I’d like to get back to reviewing movies, but I need to find a way to get paid for it. For now I’m going to try and use the blog as a log for what I read and watch day by day. All of it. Whether you read it or not.
Anyway, Die Fälscher, or The Counterfeiters, was excellent. Karl Markovics is fantastic as Salomon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch in a story based on a true story about Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen who were forced to help finance the German war machine by producing forgeries. In fact, “Project Bernhard,” as it was called, aimed at actually destabilizing the economies of Britain and the USA by producing and circulating vast quantities of forged banknotes. Something like 140 million British pounds were put into circulation – some of them examined by the Bank of England itself.
My quick observation has to do with the acting of Markovics. It’s been said often enough before, but acting in a film really must be a completely different animal than acting on stage. Markovics hardly makes even the tiniest of facial gestures, and yet this glacial visage informs us in so many ways about his character that it’s very difficult to consider much else. Yes, it’s a great story, and yes there’s a lot of brutality, but what really makes the movie is the performance by Markovics.
Great flick.
It's a film I'd like to have seen but didn't.