Prisoner of Paradise
The popular German-Jewish entertainer and movie director Kurt Gerron had the grisly misfortune to have been handpicked by the Nazis in 1944 to shoot a film starring the prominent Jews who'd been forced to live in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Afterward, he was promptly put on a train to Auschwitz.
Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender's chilling and provocative documentary ''Prisoner of Paradise'' takes us through Gerron's career and his doomed arrival, outside Prague, at Theresienstadt, which was where the Jews whom the world would ostensibly miss (aristocrats, intellectuals, celebrities, scientists, etc.) were sent so that people could see that they weren't vanishing; they were living among themselves.
The Nazis wanted the casual observer to think the place was a resort. So they conscripted Gerron to film a beautified subterfuge, in which the concentration camp would seem a jolly model of community living. The truth is that its thousands of residents were all bound for firing squads and gassings.
The film combines found footage and interviews with survivors -- most of whom knew Gerron personally or professionally or both -- with several bizarre dramatic reenactments. It gets off to a terrifying start, inviting us to behold some of Gerron's completed film, ''The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews,'' which contains well-groomed children, citizens frolicking, and many other productive-looking people, only to pull the rug from beneath us in an effective ''gotcha'' manner. The frame freezes on a boy's face, and the volume on Ian Holm's otherwise solemn narration is raised slightly to explain that this ''remarkable experiment in living'' was, in fact, a lie. That's the kind of tone some horror films assume, and without forcing the issue, ''Prisoner of Paradise'' knows that it's a horror film, too.
One of Clarke and Sender's most jarring images is a black-and-white photograph of Gerron that becomes a haunting touchstone the movie revisits. His fleshy face is sculpted into something defiant and fearsome. It's the sort of expression that would become more familiar on Orson Welles. As the photo resurfaces and as we get a clearer sense of Gerron, the strength on that face seems to soften into some kind of confusion and, by the last time we see it, fear.
The film, which was an Oscar nominee for best documentary this year, leaves the atrocities of 1944 and takes us back to the years of Gerron's Weimar heyday, which happened to coincide with Hitler's climb to power. He was a war hero and an aspiring doctor, an epicure and a glutton. He was the first person to sing ''Mack the Knife'' in Brecht and Weill's ''Threepenny Opera'' and memorably played the knucklehead magician in ''The Blue Angel.'' Gerron was also shamelessly prolific, making or appearing in 27 movies and several plays in 1927 alone.
But while peers such as Peter Lorre and Billy Wilder began to see Hitler's prominence as a dark harbinger and leave Germany for Hollywood, the famous Gerron stayed behind, eventually taking his cabaret and filmmaking career to Paris and Amsterdam. But he wound up being deported home and performing for Jews en route to Auschwitz. Eventually, he was chosen to make ''The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews,'' the ruse of a movie designed to make the concentration camp look every bit this documentary's paradise.
While ''Prisoners of Paradise'' gives us but an impression of Gerron's state of mind, the film does a powerful job of showing us how deflated, small, and desperate this boisterous man had become. It's agonizing but not unfathomable to see how Gerron might have viewed his complicity in filming the sanitized camp as a sort of deranged comeback. Entertaining was a compulsion. And even at the risk of traitorous propaganda, the show, in his mind, had to go on.
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