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The Counterfeiters

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Studio: Sony Pictures
Category: DVD

List Price: ~~$28.96~~
Buy Used: $7.44
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New (42) Used (22) Collectible (2) from $7.44

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

31 reviews
Sales Rank: 3374

Format: Ac-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: German (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 99
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.3 x 0.6

MPN: COLD23920D
UPC: 043396239203
EAN: 0043396239203
ASIN: B0012QE4PI

Theatrical Release Date: February 22, 2008
Release Date: August 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 08/05/2008 Run time: 99 minutes Rating: R

Amazon.com
A deft blend of suspense and docudrama, Stefan Ruzowitzky's sixth feature focuses on history's largest counterfeiting operation. Before World War II breaks out, Salomon Sorowitsch (the compact yet steely Karl Markovics), a Russian-born Jew, lives the good life in Berlin. He forges documents, like passports and banknotes, and sketches beautiful women to the romantic strains of tango records. Sorowitsch's dolce vita comes to an end when he's sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. Once Reich officials decide to deploy imprisoned printers, craftsmen, and bank officials to counterfeit foreign currency, they draft Sorowitsch for "Operation Bernhard" and ship him to Sachsenhausen. Though he and his colleagues receive preferential treatment, the threat of execution hangs over their heads at all times. First, they master the pound; then they tackle the American dollar. At this point, communist co-worker Adolf Burger (The Ninth Day's excellent August Diehl) suggests sabotage. As he explains, they're extending the conflict and increasing the death toll, but the entire team will suffer if they fail, even their SS supervisor, Freidrich Herzog (Downfall's Devid Striesow), whose career depends on it. As Jews, however, they stand to lose more than their jobs. Based on Burger's book The Devil's Workshop, Austria's Ruzowitzky (Anatomy) sheds a compassionate light on the guilt and complicity of survivors. Though The Counterfeiters plays more like a prison camp movie than a Holocaust drama--Stalag 17 comes to mind--that doesn't make it any less significant, just less wrenching than some of its counterparts. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Stills from The Counterfeiters (click for larger image)

Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Better than expected November 29, 2008
Found this movie for $5 at the video store--a 'gem' at that price. The story of the Nazis forcing concentration camp inmates to forge foreign currency to bankrupt England was compelling. The 'dilemma' the characters face of doing good work and enjoying more comfortable survival, or sabbotaging their captors efforts, drives the film. The special features include a Q&A with the Director where a lot of great information is told about what happened to the characters after the War.

3 out of 5 stars

Too grainy & shaking November 26, 2008
The story is interesting and the presentation is fine, but for two things that it is worth only 3 stars to me:
1. too much grainy effect on the video quality that it seems only marginal improvement over DVD ver, which I happened to have bought earlier, and the comparison of two tells no big difference. It is said to be the director's intent to make it look like old style movie, but too much would ruin what made us buy the BR version instead of the DVD. The DVD version in 480p is truely what the director desired for heavy grainy look!

2. too much hand shaking effect to the camera in many occasions. The director seems to produce the effect that there was a camerman running with the actors and shotting at the spot. But again, too much of anything would kill the good intent. It just gets me headache to watch.

Anyway, still a good film produced by foreign producer other than Hollywood esp based on WWII true stories.

4 out of 5 stars

Excellent movie about an interesting true story. November 8, 2008
This is a pretty interesting movie. It is based on a true story. At times, especially at the beginning, it seems to jump quickly over events. It takes a little to get into the flow of the movie and feel comfortable with who the characters are. The end of the movie is a bit abrupt also. You aren't quite sure what happened to some of the main characters between the last days of the war and the ending where the main character is in a Casino in Monaco. In spite of these drawbacks, this is an interesting movie that makes you want to go out and learn more about the events it was based on.

3 out of 5 stars

A Compelling Story, Strangely Told October 27, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

The German-Austrian film The Counterfeiters is based on a remarkable true story. Late in World War Two the Nazis rounded up Jews who had been confined in various concentration camps and set up a large counterfeiting operation designed to undermine the British and U.S. economies. The Nazis found some 150 Jews with the necessary skills and put them together in a special section within the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, providing the latest money-making equipment, giving them plenty of food and comfortable accommodations. But the counterfeiters were constantly pressured to produce (at pain of death) and there were sadistic S.S. guards who cruelly reminded the counterfeiters that they were still in Hell.

Just outside the counterfeiters' quarters other prisoners were brutalized by the Nazis. In one incident, a group of the counterfeiters can hear a guard insulting a man as he executes him. The bullets fly through the very wooden wall next to which they are standing.

It's an important and compelling story. But much of the film was shot with a hand-held that often awkwardly jumps from actor to actor in prolonged scenes. In one of the DVD special features writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky asserted that he was trying to create a documentary effect. I think he failed at this. It all comes off as too contrived.

The main character is Saloman "Sally" Sorowitsch, portrayed very energetically by Karl Markovics. Sally is a very clever, tough, wily man who jerkily moves about like a bantam rooster surrounded by mean foxes. His eyes dart from tormentor to tormentor. Too much eye-darting, if such a thing is possible. Markovics likes to strike a pose, as do the other key players, both victims and tormentors. They are quite good at striking poses, but enough is enough.

I recommend the audio commentary by Ruzowitzky. He addresses some of the things I wondered about, like the sometimes bizarre soundtrack. The interview given by Adolf Burger is very touching. Now in his nineties, he is a survivor of the counterfeiters. Burger was a consultant on the film. He has devoted decades of his life to keeping the memory of the Holocaust and the counterfeiting operation alive.

Although this film received the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, I would not rate it so highly. It just did not seem "genuine," somewhat like a good counterfeit.

5 out of 5 stars

an amazing more or less true story October 22, 2008
Until watching this movie, I had no idea that the largest counterfeiting operation of all time was carried out by prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp. They were assigned to forge pounds and dollars, in order to undermine the Allied economy and finance the Nazi war effort. They ended up printing over 100 million pounds sterling, which even the Bank of England could not distinguish from the genuine article. On the other hand, as a result of stalling tactics, they didn't crack the dollar until the war was almost over and it no longer made any difference.

This movie is a fictionalized version of this story. Prisoners with relevant skills are brought in to a special, top-secret area in a concentration camp, where in contrast to the appalling conditions elsewhere, they are provided with sufficient food, decent beds, time for breaks, etc. But if they don't produce results, they will be shot. Sorowich, a master counterfeiter, is brought in to take charge of the counterfeiting operation. Burger, one of the other workers on the operation, wants to sabotage the operation, so as to hamper the Nazi war effort. This view is not popular among the other workers, who do not feel like dying for this cause, just so that other workers can be brought in to do the job for them. Much of the movie is a dramatization of this moral argument. The end result is to delay the production of the dollar just enough. The protagonist is Sorowich, who initially just wants to save his skin, and also has a personal longing to crack the dollar, but eventually sort of comes around to the other point of view.

The movie is very well done. The acting is excellent, especially the actors who play Sorowich, and Herzog, the boss of the concentration camp. One is really immersed in the concentration camp, which is quite scary, although not nearly as gruesome as it could be since we are in the elite section.

The bonus features are worth watching and tell more about the true story on which the movie is based. For example, in reality, only two people knew about the sabotage, unlike in the movie where for dramatic purposes lots of people knew about it so that they could argue about it on screen.

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