Bardot) falls out of love with her husband Paul (Michel Piccoli) while he is rewriting the screenplay Odyssey by American producer Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance). Just as the director of Prokosch's film, Fritz Lang, says that The Odyssey is the story of individuals confronting their situations in a real world, Le Mépris itself is an examination of the position of the filmmaker in the commercial cinema. Godard himself was facing this situation in the production of Le Mépris. Italian producer Carlo Ponti had given him the biggest budget of his career, and he found himself working with a star of Bardot's magnitude for the first time. ~ Louis Schwartz, All Movie Guide

Theatrical Feature Running Time: 104 mins
Contempt (1963)

It is interesting to see Fritz Lang on film playing himself and true to everything I have heard, he also did not get along with producers, although it is easy to see why any director would not get along Prokosch.

As some of my recent on-line discussions have revolved around "objectification" of individuals, I was struck by the blatant objectification that Camille shows throughout the picture including one of the opening sequences where she is nude in bed and asks her husband if he likes her various body parts including asking if he likes her nipples or tits more. He uses the filters of red, white and blue during this sequence. Stam says it is to show homage to both the colors of the French and USA flags. And it is worth noting that even before the commentator noted this, I had noticed that Godard (director) had a lot of dynamic blues and reds throughout the film.

I can readily identify with husband Paul. Although he shows his inability to make decisions (spineless and inconsistent as described by Stam), he actually was giving her the ability to make decisions for the couple. Instead she wanted a manly man and thus experiencing the bombastic personality of the producer, she saw her husband as a weak ineffectual man.

You're not a man.

Basically sums up Camille's feelings about her husband but we have to see and hear her beat around the bush until the last 10 minutes of the film before this is revealed. But ultimately it had to end as Greek Tragedy...

Robert Stam gives the commentary for the film, recorded in 2002. Stam seems to think Camille is smarter than the part is showing out, but a truly smart woman would have spelled out how her husband should have made her happy and stopped all the beating around the bush including lying about still loving him when he asked. If she lied about that the husband also had to question other statements she said later on. He was smart enough that her feelings toward him as soon as she met the producer. So the husband knew what was happening, he clearly did not know what to do. This agony kept increasing and he then becomes more violent in words and actions.

While yes in real life people often talk past each other and in "American films" Camille would have said you were an ass and prostituted me off to your producer after the she was taken by the producer in his car, still real life requires not just beating around the bush before spelling out what you want and desire. It would have been interesting to hear what a feminist film critic may make of this film.

While Stam spends a lot of time about how the filming of a film is produced, I often consider this just navel gazing by people in the industry. He also goes on to explain that Prokosch was to represent the embodiment of the new form of fascism that was based on money and power. The Anti-Americanism is noted by having the producer be so obnoxious.

Fair to middling.