The Great Movies III

What happens to Maria and her husband in the final scene was the subject of heated discussion after the film played at Cannes in May 1979• It's a surprise, but you must admit it is as plausible an ending as any other. I remember Fassbinder late at night at a backstreet bar at Cannes that year, always in his black leather jacket, surrounded by his crowd, often scowling or arguing as they tried to please him. He was Maria Braun and they were all Oswalds. But he was a genius.' That much everyone admitted.

Three years later, alone in a room, naked on a mattress, surrounded by money, watching 20,000 Years in Sing Sing on television, he gave a fatal jolt to his heart with what he phoned a friend to say would be his last line of cocaine. There should have been at least twenty-three more films.

n Mephisto, a movie that takes place in Germany during the rise of Nazism, there are many insults, but the most wounding is simply the word "actor"! It is screamed at the film's hero by his sponsor, a Nazi general who is in charge of cultural affairs. We stare into the actor's face, but are unable to determine what he is thinking, or what he is feeling. Maybe that is what makes him a great actor and an ignoble human being.

The actor is played by Klaus Maria Brandauer, in a performance of electrifying power; he makes us intensely fascinated by his character while keeping us on the outside-until we discover there is no inside. He plays an actor named Hendrik Hoefgen, but even that's not quite right; his real name is "Heinz" until he upgrades it. ("My name is not my name," he says to himself, "because I am an actor.") Hoefgen bitterly reveals early on that what he hates most about himself is that he is a "provincial actor." Eventually he will become Germany's most famous and admired actor, and the head of its State Theater, but that progression is in fact a descent into hell.

We should begin by noting how particularly Mephisto (1981) makes its details vivid: the look and feel of the theater, the rise of the Nazi Party from the 192os through the 1930s, the Berlin social life that was itself a stage. The film's Hungarian director, Istvan Szabo, demonstrates that the Nazi uniforms themselves seemed to transform some people into Nazis, just as costumes and makeup can make some actors into other people. The uniforms are deliberately fetishistic; to wear them is to subjugate yourself to the system that designed them. And we sense the sadomasochistic undertones that helped seduce a ruling class into a system of evil.

The film opens in Hamburg, where Hoefgen is involved in a smalltime theater scene that is later described as communist, bourgeois, decadent-everything but National Socialist. Consumed with ambition, he throws himself into his work with abandon. During a meeting to discuss the props for one production, he hears the words "lamppost" and flies into a manic fury, declaring that the lamppost, and the exploited worker woman who stands beneath it, symbolize all that is rotten with Germany. He leaps from the stage into the auditorium, screaming that the lampposts will not be confined to the stage but will extend into the orchestra!-the dress circle! the entire theater!-as their revolutionary spirit unites actors and audience. The others look at him with astonishment.

Of course this is all acting, posturing, calling attention to himself. Hoefgen as played by Brandauer has not a moment's self-doubt as an actor, although as a human being, he is nothing but doubt, fear, and abnegation. He is ruled by ambition. His first wife is the daughter of a powerful man. When the man falls from grace, the wife is divorced. His early friends are left wing; later he drops them, forgets them, or tries to shield a few from the Nazis as a gesture toward his abandoned ideals. On the day of Hitler's election, a left-wing friend asks him to join a protest movement in the theater. He can't accept, and he can't refuse: "I'd rather stay with the reserves." In fact, his early beliefs are the same as his later ones; he goes from the far left to the far right without the slightest difficulty, because he never believed anything in the first place.

Having not seen Mephisto since the early r98os, I came back to it again thinking it was an anti-Nazi film. Not entirely. The Nazis are simply ... opportunists. Hoefgen wants to be famous, rich, and admired. He purrs at praise like a cat given cream. He can discuss with himself the rights and wrongs of his situation, but it is a strategic discussion, not a moral one. All of his romances and marriages are designed to further his career, except one, which begins in Hamburg and continues unbroken into his Berlin days as the favorite actor of the Reich. This is his affair with Juliette (Karin Boyd), who had a German father and an African mother, and, as a black woman, violates all the twisted Nazi theories of racial purity.