Sick & tired

Fiction, movies, alternate history, humor, and other non-research topics related to WWII.

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panzermahn
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Sick & tired

Post by panzermahn »

Hi,

Yesterday I watched a DVD entitled Dominion: Prequel to Exorcist and I was hoping for a good horror flick. The first 10 minutes of the shows a group of German Waffen SS troops surrounding a group of people in Holland 1944. The German SS officer, Obersturmfuehrer von Kessel (if you noticed the shoulder boards of his greatcoat, it is an enlisted man's rank) told the group of people that a German soldier has been found dead with a knife stick to his bad and there should be someone responsible for it.

He then ask Father Merrin to choose 10 people to be shot. Father Merrin did not choose and ask the officer to shot him instead. But the officer shot a woman. Still Father Merrin did not want to choose so the officer decided to kill all. Finally, Father Merrin reluctant choose 10 to save the rest of the congregation.

My question is why again and again Nazis were used as an example of bad guys or villains in movies? DOn't that bother at all? Why not some NKVD troops shooting some children instead? Why must all the time, the Nazis were shown as the bad guys? Of course, the Nazis are bad but the same thing with the Soviets..

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Post by M.H. »

The uniforms? :shock:
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Post by Cott Tiger »

Hollywood has been portraying the Soviets/Russians as bad guys for decades, since the beginning of the Cold War.

However they are not usually portrayed as baddies in WWII because the Americans were not fighting the Russians, they were allied to them. It’s hardly rocket science Panzermahn.
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Post by pzrmeyer2 »

Hollywood has been portraying the Soviets/Russians as bad guys for decades, since the beginning of the Cold War
really? aside form "Red Dawn" and "Rambo III" show me some films where this is true. 99% of all "bad-guy" roles have either English or German accents. Never, of course, are criminals portrayed by the racial and ethnic backgrounds who commit the majority of crimes.
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Post by Cott Tiger »

pzrmeyer2 wrote:
Hollywood has been portraying the Soviets/Russians as bad guys for decades, since the beginning of the Cold War
really? aside form "Red Dawn" and "Rambo III" show me some films where this is true. 99% of all "bad-guy" roles have either English or German accents. Never, of course, are criminals portrayed by the racial and ethnic backgrounds who commit the majority of crimes.
Come of it PM2, crappy TV films through to big-budget James Bond productions have portrayed the Russkies / Commies as the bad guys for decades.

The English bad guy role is an interesting one. I think you will find Hollywood often has an Englishman portray a lone villain, but rarely (if ever) casts the “English” as villainous.
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Post by pzrmeyer2 »

crappy TV films through to big-budget James Bond productions have portrayed the Russkies / Commies as the bad guys for decades.
shouldn't they have been cast so? after all, they were the enemy during that era. Made more sense than continuing to chase their grandfather's foes from WW2.

The English bad guy role is an interesting one. I think you will find Hollywood often has an Englishman portray a lone villain, but rarely (if ever) casts the “English” as villainous.
.

No, not as a race, per se, they, along with Germans, though always find themselves in those roles. Hell, even the big budget Tom Clancy "The sum of All Fears" changed the villains from the absolutely believable Islamofascists to the ultra-Politically correct "European Neo-nazis", hardly a "clear and present danger" to anyone these days.
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Post by oleg »

The English bad guy role is an interesting one. I think you will find Hollywood often has an Englishman portray a lone villain, but rarely (if ever) casts the “English” as villainous.
In both Brave Herat and Patriot English are portrayed rather badly – maybe some English stole Mel Gibson girlfriend some time in the past. :D
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Post by oleg »

P.S I wonder what PM2 thinks of Hellboy which managed to make combined grand evil of both Russians and Germans @{

http://www.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0167190/ ... ey=0167190

http://www.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0167190/ ... =tt0167190
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Post by panzermahn »

oleg wrote:P.S I wonder what PM2 thinks of Hellboy which managed to make combined grand evil of both Russians and Germans @{

http://www.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0167190/ ... ey=0167190

http://www.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0167190/ ... =tt0167190
Hellboy? Damm! I know Uncle Oleg is going to mentioned about that... :shock:

The only "evil" Russian in that show is Grigori Rasputin. THe rest, you know is the go-damm Nazis..Hell, even the Nazi lady is named as Ilsa (reminds me of the infamous Ilsa, She-wolf of the SS)

By the way, at least the movie Rambo II and III had the Soviets portrayed as the bad guys....Remember Colonel Zaysen in Rambo III (I am not sure his English sounded more with a German accent rather than a Russian accent coz the actor who portrayed this character was a Dutch I think)

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Post by panzermahn »

There should be movies about how the NKVD shot Polish POWs at Katyn or how they deport the Baltic peoples to Siberia.

Hell, I even wished for a movie of the Great Soviet Purge in the late 30s or the Cheka 8)

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Post by Dragunov »

i felt sorry for the krauts in 'saving corporal ryan' when they were shot when trying to surrender...

and don't forget "indiana Jones". i love their retarded view of things, so what it wasn't made for historians! the lame vickers tank like contraption, the random RPG-7 in 1938 and some other things i cant remember.
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Post by Rosselsprung »

By the way, at least the movie Rambo II and III had the Soviets portrayed as the bad guys....Remember Colonel Zaysen in Rambo III (I am not sure his English sounded more with a German accent rather than a Russian accent coz the actor who portrayed this character was a Dutch I think)
I don't quite understand this- it's a bad thing if Germans are horribly mis-represented as child killing genocidal Nazis, but a good thing if Russians are equally badly represented? Red Dawn, Rambo II, and III are on the same level as the worst depictions of Germans in WW2 movies. Russians are shown in an almost entirely negative light in Hollywood, if shown at all.
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Post by oleg »

panzermahn wrote:There should be movies about how the NKVD shot Polish POWs at Katyn or how they deport the Baltic peoples to Siberia.

Hell, I even wished for a movie of the Great Soviet Purge in the late 30s or the Cheka 8)

Panzermahn
There is good minis-series baaed on Solzhenitsyn works –approved by him non-the-less that came out last year. I guess you should petition your government to dubbed it

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Post by phylo_roadking »

D, the "lame Vickers tank" is actually v close to one of the many abandoned AMERICAN designs of the twenties LOL, suprisingly close actually - except it fairly motored along in The Last Crusade!

As for James Bond films being stereotyped - in most of the early ones the Russians actually come out with a relatively good rep, even the KGB/GRU play sort of by the rules! Its the later ones where rogue Russian Generals etc. becom eht ebad guys. Its fun nowadays watching for the Anti-Russian cues in old '50s and '60s films and TV programmes, some of them are SO stereotyped as to make them look good!

Oleg, governments dont dub TV programmes or foreign language films, pruvate media companies do, then try to sell them. The problem with Alexander Solzhenitsyn is his stuff belongs in a different time, and more "pithy" historical drama, fact-based or not, earns the real money.
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Post by Michael N. Ryan »

Not all cold war films portray the Soviets as bad. The Movie the Russians are Coming the Russians are Coming, Starring Brian Keith and Rob Reiner, in which a soviet submarine 'inadvertently' violates American waters and runs aground is a case in point. Anyone see it? In the book one of the soviet crew defects while locals drive the rest off. In the movie, the Russian does not defect and locals escort the sub back out to sea while serving as willing human shields to protect the russians from being bombed and strafed by American fighter jets. Raising the Titanic ended with a Peace Message rather than how it ended in the Clive Cussler novel.

There are lots of movies about the Holocaust and lots of attrocities actually perpetrated by the nazis but hardly anything on the Gulags of the Soviets or the Red Terror or the mass rapes committed by Soviet soldiers. Of course, it is not just the Soviets who get this soft treatment, hardly anybody mentions what the Turks did to the Armenians.

I think the main reason Fascists in general the nazis in peticular get the bad psycho roles rather than the Soviets is they are the Left's Bloody Shirt, even though the nazis committed far fewer attrocities. And the left has fewer problems with the ideology of the Soviet Union and its cronies.

For the 'correct' politics, any group favored by the Left can be portrayed as victims of nazi 'persecution' to make them appear legitimate. Berlin has actually errected monuments to Nudists and Homosexuals 'persecuted' by the nazis. Yet they're not doing that for Smokers anywhere.

From a historian's point of view both Nazis and Communists represent evil godless regimes headed by mass murderers.
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