Soldier turns into Nazi monster in ‘Captain’
Robert Schwentke’s devastating “The Captain,” a wide-screen, black-andwhite World War II film is a diabolical variation on Nikolai Gogol’s 19th century classic “The Inspector General.”
Based on an amazing true story of “the Executioner of Emsland,” the film tells the tale of Willi Herold (a terrific Max Hubacher), a very Aryan-looking, 19-yearold German soldier, who impersonates a Luftwaffe captain, commandeering his three-axle staff car, assembling a gang of crazed Nazi murderers and wreaking havoc behind the lines two weeks before the end of the war. The real Willi, a chimney sweep by trade, was tried by the British and executed by guillotine after the war.
We first meet Schwentke’s Willi as he flees other German soldiers, who are hunting him down and shoot at him from an open truck, assuming he is a deserter. Willi barely escapes, finds the staff car with a uniform in a suitcase and puts it on, if only to get warm. But soon the impressively tailored garment takes over, transforming Willi into an officer with the commanding posture, voice and gestures of the Luftwaffe elite. He even has a monocle.
Captain Herold and the diabolical gang he assembles enter a Nazi work camp, pretending to be on as mission for der Furher himself to report on conditions behind the lines. After appealing to the blood lust of one of the command- ing officers and hosting drunken dinner parties, where starving prisoners provide entertainment and fights break out and spread into the compound, Herold and the other Nazi soldiers execute most of the camp’s inmates.
“The Captain” is the tale
of an imposter, who leads a band of armed sociopaths in a reign of terror, made possible by the pandemonium unleashed in the late stages of an evil war. It is a cautionary tale for these demagogic, saber-rattling times. While the Gogol touch is there, “The Captain” also suggests a World War II feature film version of Francisco Goya’s “Los disastres de la guerra.” In one scene, Willi’s barbarians open fire on prisoners in a trench with an anti-aircraft gun, ripping the victims to pieces. In another, Herold steps through a forest over a carpet of human skeletons.
That this murderous masquerade could ring so many artistic and psychological bells makes it all the more remarkable. The young Swiss actor Hubacher makes Willi’s transformation from weak, terrified private to imperious, utterly merciless “Hauptmann Herold,” completely believable. Frederick Lau is scarily memorable as one of Herold’s maniacs. Some later scenes play like a dinner theater version of Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” (1969). But nothing writerdirector Schwentke (“Allegiant,” “Red,” “R.I.P.D.”) has done suggests he had a film as great as “The Captain” in him.
That the Stuttgart-born Schwentke used the cachet he earned in Hollywood to make this real-life, Florian Ballhaus-lensed World War II story would almost give one hope were the film not so profoundly dark and disturbing. The ending is considerably different from the true story. But it is a fitting conclusion for the larger-than-life anti-hero. A parade during the final credits suggests that Willi lives on in a full color modern Germany and by extension all of the socalled civilizations of the West.