Grave Diggers of 1933-45

By RICHARD CORLISS

INSIDE THE THIRD REICH, ABC, May 9, 8p.m.; May 10, 9p.m. E.D.T.

In history as in popular art, the general taste runs to horror shows rather than tragedy. How else explain the enduring fascination with Hitler's Germany and the continuing lack of interest in Stalin's Soviet Union? In the atrocity sweepstakes, Hitler runs a distant second to Stalin, who sanctioned the deaths of 20 million to 50 million of his countrymen. Nor can Nazism, a brutally simple triumph of the goons, touch the tragic complexities of Stalinism--a political torch fanned by the world's idealists while one avuncular pipe smoker in Moscow was wielding it as a genocidal bludgeon. Certainly Stalin was not typecast as a satanic maniac. Hitler was, and his regime paraded itself as a national theater of cruelty. The black leather and stainless steel, the epileptic rhetoric--these were the props and syntax of a most histrionic villainy. At stage center was a master psychotic, whose depths and demons the world still wants to decipher. What actor has played Stalin? What actor would resist the chance to play Hitler?

Inside the Third Reich, a five-hour TV movie based on the best-selling 1970 memoirs of Albert Speer, is one more honorable exploitation of Nazism's awful charm. At an early Nazi reception, Speer's wife (Blythe Danner) surveys the panoply and calls it "a dress rehearsal for disaster." It was no dress rehearsal; it was a superproduction of the real thing, and the main characters acted as if they were in their own movie. Hitler (Derek Jacobi) does malicious impersonations of Mussolini and Chamberlain; he sits raptly before a Busby Berkeley musical extravaganza; he watches himself at a filmed rally and mouths the Fuehrer's words. He was both the big star and his biggest fan. And Speer (Rutger Hauer)--the young architect who became "the nearest thing Hitler has to a friend" and ran Germany's war machine while Hitler lay quivering inside the bunker of his psychosis--played both a featured role and the ideal, attentive audience. It was not until his imprisonment for war crimes that Speer became Nazism's most knowledgeable critic.

Architecture is an art in the service of the power it houses, and Speer, the upper-middle-class son and grandson of architects, was a smooth courtier. His stern father (John Gielgud) despised the Nazis from the start for their socialism rather than their nationalism, but Albert felt no foreboding at all. This TV movie wonders just what he was capable of feeling. Hauer is a Dutch actor (Soldier of Orange, Nighthawks) with a sharp-featured face that emotion seems never to have touched. Thus he makes a perfect Speer, whom E. Jack Neuman's teleplay depicts as a young man not so much on the make as on the irresistible rise. He is a camera that, too late, became a witness.

Director Marvin Chomsky (Roots; Holocaust; My Body, My Child) has usually been willing to sacrifice pace for performance. This time the tempo of fascism has given his film a compelling rhythm, and a company of distinguished actors has lent it an elegant tone. Gielgud is haughtily endearing, a stiff-collared gentleman who speaks in the cadences of Schiller and dreams in the images of Goethe. Robert Vaughn displays a flinty decency as Field Marshal Milch, who probes surgically for Speer's conscience, or at least his common sense. As Hitler, Jacobi spellbinds--first with the ingratiating gifts of the born orator, then with capricious viciousness. Finally, as the cracked shell of a dictator, he feebly insists that "it is easy for me to end my life." It would indeed have been, if Hitler could have guessed how his malignant legend would grow. Our addiction to horror shows has kept him with us--a dark star over the world's troubled sleep. --By Richard Corliss

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