"Schindler's List"
                              A film review by
                            Linda Lopez McAlister
                            on "The Women's Show"
                          WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                              January 15, 1994

    I have never been a great admirer of the films of Steven Spielberg.  
Though hugely popular and often very clever, the ones I've seen have struck 
me as glib, shallow, and predictably sentimental. He has aimed for the 
box office blockbuster rather than the great film.  So I was dubious about 
his ability to make a really creditable film about the Holocaust.  But 
critical reactions have been uniformly positive so I decided I should see it 
even though it doesn't fit well under the "women and film" rubric.  Now I'm 
thoroughly glad I did.  The film is unbelievably good, far surpassing anything 
I ever thought Spielberg and Universal Pictures were capable of producing.

Gone are Spielberg's nifty special effects and Kodak-cheery colors (in fact 
the film is virtually all shot in black and white, though in a few places 
color is used to good effect. This is a thoroughly committed and serious 
effort to tell a incredible story about real people that happened in Poland 
and Czechoslovakia during the Nazi atrocities of World War II.  Spielberg's 
respect for the people the film is about and those who died at the hands of 
the Nazis is too great to allow him his usual tricks.  This material inspires 
him to rise above his previous accomplishments and to approach greatness.

   In that respect he's rather like his hero, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson).
Schindler was a Sudeten German who had failed as an entrepeneur before the war
who now sees his chance to turn a huge profit when the Nazis occupy Poland
forcing Polish Jews into first ghettos and later into labor or death camps.
Schindler is a member of the Nazi party who cultivates the friendship of Nazi
officers in Krakow where he settles.  His plan is to get rich off the war by 
getting incarcerated Jews to give him money to invest in a bankrupt factory to
manufacture field kitchen equipment.  He gets a gifted Jewish business man,
Izthak Stern (Ben Kingsley), to recruit Jewish investors and workers for him 
and run the business.  Through his own considerable talents for self promotion,
PR, and coercion, he is able to drum up business and special favors from his 
highly placed Nazi friends.  He seems to be motivated wholly by personal 
greed and enjoyment of the lavish lifestyle he can afford off the unpaid 
labor of Jewish prisoners.

   At first Schindler and the Commandant of the forced labor camp, Amon Goeth
(Ralph Fiennes) seem to be cut from similar cloth.  They look very much alike,
emphasized by matching shots of them shaving their fair Aryan faces.  As we
learn more about each of them, we discover that despite their apparent
similarities, they have their differencs; Goeth is a sadist who kills for sport
and sees Jews as abstractions while Schindler's a person who looks at people as
individuals and tries to figure out who can benefit him.  These differences are
suggested when we see them talking and drinking together in a shot in which a
thin vertical shadow in the center of the frame serves as a line of demarcation
between them.

   Schindler's factory is wildly successful and he protects his workers from 
the brutality others face--if only for his own self-interested reasons.  
Soon the factory is seen as a haven and Jews beg him to bring their relatives 
onto the work force. Such requests anger him for he does not see himself as 
there to help Jews but to make money.  Nonetheless his underlying humanity  
prevails and he grudgingly acceeds to some of these requests.  Spielberg and 
his cinematographer repeatedly find just the right shot to express their 
characters' conflicts and changes.  Near the end of the film we get another 
shot of Schindler and Goeth in profile, but this time the line of demarcation 
between them is not a thin shadow but a thick wall--a visual analogue for how 
very much Schindler has become distanced from Goeth and Nazi ideology.

    At one point Schindler expresses the view that war brings out the absolute
worst in every person involved.  Though he doesn't know it, he will be
an exception to this rule. The war has turned the self-centered and greedy
Schindler into a man who risks everything to help others.  At the point when 
his ambitions have been realized and he could walk away from the war a rich man
while "his Jews" die in Auschwitz, he spends every penny he has bribing and
paying off Nazi officials in order to be allowed to move 1,100 of them out of
Poland to the relative safety of a new factory in Czechoslovakia where they 
manufacture unusable munitions until the war is over.

    At the end of the film we learn that while today there are only 4,000 Jews
left in Poland, there are over 6,000 descendants throughout the world of Jews
Shindler saved from death.  In 1974 Oskar Schindler died and was buried in
Jerusalem, honored with the official designation "righteous Gentile."
This man who rose above himself has given Spielberg the material he needed to
rise above his past accomplishments as a filmmaker and, in this instance,
approach greatness.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.

   Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.  Please do 
not reprint this review without the permission of the author.