Worth: $12.00
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Cast:
Roy Scheider, Scott Cohen, Sarah Bolger, Helmut Berger, Alexander Newton
Intro:
The strength of the storytelling lies in the flashback episodes.
Roy Scheider passed away on February 10, 2008 (aged 75) while still making his final film Beautiful Blue Eyes. Thanks to new technology, the Holocaust-themed drama was able to be completed and was released in 2009 following the two-time Academy Award nominee’s death. Also known as Iron Cross in the US, Beautiful Blue Eyes is finally gaining a wider release, bringing this legendary actor back to the silver screen fourteen years later.
According to Variety, completion of the film was put on hold until AI and CG technology was advanced enough to overcome the technical challenges faced by the filmmakers dealing with the death of their star during filming. CGI technicians were able to produce a workable facsimile of Scheider in order to complete the production.
The British-produced thriller is set in Germany and incorporates black and white flashback scenes of Nazi-occupied Poland of WWII. The film opens with grim scenes of starved prisoners digging their own graves in advance of their summary assassinations.
We meet Joseph as a teenager (played by Alexander Newton, the filmmaker’s son) romancing a Polish girl, Kashka (Sarah Bolger). Flashbacks throughout the film gradually chart their budding love affair before his narrow escape from the massacre that claims his family and Jewish neighbours.
Impressionistic scenes form patchy memories of Joseph’s and other Jewish families being rounded up by the SS. The story abruptly jumps ahead to over fifty years later, to Germany circa 1997. Now photographed in full colour, we see glimpses of additional impressionistic flashbacks yet these are more recent.
Scheider plays Joseph as an adult, now a retired New York City police officer who goes to Nuremberg Germany to visit his son Ronnie (Scott Cohen) after ten years of estrangement. Back in Germany after so many decades is a haunting experience. Everywhere Joseph glances something triggers a past memory, rendered in gloomy black and white. Immediately, the prickly dysfunction between the two is palpable as Joseph resumes his pattern of guilt-tripping his grown son. Antagonism dominates their strained conversations as they both feel each turned their back on the other.
After a brief glimpse, Joseph is convinced that his son’s elderly German neighbour is Vogler (Helmut Berger), the man who murdered his entire family so many years ago. His traumatic flashbacks evolve into monochrome fantasy scenes of grisly murderous retribution. Drawing on his police expertise, Joseph executes a stealthy plan to obtain evidence that the neighbour is indeed a war criminal. Inexplicably, his son assists in surreptitiously casing the apartment. Improbably, Dad immediately locates the man’s incriminating stash of photos, letters and Nazi memorabilia.
Full of piss and vinegar, Joseph fills his son in on his family’s tragic history during their long overnight journey that follows the abduction of Vogler. Convinced that Vogler would never stand trial for his long past crimes, Joseph talks Ronnie into helping him obtain justice and vengeance.
Let’s face it, Scheider has always been a bit of a ham and so his performance is overplayed. It doesn’t help that both his and his adult son’s characters are thinly drawn bordering on two-dimensional. The strength of the storytelling lies in the flashback episodes. Alexander Newton has superb screen charisma as well as the more engaging (and dramatically convincing) storyline, which elevates the otherwise familiar material.
Scripted and directed by Joshua Newton, the highly contrived plot borrows heavily from Ira Levin’s novels Marathon Man and The Boys From Brazil –specifically the trope of an important character recognising a now-elderly Nazi villain living in plain sight decades after the war. Paired with some ham-fisted dialogue and choppy editing, the film fails to compel.
