Ernst Jacobi Movies
- 1998
Robert Mitchum's is seen in one of his last performances in this Norwegian drama about four lifelong friends. After Carl (Espen Skjonberg) collapses in an Oslo street, he awakens in the hospital to the grins of his buddies Ernest (Mitchum), Ted (Cliff Robertson), and August (Erland Josephson). The dying Carl's last wish is to hear opera sung by the sister of a dead friend. The four head for Heidelberg where they all went to 1937 medical school. As they seek the singer, revelations surface from the pre-WWI Nazi era, including a plot none knew about 60 years ago. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert Mitchum, Cliff Robertson, (more)
This powerful Scandinavian biopic chronicles the fall of one of Norway's most respected authors, Knut Hamsun (played by Max von Sydow in one of his most acclaimed performances) who up until WW II was considered one of the greatest Norwegians of the 20th century. At the dawn of the war, the Nobel Prize winning author shocked his countrymen by publicly siding with the Nazis. His wife Marie took it a step further and went to Germany to give lectures. Following the war, both were convicted and branded as traitors. Hamsun attempts to answer the questions surrounding the author and his wife's treachery. By the time the war erupted, Hamsun was an elderly curmudgeon who could barely hear. A profoundly lonely man with hatred of British Imperialism, he was an easy target for Nazi propaganda. His wife Marie, who in Norway is still more vilified than her husband, also had her reasons to support the German party, but while though-provoking, they don't invite much sympathy. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1995
In this German psychological drama, troubled Roula finds herself drawn to Leon, an author of children's books who has suffered an enormous emotional and creative blockage ever since his wife died in a motorcycle accident two years before. Leon has only his 12-year-old daughter Tanja to keep him company. As romance blooms between Leon and Roula, his daughter approves. Unfortunately, Roula is carrying heavy emotional baggage stemming from the incest she suffered at the hands of her father. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1993
No one knows, or is ever likely to know how many disabled or handicapped relatives have been hidden from the outside world in attics and basements over the years. In this wry comedy, Basile (Claudio Bucella) is an eleven-year old boy living in a rural French town (along with his mother) with his grandparents. He has the usual boyish adventures in town, punctuated with odd goings-on brought about by events which take place in his grandfather's crocodile farm. However, there is a deep rivalry between his grandmother and her wheelchair-bound half-sister, Cecile (Jeanne Moreau), who has kept hidden from the world (and her family), and has lived in the attic for decades. Basile eventually feels the wrongness of her situation and feels that he may be the reincarnation of Victor, Cecile's long-lost lover. Eventually things come to a head in a confrontation which provides the town gossips with material for years to come. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jeanne Moreau, Micheline Presle, (more)
Director Helma Sanders-Brahms reached back into her own wartime childhood for her best known film, Germany Pale Mother (Deutschland bleiche Mutter). The film is based on the life of Sanders-Brahms' mother, fictionalized in the person of Eva Mattes. Ms. Mattes marries Nazi soldier Ernst Jacobi, remaining loyal to her largely absent husband through the fall of Germany and the grim postwar era. The couple has a daughter, for whom the aggressively independent Mattes tries to provide even as those around her starve to death. Originally released in 1980 Germany Pale Mother received its general American release four years later. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Eva Mattes, Ernst Jacobi, (more)
In Volker Schlöndorff's award-winning adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass' allegorical novel, David Bennent plays Oskar, the young son of a German rural family, circa 1925. On his third birthday, Oskar receives a shiny new tin drum. At this point, rather than mature into one of the miserable specimens of grown-up humanity that he sees around him, he vows never to get any older or any bigger. Whenever the world around him becomes too much to bear, the boy begins to hammer on his drum; should anyone try to take the toy away from him, he emits an ear-piercing scream that literally shatters glass. As Germany goes to hell during the 1930s and '40s, the never-aging Oskar continues savagely beating his drum, serving as the angry conscience of a world gone mad. The intense and visceral Tin Drum was one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s and won the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the 1979 Golden Palm (which it shared with Apocalypse Now). In the late '90s, the film became the center of a censorship controversy when some U.S. videotapes were confiscated because of the film's supposed violation of a child pornography statute. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, (more)
