Watch Hitler: The Last Ten Days For Free

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Despite this movie being from 1973, then it is still enjoyable today, particularly if you have any interest in World War II.However, and yes there is an however here, it was somewhat difficult to take the entire cast serious in the roles as Germans, as they spoke British English and just tossed in a German word here and there. For people of the Third Reich, British English seems a bit out of tune.Aside from that fact, then the movie is entertaining and it does hold some pretty good performances by the actors hired for the various roles. Needless to say that Sir Alec Guiness is the one doing the most of the lifting in the movie with his performance.There were some nice touches to the details, such as the uniforms and such.If you are looking for a action-packed World War II movie, then "Hitler: The Last Ten Days" is not the best of choices, as there literally is no action here. This is a story-based movie that only takes place in the command bunker in Berlin from where Hitler ruled supreme and saw his vision of a Third Reich crumble up until he took his own life. "Hitler: The Last Ten Days" offers more of an insight into the person who was Hitler, and into his utopian visions of one Reich.The dialog in the movie is quite good, as is supposed to be rather historical accurate, if so, then that is impressive. But again, the British accent just completely threw the movie off course and down a notch in entertainment value. But for a 1973 movie, "Hitler: The Last Ten Days" did quite well.

Alec Guinness's eerie performance as Hitler centers a deeply ironic if sloppy look at the Führer's final hours in his bunker. It's not the film one needs to see for that story (2004's German film "Downfall" stands supreme), but it scores some points with a terrific cast and weird bits of black humor.It's April, 1945, and the Russians are closing in on the Third Reich. Once proclaimed to last 1,000 years, it now appears unlikely to survive the month. As the curtain falls around him, a frustrated Hitler alternates between tirades and tea breaks, even getting married to the hopelessly devoted Eva Braun (Doris Kunstmann).At the outset, we hear Josef Goebbels proclaim Hitler "the only man worthy of (Germany's) tragic grandeur." Guinness's Hitler indeed seems all too content to accept this mantle, preferring to die as long as he isn't alone. He even hands out cyanide pills to his underlings as little "gifts" to speed them on their doom. The point of Ennio De Concini's film, with the aid of newsreel footage, is to show how cowardly these acts really were. Many Germans in 1945 suffered far worse fates for Hitler's mad folly then expiring at a time of their own choosing over cream and cakes.The newsreel sequences, which roll in and out to counterpoint the hollowness in Hitler's claims, push entirely too hard at this point. There's also a major subplot about a young officer named Hoffmann (Simon Ward) who grows disillusioned with the Führer, which doesn't gel into anything interesting as we never see what pushes him to lose his faith. Ward looks alternately supercilious and wooden, clearly at a loss as his character is given little to do.The film scores best with small moments, like an early occasion when Hitler accepts birthday greetings from his staff with hard stares at each man in turn, or later on when Eva leads a ridiculously merry singsong in blackface. Kunstmann gives a solid if ahistorically spirited performance. Eva really loves the guy, but you can see her discomfort as Hitler brags about being unmarried and explains: "Love and devotion to a man are the highest virtues of a woman. Intelligence is not very important."Guinness studied Hitler the speechgiver, and it shows at times, like when he denounces his SS commander Himmler in a loud voice, pressing his hand to his heart a la "Triumph Of The Will." By 1945, one suspects such grand gestures were beyond this drugged-out mental case. It's fun to watch a great actor cut loose, though, however historically inaccurate he may be. Guinness was rarely so outré, perhaps only more as Fagin in "Oliver Twist," and he's fun to watch, as he apparently thought so, too. His resemblance to the real Hitler is startling, however off his performance may sometimes be.The rest of the cast is quite something, too. I counted two James Bond villains, Bond's father-in-law, Sean Connery's ex-wife, Grady from "The Shining," and even Manuel from "Fawlty Towers." Adolfo Celi as Krebs even has the same guy dubbing him here who did his Largo voice in "Thunderball." All do fine work, and De Concini blends them together well, even if their scenes lack the intensity or realism of "Downfall." It's hard to fault "Last Ten Days" for this too much as they were there first, but nothing Guinness does here will make you forget Bruno Ganz in the later film.In the end, the film's message seems to be that Hitler was a bad, bad guy. As a moral point, that's fine, but dramatically you need something more. "The Last Days" delivers something of interest, it's a film of texture and craft, but it fails to rise to the grand scope of the history it presents.

Many inaccuracies. First, Hitler and his bunker crew were German and spoke German. The actors in this film were British and Italian speaking English. The layout of the bunker is way off; it was more cramped. The entire final scene where Eva Braun and Hitler kill themselves is complete and reckless conjecture. How does anyone know what transpired between them in their final moments? Much of this film seemed to about giving a history lesson, what with some characters unnaturally giving historical background while engaged in conversations with one another. It was also awkward to have Hitler discussing the map situation, then the camera cut to a map with subtitles giving the date and how far from Berlin the Russians were — obviously not what Hitler was looking at on the table before him. The film makes Hitler out to be a bad guy, which is as it should be, but make him out to be a bad guy accurately!

Truly on the level of "Dr. Strangelove", "Hitler..." details the last 240 hours of Mr. Schicklegruber's life. We see him surrounged by his bug-eyed, fanatical Party people (the liar Goebbles and the piglike Bormann), paralyized Army Fieldmarshalls, the SS schemer Fegelein, and the rest of the army, navy, SS, and air force hangers-on who are mostly young, drunk, and making love to the female staff. For some reason, all shots outside the bunker are monochrome (to represent reality?) while everything within those 60 inch thick walls is in a gauzy technicolor. The action is seen by a young blonde Army officer who arrives to brief his Fuehrer on his General's advance. He is made Gen. Kreb's deputy and hangs on untill the 9th night. Though him we witness the general insanity of Hitler staying on in his mangled capital, the plotting of Hitler's entorage to hide the truth from him, listening to Adolf's interminable stories, etc. In short, you get to see what sort of madness goes on when a country invests absolute leadership in one man. Hitler's rant to his three Army commanders and Bormann is hilarious as we see him scream them against the walls of his war room. Nothing comes out right for the title character, an inverted Chaplin. Hitler walks stiffly, is bag-eyed, and has a semi-useless arm thanks to the 1944 bombplot. All of these aspects, and Hitler's general character, are masterfully acted by Guiness. This film is only depressing if you are a Nazi or a Buchanan supporter; others will cheer when the credits roll. I didn't know smoking was such a central component of the failure of the III Reich...maybe tobacco company execs will use this film in an anti-anti-smoking campaign.