Night Will Fall, 2014 - ★★★½

Night Will Fall, 2014 - ★★★½
REVIEWED

.:: Scavenger Hunt #14 May 2016 - Film 14 ::.

"They say dead mans shoes are unlucky, but what of dead childrens toys?" - Narrator (Jasper Britton)

This is about the closest I could get to an unseen Hitchcock. While I agree its a stretch to credit it to him. Because this is built around his work which seemed more a poducer/editor role, and looked far more like Bernstein at the wheel.

Night Will Fall is a documentary about a restored Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock documentary that lay unfinished, had been long forgotten and thought lost. Till researchers in 1984 discovered footage that turned out to be their unfinished/shelved film from 1945 about German concentration camps. That was simply titled 'German Concentration Camps Factual Survey' that was intended to be feature lengh.

While HBO/Andre Singers 'Night Will Fall' succeeds at what it intended, its likely that its modernistic talking heads format strips away much of the power that the bleak original GCCFS had.

Incidentally Billy Wilders similar war documentary Death Mills used material from the same soldiers and war correspondants, I had done a letterboxd review of that but its gone missing in action, likely due to a TMDB page/information change or something.

Originally taken from Letterboxd