"You must be careful about what you pretend to be,
A Review of "Mother Night"

because in the end you are what you pretend to be."

Last weekend I rented and watched a very intriguing movie adapted from a Kurt Vonnegut novel and staring Nick Nolte. The movie was "Mother Night". I have absolutely no idea what that title means, but the message of the movie I do understand, and it was presented very well.

I rented the movie because of Nolte’s participation, because it was based on a Vonnegut novel , and because it had an unusual WWII setting. (I confess here to being a Notle fan ever since "Who’ll Stop the Rain" (1978), but often a disappointed fan. Not this time!)

The premise of "Mother Night" is that an expatriate American, Howard W.. Campbell Jr. (Nolte), who was raised in prewar Germany, became a successful writer in the German language, and loved and married a beautiful German actress, is recruited in Berlin in 1938 by American Military Intelligence (not an oxymoron in this case) as a deep cover agent in Nazi Germany. His cover? Remain in Germany, pretend to be a fiercely anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, and broadcast Nazi propaganda world wide in English from Germany. Each broadcast ends with the signoff, "This is Howard W. Campbell Jr., the last free American, speaking to you from Berlin, the heart of the free world."

The propaganda is the usual stuff presented exceptionally well: "Jews alone are profiting from the war; there aren't any Jews in foxholes; Germany is fighting for racial purity and against the Slavic rabble under their Jewish masters; America has been tricked into the war by that Jewish agent Franklin Delano Rosenfeld, etc." Except for the occasional coughs, grunts and pauses – he does smoke too much, the talks are powerful political rants, and Campbell earns himself a wide audience not just in America, but in Germany itself, since he puts the Nazi case so forcefully.

Campbell also earns himself a place of respect in high-ranking German Nazi social circles, along with a spiffy German uniform. And the hatred of many of his listeners overseas. Only a few people in America and only one other person in Germany know that those coughs, grunts and pauses are an elaborate code, by which another deep cover American agent – that one other person in Germany - is passing on German secrets to American intelligence.

At the end of the war, there is an immediate problem which was dismissed when Campbell was first recruited because it was regarded as so unlikely: Howard W. Campbell Jr., deep cover spy and American "traitor," has survived, although his much loved wife has not. He wasn't ferreted out by German intelligence, he never gave himself away by an inadvertent remark to his Nazi "friends"; he wasn't killed during the Russians in the sack of Berlin, and he wasn't even taken out by stray American or British bombs during the war.

Foreshadowing some future problems, the American soldier who captures him is not gentle with this infamous traitor. His survival is particularly inconvenient for American Intelligence, because it hopes to use the same ruse in the "next war", and are unwilling to reveal Campbell's true role in the completed war. They are, however, willing to provide a new identity and anonymity in post war New York.

There are another couple of problems, one of which was also already beginning to seep into Campbell’s consciousness before the end of the war. He is starting to realize that he played his overt political role so well that he may have contributed to the Nazi successes. Such as fortifying the German home front, and encouraging the hatred and destruction of European Jews. After all, it was the role of a lifetime, and he played it to the hilt! Since he doesn’t have a clue whether the intelligence he passed on was really useful, this is personally troubling.

The other problem, which only manifests itself seriously 15 years later, is that various anti-Nazis, from American WWII veterans to the state of Israel, would like to get their hands on this man whose "hands are covered by the blood of six million human beings."

The last third of the movie shows ups and downs of Campbell's "life", such as it is, in post-war New York. While there are some surprising good times, mostly he is shown as a lonely widower, his only friend of another widower (Alan Arkin, in a great supporting role). Also, he turns out to be an unwilling hero to some bumbling neo-Nazis. These guys, including the "Black Fuhrer of Harlem", like to watch films made in Germany of Campbell's wartime broadcasts. And more then 15 years after they were made, those films still appear on the surface to be persuasive anti-Semitic rants, much to the dismay of Campbell, when he gets a chance to watch one.

It turns out that like Campbell himself, some of the post-war people Campbell meets are only impersonating who they claim to be. In some cases becoming the people they are impersonating, for either good or bad. In the end, it is unclear to Campbell who any of them really are, including himself. This is presented with occasional humor, mixed with a great deal of sadness.

Near the end of the movie, more than half convinced of his own wartime crimes - and knowing no one else who really wants him around, Campbell does not make it hard for the Israeli government to capture him. In a final irony, his Israeli prison cell is directly below that occupied by Adolf Eichmann, one person from that mixed up time who was completely convinced about who he was and that what he did was right.

Okay, so maybe the movie sounds too outlandish, too sad, or too complex to follow. It isn't, although some events in the last third of the movie are even more surprising and convoluted than I have let on. But, maybe "That's just the way life is", which is a line spoken at one critical point by Arkin's character. Whatever, "Mother Night" a great movie. With Nolte doing a great acting job, playing a truly complex character who believably changes greatly - both physically and mentally - over time.