Review - "Dresden - The Inferno"

Dresden - The Inferno (2006)

"Dresden - The Inferno" is, counterintuitive to the setting and title, a romance movie  made for TV set against the backdrop of the historical attack against the city of Dresden in Feburary 1945. Produced by the ZDF, the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (2nd Public Television Programme), it premiered on March 5th and 6th in two parts of 90 minutes each. A so-called cinematic version of 145 minutes runtime was also produced, first broadcast on May 5, 2010. To stage his epic story, director Roland Suso Richter had a budget of 10 million €, access to original locations as well as access to the accumulated requisites of German public television. Originally named "The Fire", hinting at a connection to the very popular book by historian Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Germany after being published in 2002, "Dresden" was shot on original locations in the cities of Dresden and Chemnitz, while the scenes set at the hospital were shot in Leipzig. The exterior shots of the attack on Dresden were shot at an industrial site at Cologne. The rights to the movie were subsequently sold to TV stations in the United States, Great Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, Greece, Serbia, Thailand and Australia, making it a commercial success for the producers.

The Plot
The female main character is Anna, a feisty daughter of a wealthy doctor with a love for jazz music and a mind of her own, working as a nurse in her father's clinic, where civilians and soldiers alike are treated, which is something that never happened in real life. In the very first scene Anna is treating a seriously wounded Wehrmacht soldier together with Doctor Alexander, described as a dutiful but rather stuffy individual - and her soon-to-be husband. Even though the Russians are still several hundred kilometres away from Dresden at that time and attacks by the Allied air forces are a seldom occurence in the region, the man the two of them are treating is far too freshly and - apparently seriously - wounded to have survived or come from any kind of field hospital. And into the middle of the scene the air raid sirens sound the alarm. But this is just the first of many instances where the director does not care all too much about common sense, historical accuracy and plausibility. 

The movie then cuts to a scene in a pub filled with RAF personnel in Great Britain, where the male main character, the pilot Robert Newman, is introduced as a good-looking, dashing ladies' man with a knick for tricks and gaming. Then it cuts back to Germany, introducing Anna's father as he arrives at the hospital where she complains about the air raid, demanding to know why they even bother hoisting red crosses on their roofs when they are attacked anyway. He calms her down by guessing the bombs were meant for some industrial target, then compliments her for her good work. She then walks home, where we are introduced to her mother and her younger sister Eva. The radio in the background tells of the dire news of the events on the front.

Anna does all the walking and talking while simply being in her nurse's uniform. This in a winter where the climatically milder Berlin to the North measured 72 days of frost and 23 days of ice! The winter in which hundreds of thousands fled from the Red Army across a frozen Baltic Sea! The winter where tens of thousands, including the inmates of concentration camps and fleeing German civilians alike, froze to death!

Trailer of "Dresden - The Inferno"

We then cut, again, back to the British, beginning by a short clip of authentic footage. This is the one thing the movie truly does good work on: mixing original wartime footage and new material. The special effects and props used to show the RAF airfield with its Lancasters are of an admirable quality for a made-for-TV production, and most of it looks at least halfway authentic. The bombers start and are off to attack their target: Magdeburg. They drop their bombs without any problems, even though any real pilot of a four-engined bomber certainly would have cringed in horror at the spitting distances between the individual Lancasters (apparently close enough that two crews without interior lighting can exchange hand signals in the dark of the night...). The way I understand it, Lancasters flying that close would have kicked each other out of the sky by the dozens. Nonetheless, they fly home while they listen to music, but all of a sudden their formation comes under attack. Three Me Bf 109s attack them - GROAN -, our British hero takes his Lancaster out of the formation - because heaven forbid you'd stay where it is safest - and they subsequently get shot down.

 

There is probably only one Me Bf 109 variant that even qualifies for the job - the G-6N equipped with a weapons' kit of two underwing MG 151/20 cannons - and that one was an obsolete design at the time. And since the attackers in the movie do not appear to sport the underwing cannon kit, we can safely assume those are the vaunted planes of the Luftwaffe Fairyland Squadron. Don't even get me started on the stupidity of having those lightly armed planes be there in the first place when the absolute majority of German night fighters were heavily armed two engined machines like the Heinkel He 219 Uhu...

A German Nightfighter

NOT a German Nightfighter

Again, to give the movie credit where credit is due, the animations are top notch for a TV production.

Then the movie does something that has, at least to my knowledge, never before been depicted, which is the lynching of Allied airmen by enraged German villagers. More than a hundred members of the RAF and USAF were killed that way during the last year of the war, often with the more than tacit approval of local NSDAP functionaries. Only our protagonist, Robert Newman, escapes the fate of his comrades, but while we learn that he speaks nearly accentless German he is nonetheless shot in the stomach. Still, he escapes on foot in the dark. Meanwhile, Arthur Harris back in Bomber Command plans the destruction of Dresden, the same Dresden that the downed Allied pilot moments later arrives at, disguised as a refugee from the East.

Just to make that one absolutely clear: our male protagonist, after having been shot from the sky and suffering a potentially fatal gunshot wound to the stomach, marches at least 200 kilometres (the beeline from Magdeburg to Dresden is 188 kilometres, and he would already have been on his way back) through freezing Germany, allthewhile evading the police, the SS and Nazi Germany's plethora of other domestic security forces.

And because fate and a lousy script want it so, Anna and Robert meet in her father's hospital, where we also get a short scene with a weasely Gestapo officer. The nurse Anna is working with also happens to be married to a Jewish man whom she protects, and it turns out that Anna's father, the head of the clinic, is trafficking morphine to earn enough money so he can escape with his family to neutral Switzerland. Already 55 minutes in, we now have the character constellation established: a love triangle in which the decent, but boring Dr. Alexander will be the loser; a persecuted Jew subplot; a crime subplot. With the coming attack being nothing but a matte painting in the back. In short, a convoluted mess wasting breath, money and talent on a plot right out of a "Harlequin Romance" novel when it could have easily been a gripping drama, or even a war movie.

A couple of muddled scenes follow in which Anna tries to protect a woman who had hidden away her husband, a deserter, from the Feldjäger military police. Subsequently and to her surprise, she finds herself put against a wall, and only her fiancee's intervention saves her from being shot. The scene is clearly meant to establish Anna as a character with clear and moral judgement, but it failed to convince at least this viewer who has no sympathy for deserters and those who help them. Clearly traumatized by what she saw, she seeks comfort not in her fiancee's arms, but those of Robert Newman. Oh, how I hate this kind of woman...

The next evening at a lavish engagement party the airman turns up, disguised as a German officer, and dances with Anna, causing an upheaval with Dr. Alexander who confront Anna for being what she truly is: a spoiled brat without real sorrows born to a wealthy family, while he is the son of a working class man who had to work his way up the hard way.

We are halfway through the movie when the RAF is briefing its bomber crews on their next attack - the one on Dresden, where they are to attack "a Gestapo headquarters, a munitions factory, as well as poison gas works. The city is full of German troops." Their goal is "to show the Russians what Bomber Command is capable of," and to "bomb the city till it burns."

A British "Lancaster" bomber. Several hundred of them attacked Dresden in two waves in the night between 13/14 February, 1945.

The second half of the movie gladly moves faster than the first one. The bombers are in the air, and the plot around Anna's father thickens as he receives new personal documents allowing him to leave the city and bring his family to Switzerland. They all get caught in the attack, which begins around the 1 hour and 40 minutes mark. Her father is killed, and the rest of them try to survive the bombing and the firestorm, which both fail to leave an impact on the halfway informed viewer due to their timidity. The attack on Dresden, regardless of what one thinks about its moral justification and final number of victims, was one where good planning and preparation on the Allied side and circumstances on the ground coincided in a manner that made way for destruction on a hellish and truly epic scale. 

However, the movie fails to convey both the scale and the horror of the events. That "Dresden" was made for a prime time audience is only a shallow excuse. One simply cannot spend such sums as this movie did on a story that happens during the attack - and then go all mellow on the attack. That, and it gets elemental facts wrong. The morning after the attack the skies are clear over the city, the fires extinguished. In truth, when 8th Bomber Fleet returned to the city around noon that very day, they found the city still wide aflame and under a thick layer of smoke and clouds.

Our lovers share some moments in the burned-out husk of the Frauenkirche, and then the movie ends with  an epilogue (Robert dies after the war ended while he was flying back to Dresden to celebrate the birth of his and Anna's daughter) and footage from a memorial service in the rebuilt Frauenkirche.

The Actors

"Dresden" was able to gather some of the top-notch actors German television has to offer for the ride. Given what they had to work with, they all did a rather solid job. 

Felicitas Woll as Anna Mauth delivered a good performance, but failed to establish a connection at least with this reviewer. Supposed to be a plucky heroine, she instead appeared as a spoiled brat far too easily dumping her fiancee for the thrill of a liaison with a downed enemy soldier. 

John Light as Robert Newman filled his role and actually speaks a really passable German.

Heiner Lauterbach as Anna's father was miscast and artificially aged, wasting his usually energetic performance on a role that should have been played by someone who really looked and acted the age.

Marie Bäumer and Kai Wiesinger as the German-Jewish couple added surprising depth to a subplot I otherwise would have found clichéed.

Surprisingly, Benjamin Sadler as Alexander Wenninger brings the most life and variety to his own role.

All in all, however, the characters remain cardboard cut-outs, a fact that seriously hampers even seasoned actors like the cast above.

Final Verdict: 1/5 for trying to be a jack of all trades and ending up a master of none. "Dresden's" problems is the "Pearl Harbor"-syndrome: the retarded idea that a good movie has to appeal to all demographic strata and possible audiences, even though its basic topic clearly marks it as a war movie or a tragedy set during wartime. Hell, we even get a love triangle, just like in "Pearl Harbor"! It could have been a great drama about the most devastating bombing against Germany during WW2. It could have been a war movie. But what it turned out to be was a Rosamunde Pilcher story with a couple of explosions.

As one review on IMDB concluded:

The story of this film comes straight out of our favorite handbook "How to write a screenplay for beginners", so everything is trite, obvious and corny, from the way our heroine meets her hero just as she is about to get engaged, to the point where she is miraculously re-united with her dying father so he can whisper "I'm sorry" before drawing his last breath... And as you might expect, the directing is as trite and unimaginative as is the story.

If you still want to take a look at it, I suggest your local bargain bin or the internet. That's the way I found it, and that's all that it's worth.