Submitted for your approval, a completely disgusting, but darkly and perversely funny, piece of Soviet WWII propaganda. Thought to be a lost film, Young Fritz tells the bizarre story of what happens when a baby joins the Nazis. It's just as hilarious and frightening as you'd think a film with a description like that would be.
So first off, there's this guy. Everyone knows him. He's a racist. Like Hitler, he professes the superiority of the Arian race, but is not actually a member of it himself. Another level to the absurdity comes when the doctor tells the audience that he can always tell a member of the Nazi party by tapping on their skulls. "They ring!" he says, beating on the skulls with a hammer, a hollow "ting" sound emitting from them. The staging of this sequence sets the precedent for the rest of the film. With the stark, black backgrounds it retains the look of a stage play, or perhaps a surreal, horrifying lecture from hell.
In the next sequence, we're introduced to Fritz's family, who are shown to be both slovenly and psychotically driven by the Nazi ideology.
There he is, young Fritz himself. He's played by an adult man, but camera trickery keeps him smaller than the "adults." It's a really off-putting sequence, and the baby scenes are definite points at which I was alternating looks of horror and twisted glee.
Here, the Soviets show the absolute ruthlessness of the fascist ideology. For his birthday, Fritz's parents friends give him tanks and guns ("to shoot the neighbor's dogs," no less).
After learning nothing in school from his father, Fritz travels to see devil Hitler and rat them all out "for the good of the nation." The sign in the background reads, "WE DON'T THINK -- WE OBEY!" Apropos, me thinks.
After ratting his entire family out to Hitler, Young Fritz becomes a full-fledged Gestapo member, leading the fight against treason from within his own school. He absolutely torments a young girl in his class, asking her who she talked to last night, to which she responds that she talked to no one. Fritz, being a typical fascist, doesn't believe her and continues to interrogate her.
This still right here is what Young Fritz is all about. Twisted, minimalist images that show, with some brilliant black humor, the absolute evil of the Nazi Party.
A quite shocking acknowledgement of the horrifying reality of concentration camps. Only the Soviets would be so bold in 1943.
This is probably my favorite scene. Young Fritz is forced to chose a bride between a completely ghastly gallery of Germanic stereotypes. The woman on the end is particularly frightening, what with her Frankenstein's Monster-esque face and sharp edged frame. She looks like a chainsaw sculpture, and it's fucking terrifying.
Throughout the scene, women are degraded and humiliated for the glory of the Nazi party. Fritz dances with them briefly before slapping them on the ass and putting them back in their place. His father equates them to little more than cattle (though were the Soviets really that much better with gender politics?).
A true motto for us all!
Fritz then enlists in the army, and is indoctrinated with the tenants of Nazi life.
Suck it, working class! We're fuckin' Nazis!
Again and again, Fritz (and by association, the entire Nazi party) is shown to be psychopathic. His undying allegiance to Hitler and the National Socialists makes him a reckless, disturbed brute.
Fritz also hasno qualms at all with desecrating art, grafitting his own name on the Venus de Milo. Another very memorable image here.
And now we've reached the finale, where the Russians are shown to have put the Nazis in a zoo ("with the rest of the beasts")
While I can't deny the unabashed hatefulness of this film, it's shot extremely well, almost expressionistically. Looking at it with hindsight, it's a disturbing look into prejudice and hate towards an ideology that many consider to be downright evil. As a piece of political propaganda, it's undeniably effective and deserves to stand next to such classics as Private Snafu, the Why We Fight series, and Der Fuehrer's Face.
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