Himmler fifth grade. It's a really scary movie. It is terrible not by showing sores of society, violence, blood - no, this film is terrible with its revelation. Not only is it a brilliant on-screen interpretation of Terence Rattigan’s play, which was a huge success in its time at the West End Theatre in 1948, it is also an incredibly psychological, subtle and profound film. The revelation that Exvit raised in his film work affects the personality. And more precisely – spiritual devastation, spiritual death of the personality, draining emotions, complete indifference to everything.
The main character of this film is the Latin teacher Andrew Crocker-Harris, a vivid example of the extinction of the soul, something emotional, cold as ice, hard as stone, a face completely devoid of emotions. From a once ambitious and perhaps even talented and gifted person, he turned into a gray spot, an insensitive creature that almost forgot what love, compassion, and banal human understanding are.
It seems that this film about showing the gray and faceless fate of the “little man” did not give anything new, it was often depicted in the movies, but Exwith’s subtle philosophical vision turns this film into something special, completely different. The director, under the guise of a classic “school” drama, tries to explore the root cause of this metamorphosis, how talented and intelligent people turn into a kind of egg-eaten?
The main character becomes pathetic, unlike most such characters, he became so not because he was offended there, he was cruelly treated, but fate itself was not favorable to him, he is a man with a broken, distorted fate, grumpy wife, who partly made a tangible contribution to the formation of a “spiritual tumor”, but at the same time, strange as it may seem, he managed to preserve a bit of a human one, in contrast to the tape “Neighboring Boys” Penelope Spheeris, where the main characters with such distorted, disfigured fates as the hero, and the “Michaels” keep a human face in front of the hero, and the main characters in front of the “the hero”. And even in the final, in a confessional form, he regrets everything, including the fact that for such a cold attitude to the students he was nicknamed “Himmler of the fifth grade.”
Michael Redgrave simply and brilliantly, subtly and gracefully conveyed spiritual research, the experiences of the main character. Even in this emotionless, cold face you feel some pain, tension, complete readiness to redeem your torment, fatigue, loneliness. I think he deserved the golden palm tree at the Cannes Festival, a complex, virtuoso, deep and completely ambiguous image of a man trapped in his own life.
By the way, an interesting point, in the play of Aeschip Agamemnon, which is the leading leitmotif in the tape, the king was killed by his wife, in the tape - also, Crocker-Harris is spiritually dead, partly from marital "mutual murder". He made his wife miserable, she completely corroded his soul and heart.
Perhaps I will not be able to give an exact conclusion, but it is not necessary here - this is a completely extraordinary film, with a difficult-played problem of the "gray" majority, this is a film about the personal tragedy of every person who could not build his life normally and was deeply disappointed in it. And I am not at all surprised why this film was warmly received by the public, received to the magnificent role of Redgrave in the catch-up also “Bronze Bear”, a second palm branch for the script and two nominations for “British Academy”, bravo! This albeit not very famous, not at all "star" but as a quality diamond in quality not inferior to many "genre" masterpieces.
10 out of 10