This movie is well worth watching. I had not heard about the German plot to flood the British and American economies with counterfeit bank notes. It is really interesting to see how people react in the most extreme circumstances and even try to achieve the seeming impossible in the most difficult of circumstances because of the challenge.

The characters are well developed and complex in their motivations. The film looks like it could have been based on a play or could be produced as a theatrical play as the action is based around a small number of people in a confined place.

The story takes place in a concentration camp but the characters are kept in segregated buildings behind a high wooden fence and work under the camp commandant almost as his employees. The only clue to what is happening on the other side comes from the sounds of shouting, shootings and screams.

Inside the counterfeiting ‘workshops’ the prisoners live in relative luxury and work on creating the perfect Dollar bill although death is an ever present threat it is also their motivation to get the job done.

Although I was drawn in by many of the actors’ performances and was interested in the Germans’ plan to flood the global economy with counterfeit currency and the commandant’s desire to implement modern management philosophies and practices, I was relatively unmoved by this film. Perhaps cynically, I believe that its producers loaded it with certain devices-the authoritarian commandant who reveals flickers of compassion, the thuggish second-in-command who shoots prisoners mercilessly, the strains of classical music that underscore brief moments of civility-that audiences have come to expect in a Holocaust-related film. I was left wondering what it revealed that we haven’t already seen in Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List or other works. Its scale is smaller and more intimate than these big-budget Hollywood productions, though.

I think that we’ll soon see actor Devid Striesow move into English-language productions.

I was chided by a member of the audience for laughing quietly at a few short, selected scenes. She felt compelled to mutter that “there [was] nothing funny here”, that six million people died in the events portrayed. I wonder why she couldn’t assume that I’m a [admittedly non-practicing] Jew and fully aware of the Holocaust’s horrors? When did responses to movies become subject to standards of political correctness?