Page 92 - All About History 48 - 2017 UK

Reviews

THE HOLOCAUST

Systematic, sober and absolutely essential
Author Laurence Rees Publisher Viking Price £25 Released Out now

eleased in time for – and with the Jewish population, and that any conflict
full support of – Holocaust Memorial would result in their “annihilation”.
Day, this comprehensive new Vital lessons come from the sidelines.
study from author and broadcaster From the inactivity of the British
Laurence Rees (producer of the government in the face of a growing
BBC’s The Nazis: A Warning From History refugee crisis in 1938 and 1939 to the
and Auschwitz: The Nazis And ‘The Final collaboration of Dutch civil servants and
Solution’) is doubly urgent in the current the Vichy French, whose anti-Semitism
climate. Rees’ methodical explanation for wasn’t enforced, The Holocaust punctures
how – and why – the genocide happened any sense of Nazi exceptionalism. Rees
moves briskly through events to give as full is far too an impartial old BBC hand to
a view as possible of the various forces and allude to modern connections, but his
scattered actors who set in motion acts of accounts of politicians attempting to argue
error and mass slaughter that would grow with Hitler in the 1930s can’t help but feel
o grisly crescendo. familiar in an age of newly bullish right-
Rees demonstrates that while no means wing populism: “He would pile false charge
an inevitable act – it was a product of after false charge in such quick succession
human agency, after all – genocide was an that they could not be answered... He did
obvious consequence of Hitler’s ascension. not want to come to a mutually agreeable
His world view was clear from the very compromise and it did not matter to him
start that Germany had to rid itself of its that his ‘facts’ were wrong.”

BITTER HARVEST

This saga about the Ukrainian famine is starved of quality
Certificate TBC Director George Mendeluk Cast Max Irons, Samantha
Barks, Tamer Hassan, Terence Stamp Released February 2017
RECOMMENDS…

Power and Glory: urporting to tell the true story of the ‘Holodomor’ scenes, but gets on with the show like the trouper he is.
France’s Secret Wars – the famine that Stalin enforced through Sadly, it only gets worse. Tamer Hassan, mostly known
With Britain And collectivisation upon Ukraine in the 1930s – Bitter for playing mockney gangsters in countless low-rent
Harvest is instead a dreadful, if well-intentioned,
Brit gangster flicks, appears as a one-dimensional Soviet
America, 1945-2016 P melodrama primed with tin-eared dialogue, commander. In one scene, he attempts to rape Samantha
Author: RT Howard Price: £20 rushed plotting and some seriously ropey acting. Poor Barks’ heroine, Natalka, while tripping on poisonous
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Terence Stamp looks mighty embarrassed during his mushrooms he’s been served. He stops when the victim
If you’ve ever
thought the morphs into his mother. In the history of weird and
French are a unintentionally hilarious scenes in the movies, this is a
bit prickly with new entry for consideration.
the British, Put simply, director George Mendeluk is spectacularly
and wondered
why, then this out of his depth here. This is a passion project for the
isthebookfor German-Canadian of Ukrainian heritage, and the famine
you. It lays out is a story well worth telling. But Mendeluk is not the
theoriginsof
France’s deep man for the job. The filmmaker has spent much of his
mistrust with the career working in television, and it shows. Scenes are
‘Anglo-Saxon’ world, including Australia, terribly over-lit, the photogenic depictions o f peasant folk
Canada and, most importantly, the USA
and Britain. Howard explains how the with nary a fleck of dirt on them are utterly bogus and
centuries of sparring with ‘perfidious its visions of bucolic existence – all ripe fields bathed in
Albion’, not to mention the sting of golden light – before the famine comes are excessively
usually ending up on the losing side, has sentimental. Bitter Harvest is the first film in the English
createdadeepandpervasivemistrust
on the other side of the Channel. language to tackle the Holodomor, but that’s about as
noteworthy as it gets.
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