September 25 movie: Munchhausen. No, not the one by Terry Gilliam. This is a German movie about the same character, made in 1943. I haven't read anything about where Gilliam got his inspiration, but he must have at least seen this movie. The two movies are based on the same story so many of the particulars are the same -- the servants who can shoot 100 miles away and run super-fast, the visits to Turkey and to the moon, the cannonball ride, the disembodied lady's head with the hots for Munchhausen, etc.
Even though the movie was made during the height of the war, with government approval, it had pretty much no political content. Robert Osborne said it was intended to be Germany's answer to big budget Allied fantasy movies like The Wizard of Oz and The Thief of Baghdad. It's certainly fanciful, with special effects that were amazing for the time. I was surprised by how sexy the movie was. I would have expected a movie made during the Nazi regime to be prudish. But on the contrary, Baron Munchhausen is quite the ladies man. He gets it on with Catherine the Great, a Venetian princess, and plenty of others. And there's even a scene with topless harem girls frolicking in a pool, which even pre-code Hollywood couldn't have gotten away with.
I was enjoying the movie immensely until the scenes at the sultan's palace in Turkey. There were a bunch of extras played by African actors. I started wondering where a Germany movie company found dozens of Africans in 1943, and what happened to them after filming was over. That soured me on the whole movie.
[ETA: I checked Wikipedia and discovered that our own James Wallis published a game based on the adventures of Baron Munchhausen! Wow!]
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I did, and it was quite the thing.
The adventures of Baron Munchausen were written in the late 1700s by Rudolf Raspe, based loosely on the after-dinner anecdotes of the real Baron Munchausen. Raspe's own story is almost as extraordinary as any the Baron could have created: an itinerant librarian, he would get a job working for some high-and-mighty, pilfer the choicest items from their collection, and move swiftly on before the theft was discovered. Eventually he had to flee to England, penniless, and wrote the Munchausen stories to make ends meet. He was, as his biographer put it, "a rogue".
The film was made in Venice, and I suspect the African extras in the harem sequence were Ethiopians and North Africans living in Italy anyway. It's not like Leni Riefenstahl's anti-fascist film Tiefland, which was mostly filmed during the Third Reich using Romany extras who were sent to the camps after the filming.
Thank you so much for this. What a relief. Tiefland was exactly what I was thinking of. It made me almost ill to think that I was watching a movie made with slave labor who were probably killed as soon as their scenes were over. I want to watch Munchhausen again so I can enjoy it with a clear conscience.