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The Counterfeiters | 
 enlarge | Studio: Sony Pictures
Category: DVD
List Price: $28.96
Buy New: $14.98
You Save: $13.98 (48%)
New (46) Used (13) Collectible (2) from $11.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 3116
Format: Ac-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: German (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 99
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: COLD23920D
UPC: 043396239203
EAN: 0043396239203
ASIN: B0012QE4PI
Theatrical Release Date: February 22, 2008
Release Date: August 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Expedited shipping is not available for this item.
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Product Description
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 08/05/2008 Run time: 99 minutes Rating: R
Amazon.com
A deft blend of suspense and docudrama, Stefan Ruzowitzky's sixth feature focuses on history's largest counterfeiting operation. Before World War II breaks out, Salomon Sorowitsch (the compact yet steely Karl Markovics), a Russian-born Jew, lives the good life in Berlin. He forges documents, like passports and banknotes, and sketches beautiful women to the romantic strains of tango records. Sorowitsch's dolce vita comes to an end when he's sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. Once Reich officials decide to deploy imprisoned printers, craftsmen, and bank officials to counterfeit foreign currency, they draft Sorowitsch for "Operation Bernhard" and ship him to Sachsenhausen. Though he and his colleagues receive preferential treatment, the threat of execution hangs over their heads at all times. First, they master the pound; then they tackle the American dollar. At this point, communist co-worker Adolf Burger (The Ninth Day's excellent August Diehl) suggests sabotage. As he explains, they're extending the conflict and increasing the death toll, but the entire team will suffer if they fail, even their SS supervisor, Freidrich Herzog (Downfall's Devid Striesow), whose career depends on it. As Jews, however, they stand to lose more than their jobs. Based on Burger's book The Devil's Workshop, Austria's Ruzowitzky (Anatomy) sheds a compassionate light on the guilt and complicity of survivors. Though The Counterfeiters plays more like a prison camp movie than a Holocaust drama--Stalag 17 comes to mind--that doesn't make it any less significant, just less wrenching than some of its counterparts. --Kathleen C. Fennessy Stills from The Counterfeiters (click for larger image)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 31 more reviews...
 A tense, fascinating true tale about a group of skilled Jewish counterfeiters, Nazi brutality and corrupt German self-interest January 2, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is a professional criminal, a master counterfeiter and a Jew. He winds up in a brutal Nazi labor camp because of all three. Sally also is a survivor. He's not idealistic about Judaism, he knows how prisons work and how to survive. His goal is simple: Do whatever it takes to stay alive and try to use every bit of guile and opportunism he has to get more food and to escape the work designed to kill the inmates. He winds up being jeered as a Jew but painting heroic portraits of SS officers and their families.
One night you might say his luck changes. He's transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and encounters Sturmbannfuhrer Freidrich Herzog (Devid Striesow), the man who arrested him. Now Herzog is in charge of Operation Bernhard, a top-secret project endorsed by Himmler: Find a way to counterfeit British pounds that are so perfect they won't be detected. These counterfeits will be used by the Nazis to flood Britain and destroy its economy. Sorowitsch and a group of Jewish prisoners -- skilled typographers, printers, artists, paper experts -- are taken to a top-secret, walled section of Sachsenhausen and put to work. If they succeed, they live, for a while. If they fail, they die. They succeed so well with the pound that the Nazis decide to use the stuff to buy their own war needs. But now the prisoners also have the task of counterfeiting American $100 bills. Same deal: Succeed, live; fail, die. One prisoner, Adolph Burger (August Diehl), says he will sabotage the project by deliberately showing it down. It makes for a tense moral dilemma. Burger is prepared to be shot. He's also prepared to take the others with him. The others, naturally enough, don't agree.
For Sally the pragmatist, all he knows is that they are alive while others just beyond the wall are dead. They all can hear the pleading and the gunshots. By working, Sally and the others have better food, showers once a week, softer beds and some shaky security as long as their project is needed. They still endure brutal treatment by their SS guards, but at least they're alive. Sally intends to survive, but he probably surprises himself as he finds ways to help some of the other prisoners and to delay the project enough to matter but not enough to see people shot. And it should be said that Sally the expert is in a position to have the material and presses he needs to finally produce a perfect counterfeit, something he was never able to accomplish before. His British pounds are so good they're accepted by the Swiss and verified by the Bank of England.
The Counterfeiters is an intriguing mixture of tense thriller and Nazi brutality. It is a taut story permeated with the fear of death, arbitrary and pointless. You're suspected of having tuberculosis because you cough? An SS guard simply takes you out to the courtyard, makes you kneel and fires a bullet in your brain. No matter how useful you might be, you're still just a Jew.
The movie is based on Adolph Burger's memoirs, but was significantly tweaked, with Burger's approval, by the director/screenwriter Stefan Ruzowitzky. Karl Markovics as Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch gives an excellent performance. Markovics is a tough-looking actor who probably has had the best role of his career. Sorowitsch is based on Salomon Smolianoff, a wily Russian career criminal and master forger.
Right after the war says Burger, "I told my friend Salomon, `Please promise me you will never counterfeit again.' He promised me he wouldn't do it any more. So we shook hands, and I have never seen him again." Now 91, Burger still gives talks to schoolchildren about the horrors the German's wreaked and, sometimes, about counterfeiting.
 Pathetic Little Drama January 1, 2009
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I thought German/Austrian people had had a long history of film-making, watching this pathetic little drama unfold made me think otherwise. It is about a counterfeiter called something or other who is forced to make fake dollar/pounds bills at a - yawn!! - concentration camp. The sets were of such poor quality and cost-cutting so evident that it was really shocking. I had an almost claustrophobic feeling; as if some amateur actors got together, selected an abandoned warehouse in erstwhile East German town, discussed a script whilst drinking beer and eating sausages rolls and presto, they get an Oscar. I wouldn't even dare to compare it with classics like Schindler's List. This movie is almost obscene! It leaves you so totally cold and untouched! It is even worse than our Bollywood Musicals starring ugly Shah Rukh Khan or Lilliput Aamir Khan!
Be really good at something December 24, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am not going to praise the acting, cinematography, direction and everything else about this movie that is really super - the movie got an Academy Award. What I do wish to say is that coming up with the idea to make a movie on the Nazis and the counterfeiting exercise is brilliant and original. I think most other aspects of World War II have been repeated over and over again in too many different ways (The excellent HBO series "Band of Brothers" did come to mind).
The other point I wish to make (and which the movie illustrates so well), is that it is very important to be really good at something and to build a reputation on that ability. This fact is true in everyday life and also in the case of Salomon (Sally) from the movie.
I liked the way Sally's compassion for fellow prisoners and also the strong feeling of self preservation is depicted throughout the movie.
Why not justice at the end? December 20, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Counterfeiters" tells the story of concentration camp prisoners working for the Nazis during World War II. The prisoners, all Jewish, make up phony passports and identification papers for spies and other criminals and then graduate into producing counterfeit currencies. They start with the British pound paper and then go on to the U. S. dollar. They were especially successful with the pound notes they produce revealing the little known story of how this could have brought the British economy to its knees at the end of the war.
The counterfeiting prisoners live in relatively luxurious conditions at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp while others at the same camp are left to starve and live in filth. At the shocking end, the deprived prisoners confront their well fed colleagues and we expect a blood bath to ensue. Instead, peace is made and most of our heroes survive.
"Making of" features provide useful additional information which tell us that the Bank of England had to suspend printing some of its standard currency for a time after the war since over 130 million pounds of counterfeits were in circulation thanks to the Nazis. The counterfeits were so well made that only top experts could tell them from the real thing; also, that some are even being recovered today from a lake in Switzerland where they were dumped after the war ended.
There are also extended interviews with the producer/director/writer, key stars, and the man on whom so much of the story is based, Adolph Burger. These add quite a bit to understanding the real-life basis of the show and demonstrate the indomitable courage of Mr. Burger in telling his story. It is an important one.
Although this movie is generally well done and holds your interest the whole way one wonders why some of the gratuitous violence and sex were left in while some worthy scenes were dropped. The latter show connections between the characters and were not that long. This is while scenes were left in like the murderous SS seargent urinating on the head of the lead character while he was cleaning up the latrine. Another gross scene occurs when this same SS seargent kills the young Russian inmate who had contracted tuberculosis. The seargent tells the other prisoners he was protecting them from infection but they and we are unconvinced.
Moreover, we didn't see much justice done at the end. We kept waiting for the same SS seargent or the camp commandant to get their final desserts but that never happened. If the producer/director/writer wanted to show the futility and meaninglessness of if all, you'd have to say he succeeded. While acting and production values are of the first order we were left without a positive closing to the story. Yes, it was educational and we could see why it would win awards but it could have been better with a little more thought. Since Mr. Burger was brought in as a key advisor on the project you'd think he would have insisted on positive footnotes. The Allies did win the war and their economies didn't collapse. Finally, many top Nazis were brought to justice for the crimes, not only at Nuremberg, but elsewhere in Germany and Europe. It wouldn't have taken much more to make these points and leave the audience with a feeling that some justice had been done.
A conman in a concentration camp: gripping story, strong performances, unique approach to difficult subject matter December 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For Sally (or Salomon), a Russian jew, business was good in 1932 Germany. While Nazism was on the rise, that only meant there was a growing need for false papers -- and he was the reputed "king of the counterfeiters." He had no interest in politics, and thought he could avoid suspicion by being clever. It turned out he was wrong. He is captured and finds that his skill as an artist and ultimately his abilities as a counterfeiter make him valuable, but only as long as he is able to convince his fellow prisoners to help him deliver the goods.
This is a strong film, quite gripping from start to finish. I don't think it breaks any genuinely new ground, and it doesn't feel completely unique. But it is a strong story, well worth telling. The cinematography is unique, combining mostly low-key lighting with a range of tones, and making sparing but consistent use of handheld camera movements throughout, adding both a sense of realism and a feeling of invasiveness. The use of music in the early scenes avoids sentimentality -- it is intended to evoke an era and give a sense of character rather than to create an artificial feeling of sympathy.
What makes the film work is that Sally and his fellow inmates are not presented as saints or heroes or even victims. They are resourceful individuals in a terrible situation, and they make the best of it -- but the moral questions that face them are not clear: on the one hand, by carrying out the work the Nazis have asked of them they are saving their own lives, but on the other hand they are supporting the war. The film does not judge whether they do wrong to continue living. As Sally says (roughly) "I won't allow the Nazis to make me feel ashamed for wanting to live."
Nathan Andersen
www.eckerd.edu/sundance
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