Michael Moriarty as Erik Dorf

Alomba, well said! :) I couldn't stand the character who played Dorf's wife. She was annoying, unattractive in many ways, and a lousy actress.

Yes, Michael Moriarty's work in this was superb--so much so that I couldn't stand to see the actor for quite a while afterwards. Intellectually I knew that I was responding to the character's evil, not the actor's; emotionally, however, I found it hard to separate the two.

His bland, almost meek appearance made him an excellent choice to depict what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Kudos to an earlier poster on this board who called Dorf--I don't recall whether the post referred to the character in the novel or in the mini-series--the living embodiment, or perhaps the incarnation, of that banality.

Absolutely - Moriarty was doing an excellent job here (and I don't think the actress playing Mrs Dorf was that bad either). Erich stays fully alive as a portrait of a person but simultaneously, he skilfully shows how the commitment to Nazi and revanchist ideas pervaded society. The entire first eisode, in some ways the best of the series, leads us down the alleys of a society that half impoerceptibly loses the shell of humanity and tolerance and gives in to authoritarianism and wishes for purity.


You are a lunatic, Sir, and you're going to end up on the Russian front. I have a car waiting.

"Hon i selba denkt"

My thoughts, too, Thusnelda. I never heard it as a family name. I thought, "Dorfmann", perhaps, though that would sound Jewish at that point. But I like your point about choosing the name, using it almost as "Everyman".



"The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen."

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but there's a difference between "monotone" and "subtle." Moriarty's whole acting style is very understated - he doesn't do a lot of histrionics and fireworks to get his underlying emotion across.

Anyone who thinks that it's easy to "stand [around] looking bored" probably hasn't done any professional acting. I did a commercial once where a few of us were cast as students walking across campus behind the main characters, who were talking about the university where we shot the commercial. A lot of bystanders and passersby stopped to watch us through the iron gate, and I jokingly said to my partner, "they're thinking, *I* could do that." We laughed, and then he said, in all seriousness, "no, they can't." I understood what he meant a few months later when, in a stage production with a lot of concert singers who had no acting experience, during a party scene, all of the chorus and compramari were told to simple mingle and walk around as though at a real party, to feel free to cross in front of the principals, and to cover as much of the stage area as possible. You'd be surprised how many of these professional performers simply could not get the hang of it.

It's harder than it looks. To some, it looks like it comes naturally, but there are always the directives to "hit your mark," "cheat to the camera," "enunciate so that you sound as natural as possible while clearly speaking your lines," and on stage if you're not amplified, "remember never to speak to the back of the stage because the audience won't hear you."

You can dislike Moriarty as an actor, and you can dislike his performance in Holocaust, but you can't claim that "anyone can do" what he does until you've tried to do it.

me too