Martin Freeman as we’ve never seen him before!
As part as of The Holocaust Season, BBC Two gives us a in-depth look of one history’s greatest and darkest TV productions of all time, TV movie The Eichmann Show. The TV movie tells us the amazing and shocking story of how TV Producer Milton Fruchtman (Martin Freeman) and director Leo Hurwitz (Anthony LaPaglia) were determined to broadcast the trial of Adolf Eichmann. They soon come to realise that broadcasting this particular trial isn’t going to be easy.
Directed by the talented Paul Andrews Williams (Murdered By My Boyfriend, London to Brighton) and written by Simon Block (The Shooting Of Thomas Hurndall) The Eichmann Show opens with director Leo Hurwitz, blacklisted for almost 10 years he get’s a lifetime deal to be the director of the trial of the century. The man who offers him the deal is TV producer Milton Fruchtman. At first Leo finds it all impossible, but later on decides to stick by his guns and take up the offer. However, it isn’t going to be that simple. Milton takes up the idea of using invisible cameras for the trial. And that’s where the hard work comes in for Leo and his team. It isn’t long before word gets out about Eichmann’s court hearing being televised, and Milton starts receiving death threats initially ignoring them. But the team soon hears of the death threats from protestors, and everyone is aware of keeping an eye on everything and everyone for their own safety.
With everyone being drawn to the Cuba crisis, they work at absolutely everything to get the whole world to tune in to the show. As the trial calls up the first witness, they all soon discover the full horror of the Holocaust as the witness goes into detail about how and what happened to him and his family and the awful conditions and the death of his wife and two children.
As they come to the second witness, an elderly woman who was a young girl in the camp, tells of her horror at what Eichmann and his fellow Nazi soldiers did to her and the young females which results to one of the camera man falling onto the floor. The camera man soon explains of his own tormented childhood as a slave which results to Milton and Leo not allowing him to carry on due to the trial becoming tougher as each witness comes on.
Tension rises between the director and producer as they both argue over different things. Milton obsession with the trial becomes too much, as Leo’s obsession with Eichmann’s expression and the way he is in the trial becomes too much for him too. As the show draws to the end, the whole world discovers that Eichmann was responsible for the murders of millions of innocent Jews and given the death sentence for his crimes.
This is one of the hardest reviews that I have written since I’ve started, and yet an honour at the same time! This was something that gave birth to reality of the horrors of what the Nazis did to these poor people. Before the trial was aired, no one has heard of the true horrors and nightmares of what happened behind them doors and the abuse they put with up.
The TV movie was powerful to the max simply because they used real images from the camp and real recordings from the trial which made it 100 percent affecting. Martin Freeman and Anthony LaPaglia’s partnership in this was also out of this world. You look at the pair of them and you would straight away thing that Lapaglia’s character would be hard as nails, but it wasn’t like that. Martin Freeman played a character that was so strong and determined to get what he wanted. Without a doubt, this was one of Martin Freeman’s best performances – and I’m even including his brilliant American accent in it aswell! A good history lesson and a good insight of what happened behind the scenes of the cameras that were recording the world’s most memorable trials.
