The Counterfeiters [2007]

See Larger Image	List Price: £19.99 Our Price: £6.78 Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Manufacturer: Metrodome Distribution Starring: August Diehl, Dolores Chapli, Devid Strieso, Karl Markovic, Martin Brambach Directed By: Stefan Ruzowitzky Average Customer Rating:


Audience Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over Binding: DVD EAN: 5055002553639 Format: PAL Label: Metrodome Distribution Manufacturer: Metrodome Distribution Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Metrodome Distribution Region Code: 2 Release Date: 2008-03-17 Running Time: 95 Studio: Metrodome Distribution Theatrical Release Date: 2007
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Editorial Reviews: Not for nothing did Stefan Ruzowitzky’s powerful film The Counterfeiters walk away with the Best Foreign Picture Oscar at the 2008 Academy Awards. And like the previous year’s winner of the prize--the equally superb The Lives Of Others--there are some tough decisions for certain German citizens at the heart of it. The Counterfeiters, though, is set in West Germany in 1936. It tells the true story of history’s biggest ever counterfeiting operation, set up by the Nazis. The mission? To forge foreign currency. And the king of counterfeiters proves to be Salomon Soroswitch, also known as Sally, who ultimately has to face the dilemma of what to do when he realises that his work is helping to fuel war. There are so many reasons to commend The Counterfeiters that it’s tricky to know where to start. The cast, for instance, is uniformly excellent, and you could rightly wonder why Oscar overlooked both August Diehl and Karl Markovics for nominations. What’s more, it’s also stunningly, and very intelligently, directed, ratcheting up at times the kind of tension that hundreds of films try and fail to match every year. Married up to a script of three dimensional characters and historical reverence, it’s a quite brilliant package, and one that stays with you long after the credits have rolled. The Counterfeiters is a very different film to The Lives Of Others, but both expertly reflect the dilemmas that individuals had to face in different parts of Germany, albeit some four or five decades apart. Both are exceptional pieces of cinema, though, and for the purposes of this particular review, The Counterfeiters deserves its Oscar, deserves its worldwide praise, and deserves to be part of your DVD collection. Don’t miss it. --Jon Foster
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: A tense, fascinating true tale about a group of skilled Jewish counterfeiters, Nazi brutality and corrupt German self-interest Comment: Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is a professional criminal, a master counterfeiter and a Jew. He winds up in a brutal Nazi labor camp because of all three. Sally also is a survivor. He's not idealistic about Judaism, he knows how prisons work and how to survive. His goal is simple: Do whatever it takes to stay alive and try to use every bit of guile and opportunism he has to get more food and to escape the work designed to kill the inmates. He winds up being jeered as a Jew but painting heroic portraits of SS officers and their families. One night you might say his luck changes. He's transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and encounters Sturmbannfuhrer Freidrich Herzog (Devid Striesow), the man who arrested him. Now Herzog is in charge of Operation Bernhard, a top-secret project endorsed by Himmler: Find a way to counterfeit British pounds that are so perfect they won't be detected. These counterfeits will be used by the Nazis to flood Britain and destroy its economy. Sorowitsch and a group of Jewish prisoners -- skilled typographers, printers, artists, paper experts -- are taken to a top-secret, walled section of Sachsenhausen and put to work. If they succeed, they live, for a while. If they fail, they die. They succeed so well with the pound that the Nazis decide to use the stuff to buy their own war needs. But now the prisoners also have the task of counterfeiting American $100 bills. Same deal: Succeed, live; fail, die. One prisoner, Adolph Burger (August Diehl), says he will sabotage the project by deliberately showing it down. It makes for a tense moral dilemma. Burger is prepared to be shot. He's also prepared to take the others with him. The others, naturally enough, don't agree. For Sally the pragmatist, all he knows is that they are alive while others just beyond the wall are dead. They all can hear the pleading and the gunshots. By working, Sally and the others have better food, showers once a week, softer beds and some shaky security as long as their project is needed. They still endure brutal treatment by their SS guards, but at least they're alive. Sally intends to survive, but he probably surprises himself as he finds ways to help some of the other prisoners and to delay the project enough to matter but not enough to see people shot. And it should be said that Sally the expert is in a position to have the material and presses he needs to finally produce a perfect counterfeit, something he was never able to accomplish before. His British pounds are so good they're accepted by the Swiss and verified by the Bank of England. The Counterfeiters is an intriguing mixture of tense thriller and Nazi brutality. It is a taut story permeated with the fear of death, arbitrary and pointless. You're suspected of having tuberculosis because you cough? An SS guard simply takes you out to the courtyard, makes you kneel and fires a bullet in your brain. No matter how useful you might be, you're still just a Jew. The movie is based on Adolph Burger's memoirs, but was significantly tweaked, with Burger's approval, by the director/screenwriter Stefan Ruzowitzky. Karl Markovics as Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch gives an excellent performance. Markovics is a tough-looking actor who probably has had the best role of his career. Sorowitsch is based on Salomon Smolianoff, a wily Russian career criminal and master forger. Right after the war says Burger, "I told my friend Salomon, `Please promise me you will never counterfeit again.' He promised me he wouldn't do it any more. So we shook hands, and I have never seen him again." Now 91, Burger still gives talks to schoolchildren about the horrors the German's wreaked and, sometimes, about counterfeiting. Customer Rating: Summary: language Comment: The DVD on offer here is in German with English subtitles. I recommend the movie - definitely one of the most memorable I've seen this year. If for nothing more it tells a different story of what happened within the concentration camps. Customer Rating: Summary: At last... Comment: Some years I go months and months without seeing a half decent film and start to wonder if I've just gone off films altogether. The last two films I really enjoyed (back in December!) were The Piano Teacher and The Lives Of Others, both intelligent and slowpaced dramas that had me spellbound. The Counterfeiters (another European film!) is of a similar quality, a wonderful, moving story beautifully acted with great cinematography. I can't recommend this enough. Customer Rating: Summary: Language? Comment: Does anybody know if this film has the original German Soundtrack with English subtitles or has it been dubbed? It is a shame that product information on amazon is generally very vague especially about important things such as this. Any clues would be appreciated - many thanks! Customer Rating: Summary: Captivating Drama Comment: "The Counterfeiters" is an excellent German language film set in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the latter stages of World War Two. Karl Markovics plays a Jewish counterfeiter who ,together with other Jews from a printing background, are forced by the Nazis to forge English pound notes and dollar bills to help finance the Nazi's increasingly desperate war efforts. The strengths of this Oscar winning film are it's realistic characterisation and superb acting especially that of the mercurial Markovics.The brutality and inhumanity of the Nazis treatment of the Jews is vividly conveyed as is the survivalism of the Jewish prisoners. Definitely one of the best foreign language films that I have seen for some time.As good as "The Lives of Others". More Reviews