Ed Stoppard was impressive as the lawyer who dared to put the F�hrer in the dock in The Man Who Crossed Hitler, while The Hour came to a satisfying close
The Man Who Crossed Hitler (BBC2) | iPlayer
Hans Litten vs Adolf Hitler: To Stop a Tyrant (BBC2) | iPlayer
Random (Channel 4) | 4oD
American: The Bill Hicks Story (BBC4) | iPlayer
The Hour (BBC2) | iPlayer
For all its virtue as an attention-grabber, any play called The Man Who Crossed Hitler ? a story based on true events ? was bound to struggle with the weight of dramatic irony. However much you wondered who this man was, you didn't have to wonder if things would end well for him.
This was the tragedy of Hans Litten, a smart young Berlin lawyer who, in 1931, hauled Germany's raging F�hrer-to-be into court for an afternoon of impudent questioning, in particular to have him explain the apparent confusion in Nazi party policy between his own recently sworn disavowal of violence and the activities of the city's gangs of storm troopers, two of whose number stood accused of marching with their fellows into a local communists' social evening for an orgy of shooting, knifing and bludgeoning.
Litten couldn't touch Hitler for the killings, but by interrogating him as a witness he sought to prepare the ground for a perjury charge (a plan equalled in its bathos, it occurred to me, by the US Department of the Treasury, which that same year was busy successfully prosecuting Al Capone for not paying tax). At the very least, it would provide a courtroom ding-dong that would expose Hitler either as an unreformed thug to his big-money, bourgeois backers or as a turncoat wuss to the millions of Brown Shirt maniacs who were out spreading mayhem and fear in his name.
The unenviable line: "I call on witness Adolf Hitler?" was always going to sound like the beginning of a Monty Python sketch, though by now we had been introduced to him, albeit gradually ? a glimpse of his short-back-and-sides, his mustachioed profile, his brown-trousered leg and polished shoe ? as if to prepare us for the faint but inevitable letdown of Ian Hart (who once played John Lennon, though admittedly in the Beatles' Hamburg years) not quite being the man we'd seen barking his head off in the newsreel and, of course, for not quite being German.
But Hart made a good job of giving us the face of the tyrant we knew ? the barely restrained contempt, the righteous menace, the steam coming out of his reddening ears; he captured, too, Hitler's weird single-mindedness ? his distractedness from others, his thousand-year stare, the way (even in the public tearoom, full of whispers and glances) his voice rose above the conversational until he was addressing not people but the glorious, blazing future itself. Litten had been warned not to let Hitler make speeches but he was soon at it in the witness box, to unquenchable, defeating cheers.
Ed Stoppard convinced as Litten in his bullish excitement, then in his ashen, dawning shock (refusing to flee, he ended up in Dachau, where he killed himself); Anton Lesser was strong as his senior colleague Rudolf (who did flee); Bill Paterson was nicely evasive as the craven judge. There were moments to pull a face at. Litten's carpenter friend Max (John Hollingworth), looked up from his spokeshave with perhaps one too many knowing political apercus; and Litten's "weary" catalogue of his father's objections to the new Weimar republic ? "To him, it's all atonal music, flat roofs, Bauhaus chairs, the rumba, Otto Dix, negro jazz, Jewish self-assertion" ? could have done with the lumps taken out of it.
But it drove you to set your clock for the play's sister documentary, Hans Litten vs Adolf Hitler (though why we had to wait a week for it I don't know). Here was the bigger picture in testimony and flickering footage: the rise of Hitler from his lederhosen days; his campaign against Berlin, a dangerous world city of artists, thinkers, homosexuals, Jews and communists; we learned where the Brown Shirts got their mindset from, and their Mausers; how Hitler charmed and then rid himself of his political enemies; there was the burning of books to the sound of oompah bands.
More of Litten's fate was filled in too: how he was moved from camp to camp as his mother and others around the world pressed vainly for his freedom; the torture, the broken bones and knocked-out teeth. There was the story of the poem he read out at a camp gathering in honour of Hitler's birthday, "Thoughts Are Free", its sentiments ? and Litten's defiance ? apparently lost on the watching guards. Surviving family and friends (Litten's niece, Max's daughter) and contributors now gave a poignant reading of the poem, each framed by the camera reciting one line in turn. It made a simple, powerful end to the two films, which together brought light to an act of heroism all but swallowed by history.
It took a while to get the measure of the multiple perspectives in Random, an adaptation of Debbie Tucker Green's one-woman stage play about a black schoolboy stabbed to death in the street.
It was urban violence as mundane, culminating in an ad hoc shrine, a gathering of local people, floral tributes, shiny balloons, messages in txt spk.
The day started like any other: the sister trying to get the idle boy out of bed for school, the mother burning the porridge, the sister going to her boring office job, the boy late for his class. Although nothing much happened (and when it did, it was offstage), it was a job to keep your eye on the switching narrative ? divided between naturalistic scenes from home, school and office and others in which the sister (the evidently versatile Nadine Marshall), in a dark, empty studio set, acted out the observations and fleeting thoughts of all three characters (four, when the father, who worked nightshifts, finally put in an appearance). At one point, there were three of her onstage, each one "being" someone else. It did keep you on your toes, as did the pacy, heightened language rendered in youth argot or, in the case of the mother, sinuous Caribbean dialect charged with abrasive humour and abrasive sadness. There were kind words but not many.
This flitter of spoken subtext added a poetic richness to the action: from it, we learned (though it wasn't hard to guess) the sister's contempt for her work colleagues, her irritation with a boyfriend who hadn't called; it was strong in capturing the mind of the mother, a no-nonsense materfamilias who deflected bad news with an internal commentary on the police clomping in their boots over her clean carpets, on the enforced calm they brought to proceedings ? "too trained in an unnatural politeness to let their guard slip". But did it need all this? The family, tormented in the end by this slow hammering of grief and regret, were impermeable to sympathy. It made time stand still. I was dulled by it. How can you feel, I thought, when there's so much thinking going on?
American: The Bill Hicks Story was a treat, and not just for fans of the enraged cult comic genius, who died at the age of 32. That sounds pretty young but he started when he was 14. His brother recalled getting home from college one weekend to find young Bill packing out nightclubs in Houston, Texas. It was a compelling story ? the hallucinogenic years, the drunk years and always the cigarette years. The film ? surely the most visually inventive bio-doc ever ? is a kinetic masterpiece of cut-and-paste photo-animation, with voiced commentary from the people who loved him most. "Bill was? interesting," said his mother, a southern baptist and pillar of the community. The highlight (which also appeared straight afterwards in BBC4's documentary, Bill Hicks: Revelations, his London concert in 1992) was the classic clip of Hicks as Jack Palance in Shane forcing the poor sheep herder into a fight (it's a skit on America v Iraq). "Pick up the gun?"
What was Hicks's secret? "It's not enough to make jokes," he said. "You have to kick over some tables."
The Hour has drawn some understandable sniper fire, but it's the only show I've kept switching on for these past six weeks. Yes, the espionage element has been ponderous and often laughable (Freddie's wrestling match with the MI6 man reminded me of Mr Bean struggling with a stepladder), I found it hard to care about Suez, and on BBC wages it was never going to look like Mad Men. But the cast was top-notch and in Freddie and Bel I haven't seen such unexploded chemistry since Grace Kelly nursed James Stewart's broken leg in Rear Window. No one applauded louder than me when they finally said they hated each other and went off jobless into the sunset.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/aug/28/man-who-crossed-hitler-review
Garcelle Beauvais Genelle Frenoy Georgianna Robertson
