” expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants. It is based on the 1972 recordings of conversations between Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, friend and wartime munitions minister, and screenwriter Andrew Birkin as they collaborate on a screenplay based on Speer’s memoir “Inside the Third Reich.” But Lapa’s embellished archival doc falls some way short of the cinephile/history lover’s catnip that tantalizing summation promises.
But several choices on Lapa’s part — some unavoidable, some not — detract from the film’s potentially enlightening impact. Firstly, presumably due to the degradation of the original tapes, the voices we hear for the majority of the film are not Speer’s or Birkin’s, but those of voice actors reading excerpts from the transcripts.
Despite these formal frustrations, a hazy picture of Speer’s quite infuriating ability to obscure, evade or massage the truth, the better to build a picture of duped regretful decency rather than fully complicit opportunism does emerge. The script, which was to have been produced at Paramount and for which Birkin and Speer fantasy-cast Donald Pleasance as Hitler, gives rise to multiple instances of Speer contradicting himself.