THE BUNKER (1981) *** There's always a danger is taking a small piece of history to do a historical drama, and doing it well. Stuck in his rathole, Anthony Hopkins' Hitler would be an almost sympathetic figure, if we didn't know so much going in. Hopkins has done his homework, this looks like the classical Hitler from Leni Riefehstahl's reels (not that Hopkins is a dead ringer, no, others have looked more the part-just not acted it). He rants and raves a little bit, and waggles back and forth between mood swings; has authentic emotions like affection and dejection and denial and, unquestionably, mega-delusions of grandeur. He's more like a nutty relative not enjoying the picnic than the most obvious incarnation of evil in the 20th century. The performance is outstanding, but they almost should have thrown in just a minute or two of Auschwitz footage at the end, just to remind you that there was nothing sad about Hitler's demise at all. Yes, he rants about Jews a little bit, and won't back off his scorched earth policy, but there's just nothing here to suggest the real magnitude of the horror in the man. Cliff Gorman's portrayal of Goebbels is scarier (all time all-star spin doctor, eventually reduced to nothing but boring those who know him best), and Susan Blakely is ridiculously good-looking to be Eva Braun. I've seen footage of Ms Braun-and she wasn't even decent-looking enough to place near the middle of the ugly farmgirl contest. So these portrayals of real people--people who did terrible things but no doubt weren't entirely lacking in every single human quality--come off as a little bit airbrushed. Other than that, they've all done their research, and this is probably about as close to how it was as anyone can put together. It's a substantial historical moment, and in all fairness I don't believe that every flashback should have been to the days of Nazi glamour. Surely at some point someone thought back to loading prisoners onto trains. Surely not everyone there thought of the will of God in terms of a friend running late, as opposed to Old Testament wrath and hellfire.
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