The complexities of history have always posed problems for commercial cinema. With rare exceptions, mainstream historical films tend to flatten the inconveniently irregular textures of individual biographies and their context into simpler templates of good and evil, valour and villainy.
This is abundantly true of dramatisations of German resistance in the Third Reich. Of course, there can be no overstating the enormity of Nazi crimes, the unquestionable courage of the regime’s all-too-few committed opponents – and the terrible price they almost all inevitably paid. So it’s perhaps understandable that people such as Claus von Stauffenberg (leader of the July 20 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life), or student dissident Sophie Scholl, have been portrayed in fairly one-dimensional ways.
Yet acts of extraordinary courage and integrity are thrown into even sharper relief when we appreciate the flaws as well as the nobility of the people who undertake them. Not to do so risks turning these heroic, yet all too human, people into plaster saints.
