Amid the endless, rushing Danube of Nazi-slash-Holocaust documentaries that have come at us for decades now and may indeed never cease coming, Felix Moeller's Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss holds a special patch of historical terrain - it's a movie about movies, and about how ethical responsibility and movies have always been cross-wired together, no matter how much filmmakers still like to pretend they're not. Specifically, it's about the most notorious Third Reich film made in the spirit of Nazi anti-Semitism, Veit Harlan's Jew Suss (1940), a virulent piece of xenophobic cinema that is, not coincidentally, rarely if ever seen in this country. Unlike Leni Riefenstahl's often-screened Triumph of the Will, which merely deifies the Nazis at a rally constructed for the camera and makes no mention of what would become the Final Solution, Harlan's movie is a period drama, set in the 1700s, in which the presence of Jews in German culture is explicitly, relentlessly depicted as nothing less than a pestilence. Riefenstahl's film is, all things considered, poor propaganda (it is far more tedious than persuasive), but Harlan's movie is a lurid, outrageous melodrama designed like an evangelical sermon to get people on their feet, stomping and shouting and full of fire.

It's a fascinating freak, especially given its real historical foundation (Joseph Suss Oppenheimer was a real moneylender mixed up with aristocratic finances, until he was ultimately railroaded by embittered business rivals and executed on trumped-up charges in 1738), and an earlier, "British" version of the story (released in 1934), in which Oppenheimer was a victimized hero. For Harlan, Joseph Goebbels & Co., Oppenheimer was an public-opinion opportunity, and so in this notorious version he is depicted as a slavering, felonious, hook-nosed sex criminal-archvillain who must be stopped at all costs, and who is a scourge sufficient to galvanize the film's post-Reformation society against Jewry in general. Taking a methodological page out of the Soviet agitprop hornbook, the film is as clear and outright as propaganda films ever get, but it's exactly its persuasiveness - its success at its own ambitions - that marks the film as a blight.

Which Moeller's film takes as a given, properly, although the question lingers as to how much you can logically blame a film, and therefore a filmmaker, for having an influence there is no possible way to measure. In any case, Moeller's documentary skims over the fascinating Oppenheimer legacy in favor of Veit Harlan himself, an energetic go-getter and would-be actor who was clearly larger than life, living large (often in Capri, where he is buried), netting several movie star wives (his last, Kristina Soderbaum, was the most popular German movie star from the mid-'30s to the '50s), and lording it over ambitious German productions like a Teutonic Cecil B. deMille. Harlan's life pivoted on Jew Suss - after the war, he became something of a pariah in German society, still making films but also proclaiming publicly that he'd been forced to make the film, a claim few Germans, in their own long fog of incomprehensible guilt, could believe. What Harlan meant to the culture he thrived in and then was reviled by is densely illustrated by Moeller's web of interviews, predominantly with Harlan's four surviving children (one daughter committed suicide in 1989) and six grandchildren, whose entire lives have been marked in large and small ways by Harlan's public profile and by the shadow of Jew Suss. One aging son comes close to defending his father and the film, while another, influential war crime researcher Thomas Harlan, has devoted his life to criminalizing him. (The two old brothers apparently do not speak.) The younger generation have wrestled with merely being Harlans in a country that will not forget the name, but a fringe benefit Moeller's film offers up is the realization that Jan Harlan, for decades Stanley Kubrick's producer, was Veit Harlan's nephew. He met the young Jewish Bronx-native filmmaker during the shooting of Paths of Glory, as did Jan's sister Christiane, who acted in the film and later married Kubrick. Christiane is here, looking lovely, telling of her introducing Kubrick to Harlan at her home, a meeting for which Kubrick was nervous but which you'd imagine had a degree of frisson for Harlan as well.

Of course, a documentary about movies has the extra good fortune to have their historic subject ready to be sampled in vast chunks, and Moeller ladles in swatches of Jew Suss as well as home movies and Harlan's other, swoony-crazy melodramas, in addition to Kolberg (1945), an epic war film helmed by Harlan that has the distinction of having helped the Third Reich inadvertently lose the war because the production required tens of thousands of infantry to be pulled from the front and used as extras. There are other ironies aplenty - as in the scene from Jew Suss in which Oppenheimer pleads for his life (cravenly) by claiming that he was only acting under the orders of the Duke of Wurttemberg, a virtual prophesy (or a template?) of the "Nuremberg defense" used by Nazis at the war crimes trials after the war.

In the end, Moeller and his subjects don't have answers for the questions that still plague them, stirred as they are by latent guilt in having merely been related to the man who made such a film, and with undeniable zest. It's an issue Germany is, and should be, still wrestling with.

For more information about Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss, visit Zeitgeist Films. To order Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss, go to TCM Shopping.

by Michael Atkinson