Schindler’s List (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, 1993)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I ran a movie that was made recently enough we were able to see it during its original theatrical release, but before we were together as a couple: Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, his 1993 magnum opus about the Holocaust, and in particular the story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), an aspiring German entrepreneur who when Nazis kicked off World War II by invading Poland and knocking off the Polish military, such as it was, in two weeks saw the chance of a lifetime to make a fortune. He decided to set up a factory in Krakow which would make enameled housewares (it was called “Deutsche Emailfarbenwerke,” which led Charles to make one of his weirder jokes: “He’s manufacturing e-mails? Spam is older than I thought!”) and he would exploit the Jews of Poland for both his labor force and his capital. The capital he would get from well-to-do Jews who, under the Nazi race laws, suddenly no longer could be involved in businesses themselves, but they could give him the money and he would essentially pay them dividends in the form of the factory’s products, which they could sell on the black market. For a labor force he requisitioned workers from the slave-labor camp the Nazis set up nearby Krakow, including one Jew in particular, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), who had been an accountant at one of Poland’s Jewish-owned firms before the Nazis seized it and put it under German control. Schindler knows he’s no businessman – from what we see of him before the factory opens he’s a bon vivant who hobnobs with the top Nazis, goes to nightclubs with them, drinks their champagne, eats their caviar (Charles wondered how the Nazis were getting caviar until I pointed out that not only had they occupied all of Scandinavia except Sweden, but until Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia were allies) and seduces their women. (Some critics faulted the movie for romanticizing Schindler and ignoring his less savory qualities, including his greed and his womanizing, but those are there in Steven Zaillian’s script, albeit played down.)

Schindler and his work force live through various crackdowns ordered by the Nazis against the Polish Jews, including first herding them into ghettoes and then taking them out again to be exterminated at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death camps – which, contrary to common belief, was located not in Germany but in Poland. In fact, nowhere else in Europe – not even in Germany itself – did the Nazis come as close to exterminating an entire country’s Jewish population as they did in Poland. And the reason for that is there was a long and ugly tradition of anti-Semitism in Poland, and the Nazis had quite a lot of help from non-Jewish Poles in getting rid of Poland’s Jews. In 1939 there were an estimated 4.5 million Jews in Poland; in 1945 there were just 45,000 – and the population had dwindled still further so that there were fewer than 4,000 Jews in Poland at the time Spielberg made this movie. And anti-Semitism was still enough of a factor in Polish politics and culture in the early 1990’s that Spielberg, much to his horror, was met with demonstrations opposing his movie and attempts to sabotage it while he was shooting there. It’s important to remember that there were plenty of other attempts to kill Europe’s Jews en masse before Hitler; the only reason the Nazi Holocaust is remembered while the previous tries are mostly forgotten is that the Nazis brought the resources of a modern technological state to their genocide and therefore came closer to success. Indeed, the issues raised by the Holocaust in general and Schindler’s List as a dramatization of it in particular are still very much with us: among the T-shirts worn by some of the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as they attempted an armed insurrection to keep President Donald Trump in power even after he lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College, had slogans like “Camp Auschwitz,” “Work Makes You Free” (a translation of the infamous motto emblazoned over the gates of the original Auschwitz, Arbeit macht Frei), and perhaps the most chilling one, “6MWE” – which stands for “Six Million Weren’t Enough.”

Charles and I watched Schindler’s List on the day jury selection opened in a civil trial brought against the perpetrators of the August 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Virginia by nine people who were physically or psychologically injured by them. The horrifying fact that not only are there Americans who sympathise with the Nazis’ racial views but regard the Holocaust as an unfinished job they intend to complete (“6MWE”) – and that a former (and potentially future) U.S. President, Donald Trump, embraced enough of their message that they regard him as an inspirational and almost divine figure makes Schindler’s List a lot more relevant to today’s politics than it seemed in 1993, when most of us good little liberals thought of white supremacism in general and Nazism in particular as something safely tucked away behind historical rear-view mirrors. It’s true that Steven Spielberg seems to have approached Schindler’s List as a prestige project as well as a personal one, the movie that would forever raise him above his reputation as a director who could make highly commercial box-office blockbusters about people being attacked by sharks, dinosaurs or other science-fictional creations (or, alternatively, befriended by nice outer-space aliens whose only “down” side was sticking the family that hosted them with a humongous phone bill). Spielberg wanted to prove that he could make a Serious Movie that would win him the Academy Award for Best Director (which it did). He’d already tried once before with his film of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, which was accused by quite a few critics (including Walker herself) as being a rankly sentimentalized version of her book. A critic for the music magazine Fanfare (reviewing the soundtrack album to The Color Purple but referencing the movie as a whole) noted that it set a dubious record for the most Academy Award nominations without any wins, and said that if Spielberg wanted to win the Oscar and be taken seriously as a filmmaker of substance he would have to realize “that goo is not synonymous with emotion.”

There’s a consciousness throughout Schindler’s List that this was Spielberg’s second try at making the breakthrough movie that would get the rest of Hollywood to take him seriously, and like David Selznick with Gone With the Wind he was deliberately trying to make The Greatest Movie of All Time. Schindler’s List shares with Gone With the Wind a very long running time (205 minutes) and a weighty treatment of its subject, this time an exposé of racism instead of a romanticization of it. Spielberg also made the decision to film Schindler’s List in black-and-white, perhaps as a throwback to the days before color production became standard in the late 1960’s when, counterintuitively, the most “serious” and “realistic” subjects and stories were shot in black-and-white, while color was reserved for big-budget spectacles, fantasies and musicals. I have vivid memories of seeing it in 1993 at the now sadly defunct United Artists cinemas in Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego; Charles saw it when he was living with his mother in Grass Valley, California on the Nevada border but he doesn’t remember whether the one quasi-official movie venue in Grass Valley showed it or he had to go to a more mainstream theatre in a larger community nearby. We both re-watched it when it was first shown on TV in a special screening sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, and while most people probably missed the ironic significance of that sponsorship, both Charles and I were aware of it. The founder of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, was a virulent anti-Semite who in 1916 bought The Dearborn Independent, the local paper of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan where Ford’s main factory was located, just to have an outlet for his articles attacking Jews. What’s more, he collected these articles into a book he published in 1922 called The International Jew, which became so popular among anti-Semites worldwide that Hitler himself praised it as a source. This was even ironically referenced in the 1930 film Just Imagine, in which a Swedish-American doofus (El Brendel) gets transported 50 years into the future, when people have alphanumeric names, they eat their food as pills, and they move around in small planes instead of cars. Noting that the airplane manufacturers all have Jewish names – Rosenblatt, Pinkus, Goldfarb – Brendel’s character jokes, “It looks like someone got even with Henry Ford!”

So this was our third go-round with Schindler’s List, and it strikes me now as a monumental movie even though it sometimes seems to be trying too hard to be monumental. It’s certainly yet one more demonstration of the fact that no living director can match Spielberg in his command of the basic grammar of film. He seems always to know when to move the camera and when to make it stand still, when to hold a scene on the screen and when to cut, when to overwhelm the action with dialogue and music and when to make the sound screen shut up. The use of black-and-white gives the film an odd effect, at once coolly distancing and bringing its reality home by making it look like a film from the time it takes place (though the black-and-white format apparently bedeviled projectionists in 1993, who were used to running color and had a hard time keeping the thinner black-and-white film in focus). The film also made stars of two previously little-known British actors, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes (who played Amon Goeth, the openly sadistic Nazi commandant with whom Schindler had to deal to get his workers, who’s drawn as a psycho who will kill anyone who crosses him without batting an eye and not kill someone who’s crossed him equally offhandedly, as if he’s so sure the Nazi project will succeed and all Europe’s – and, eventually, the world’s – Jews will die anyway it doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things whether he lets a particular one live a few days longer or not), though this time around I thought Ben Kingsley’s understated performance stole the film out from under the two higher-profile and more bravura leads. (When Gandhi came out I loved Kingsley’s performance but at the same time wondered, “What the hell else can he ever play?” In fact he’s had a quite long and successful career both artistically and commercially.)

Dramatizing the Holocaust is one of those projects that is well-nigh impossible because in order to portray the horror of it you have to show just how extensive a project it was and the sheer enormity of the death toll, but at the same time in order to make a movie that will be genuinely moving and hold an audience’s attention you have to have a few strong characters to engage the audience and give them people with whom they can identify. In the story of Oskar Schindler Spielberg found that balance (as playwright couple Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett had done before with The Diary of Anne Frank), and though he pulled some pretty outrageously sentimental moments – notably the sight of the young girl, her red cloak “toned” to stand out as a splash of color in an otherwise black-and-white image, whom Schindler sees first attempting to flee the mass roundup of Krakow’s Jews and then as a corpse as the local Nazis get orders from above to exhume and burn the bodies of the victims they’ve already massacred – overall he makes Schindler’s character arc, from exploiting the Jews as slave laborers to make money to putting himself on the line and spending his entire fortune to bribe Nazi higher-ups into saving them as “essential workers” (a phrase that in the current COVID-19 era has a whole different set of implications than the ones Spielberg and Zaillian had here), convincing. And it occurred to me that Spielberg here was doing something of the same thing he and his later writer, Tony Kushner, were roasted by critics (especially Leftist critics) for 20 years ago in his film Lincoln, about the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning slavery, which lovingly details all the bribes and corrupt deals Lincoln and his fellow Republicans in Congress had to do to get the great anti-slavery amendment through.

Here Spielberg and Zaillian equally lovingly detail the sheer amount of bribery and corruption to get “his” Jews spared the Holocaust and relocated to his new armaments factory in Czechoslovakia, where (in a neat detail in Zaillian’s script) he deliberately sabotages his own production because by that time he’d come to believe it would be a greater good if Germany lost the war. Schindler’s List eloquently portrays the bizarre duality at the heart of the Nazi project – its calculated cruelty and its efficiency: in one of the film’s most terrifying scenes, the belongings of the Jews who’ve been exterminated at Auschwitz are casually and matter-of-factly sorted into the useless (their personal photos) and the potentially useful, including teeth with golden fillings extracted from the corpses so the gold could be mented down and salvaged. There’s also a remarkable scene in which the train carrying the men on Schindler’s list gets to its destination at his Czech factory but the train with the women and children gets sent to Auschwitz instead (meaning that Schindler has to come up with more wealth this time in the form of uncut diamonds – to ransom them again), and the Jews that were supposed to be spared get put through the killing machinery – their hair is cut off and they’re locked into Auschwitz’ infamous “showers” which dispensed poison gas – only at the very last minute the showers start pouring out water instead, indicating that these particular victims will be spared after all. Schindler’s List manages to portray the horror of the Holocaust without letting us see Hitler or any of the other top Nazi leaders, or having us endure hearing them spew out their racist garbage: they simply are, and because of who and what they are some people get money from their victims, some people get to indulge their most violent fantasies (one of the most depressing aspects of the Nazi story in general is how many people deeply enjoy and love the idea of killing other people, and given social permission – as they were quite explicitly in the Nazi era and as they have been, albeit more subliminally and less overtly, in this country by the creeps from the National Rifle Association and other gun-lobby groups who implicitly say that mass shootings are the price we have to pay for the “freedom” to bear arms) and a lot of people end up iimprisoned or dead.

Given how we are watching the potential transformation of the United States into a fascist dictatorship – not only with Donald Trump as a would-be Hitler but millions of Americans supporting him blindly, including a large fraction who believe the QAnon nonsense that the world is run by a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles and Trump has literally been sent by God to redeem us from them (the similarities between the way the Nazis depicted the allegedly all-powerful Jews as masterminds of a conspiracy to rule the world and the modern-day American Right’s fantasies of a “deep state” are all too frightening) – and with President Biden and the Democratic Party in general offering little but the most feeble kinds of resistance (they can’t even get together to pass a bill in Congress to protect themselves against Right-wing plots to steal future American elections and rig them so the Right will always win!), it seems like sometimes we’re in a terrifying historical rerun that makes a movie like Schindler’s List not only history but potential prophecy.