Jew Suss: Rise and Fall -- Film Review

BERLIN -- "Jew Suss: Rise and Fall" is as fascinating as it is frustrating. This is the remarkable story about the actor who starred in the Nazi's most infamous propaganda film, "Jud Suss," and the ruinous impact the anti-Semitic film had on his life, not to mention how it helped to inflame racists in their holocaust against European Jewry. In a sense, though, this film by German director Oskar Roehler also is a propaganda film, excoriating anyone remotely tinged by Nazism without examining the near absence of free will in Nazi Germany and lacking any real empathy for its central character.