some were right the way they depicted the Holocaust, made it seem easier than what it was, made it seem like it wasn't THAT bad. Or made the villains seem silly and made you believe that the victims could have taken them at anytime. All this was far from the truth....also James woods was terrible in this it seem he wasn't even trying...
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I know, this is the weirdest version of Cannibal Holocaust ever made
Philosophical joke: my favorite R&B song is Evolutionary Love, by C.S.P
Come on kid (I'm making an assumption that you are younger than me, but judging by your comments I think it's a fair one) the production is thirty years old now, what do you expect?! It has dated a lot, and back then, on 'Network Tv' as you guys call it, they could not portray events as 'in your face' as HBO (for example) would do.
For it's time, shocking and very well done. Bad acting? Demeans the Holocaust? It affected a lot of viewers at the time. Don't you know that many older German viewers actually phoned the police to make emotional confessions after it aired?
Think on that.
Not only did some Germans feel moved to confess, but families became estranged after the younger generations realized what Papa and Grandpa did during the war that they never wanted to talk about.
shareIt seems to me that the quality of the program and its effect on viewers at the time are two different issues. It may have had an impact on viewers at the time though I question whether Americans in the 70's were as clueless about the Holocaust as some posters claim. The show's impact may mean nothing more than big ratings (which considering the sensational subject matter and the fact that there were only three networks is not surprising).
As for the quality, I agree with the OP that it's just mediocre. This has nothing to do with any inherent restrictions on what could be shown on television; it's just the writer's soap opera approach to the material. Take another look at the scene where Inga (Meryl Streep) and Karl (James Wood) reunite in a concentration camp or the scene between Rudy and Helena after he has summarily executed a soldier. Do you really think this is how these moments would have played out in real life?
I was also distracted by the different speaking patterns of the characters. Rudy talks like an all-American boy. (He's also extremely healthy looking for someone who's surviving on a diet of turnips. Hell, let's face it: he's hot.) The British actors speak in their natural accent and use expressions like "bloody." Other actors, like Rosemary Harris, speak as if they were translating from German ("It is wrong for us to dwell on our misfortunes." or "I listened." instead of "I was listening.") She also speaks sometimes with a German accent, though it comes and goes. All in all, the writing has a made-for-television quality which doesn't do justice to the subject.
This affected me in many ways more than Schindler's List. There were so many scenes that were harder to watch. But, because it was a mini series...it was forgotten after Schindler's List. But, I remember what a big deal this was when it came out...like Roots. I was just a kid and didn't see the whole thing when it aired...mom wouldn't let me, but I've seen it now and it's horrifying.
shareI have to agree with bad-show's comment. This mini series is just over 30 years old. So for, 1978 it was a big deal and it was a very good production for network television.
shareIt hasn't aged well thirty-odd years later; but when this was first shown on NBC in 1978, this was powerful stuff. It brought the Holocaust back on the front burner for good, and there was a steady stream of such interest stories on regular network television all throughout the cable years until the big-screen debut of Schindler's List fifteen years later.
But having viewed it again on DVD in 2008, it seems fairly mediocre by today's standards. For instance, the characters aren't as well developed as in the novel it is based upon. You can tell that the machine-gunned bodies at the Babi Yar massacre are fake dummies, and Auschwitz looks like a squeaky-clean staged setting instead of the real thing. Even the Auschwitz set they built in Pennsylvania in 1979 for the t.v. movie Playing For Time looked far more realistic than that. But the direction by Marvin Chomsky was uniformly excellent. Chomsky had previously directed Roots, which has stood the test of time and is still great viewing. But the book Holocaust written by Gerald Green still holds up supremely well, and is a mesmerizing read.
Having said that, however, Emmy-award winning Meryl Streep was superb as Inga Helms Weiss, and is still going strong as the world's greatest actress and box office draw. She had yet to win the first of her two Academy Awards (the second being for the 1982 holocaust drama Sophie's Choice) when this mini-series was aired, but I doubt even Jodie Foster and Julia Roberts will still be around at age sixty showing such clout.
What a shame that Michael Moriarty, who also won an Emmy for this, was never able to have the same kind of career. He had worked with Streep before on some other projects, but at least he did have several seasons on NBC's Law & Order before they canned him. And I believe that Sam Wanamaker, James Woods, and Fritz Weaver had also previously worked together on other shows and movies. Moriarty's Major Erik Dorf was a chilling characterization that forever changed my outlook on the Second World War. Until then, I did not think it was possible to portray high-ranking SS officers (or any Nazis for that matter) as both loving family men and cold-hearted murderers, but I was mistaken.
Actually Green wrote the novel based on his teleplay.
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MJC4861 wrote: "It brought the Holocaust back on the front burner for good".
In the United States, that is.
I watched 'Holocaust' on Dutch television in 1978, and remember wondering how a movie that once again acquainted us with the horrors of WWII could 'shock' the US. For us, Europeans, the Holocaust had been 'on the front burner' for a long time. I just wonder why the Americans seemed to have 'forgotten' about the Holocaust between 1945 and 1978, and what new insights this movie brought to them at the time.
The cruelty of the camps?
The perversion of ordinary men?
The - only partially historical - heroic struggle of the persecuted?
The fate of the children?
With the exception of the auto-biography Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, which millions of Americans had read, no one was really that interested or knew much about the Holocaust in 1978. And the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank did not focus on the Holocaust itself, just the fact that Anne Frank did not survive it.
Only people who were interested in documentaries on the Second World War, such as the best of its kind the 1972 series The World At War narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier (who would ironically be Oscar nominated for his role as Mr. Liebermann, a character loosely modeled on real life Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal in the 1978 film The Boys From Brazil) knew more about the subject than anyone outside of Hollywood or academia. Both the Holocaust mini-series and the movie The Boys From Brazil directed by the great Franklin Schaffner, who won the Oscar for directing Patton in 1970 (and who also directed Jackie Kennedy during her televised White House tour on Valentine's Day in 1962) opened American eyes to the horror and the historical significance of the Holocaust.
Because of the massive amount of media focused on the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the two Kennedy assassinations during that generational time frame, Americans never thought too much about what happened to the Jews during the war. I myself never would have known about it if I hadn't learned about Anne Frank from my school librarian in the fourth grade.
As it happened, I never got the chance to read Anne Frank's diary until I was in junior high, and only then because I was one of three female students in the eighth grade who were selected to assist the librarian during the fifth hour. This was considered a normal class for the three of us and we were each given credit. This was how I checked out that book before anyone else did, otherwise I never would have gotten my hands on it. It was the one book most girls wanted to read.
I'm embarrassed to have to admit that I was thirteen before I knew what a concentration camp was, and that I was fifteen before I realized that Nazis, however barbaric, were still human beings underneath all of that cruelty. This is what the Holocaust mini-series did for me in high school. Of course, I also read the novel Holocaust the same year that I watched the series on t.v. Perhaps I would have known sooner if my parents hadn't been so vigilant about hampering my curiosity concerning such violent episodes in the past (they didn't want me reading or dwelling on such material) or if cable television had been the norm in the late 1970s, which it was not. I had to discover these facts for myself, but once there was a media uproar in 1978, this was no longer necessary.
I grew up in the '50's and '60's knowing about the Holocaust because my parents never screened anything for us. We sat with Dad and watched "The Twentieth Century", "Biography" about Hitler, "Victory at Sea", every war movie ever made. And, many novels in the '60's had a character who had been in the camp. But, the dramatization in this series brought the concept of the every day German being pulled in.
I heard that Germans reacted strongly to the series because many still did not know about this tragedy. True?
"Two more swords and I'll be Queen of the Monkey People." Roseanne
The argument has been well made, by greater men than me (Primo Levi, Claude Lanzmann) that all dramatic reconstructions of the Holocaust trivialise it.
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hannesminkema: " I just wonder why the Americans seemed to have 'forgotten' about the Holocaust between 1945 and 1978,"
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You said a mouthful there! So much was swept under the rug in America after WWII ended to the Kennedy assassination-Nixon resignation, and NOW the American baby boomers don't want to let any of that go!
I'm watching it on youtube, about halfway thru, or maybe one-third, and I have to agree.
I didn't care for Sophie's Choice or Schindler's List, but I feel they had more going for them than this does.
Escape from Sobibor was made for tv as well and it was better than this. So was Playing For Time.
Obviously, Holocaust didn't do for Jewish people what Roots did for African-Americans
If you want a decent film that depicts the Shoah, check out the miniseries War and Remembrance.
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Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!
The Hiding Place actually came out three years before this one and was a better depiction.
I watched all of Holocaust on youtube and I must say, had I tracked it down on dvd to watch, I would have been thoroughly disappointed and felt I wasted my money.
I think the intention of the program was to show an 'alternative' approach to what happened from a Jewish perspective (or non-Jewish, if you will, with Streep and Moriarty winning the awards), but quite honestly, the miniseries looked 'prettied up' to me.
I've often wondered about different perspectives of the holocaust for people, German as well as Jewish, such as Life Is Beautiful, but I would hardly be interested in offering this one up as an example.
From an historical perspective, I can appreciate this film. It brought awareness to the masses. However, from an emotional standpoint, this film fails on almost every level. I watched the entire thing in one sitting and never felt any attachment to the characters. Many times, I caught myself rolling my eyes. The only thing that worked for me was Michael Moriarty, but that's because, I think, his character was inspired by Eichmann.
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Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!