Silent Hero

Forget your troubles, c'mon get reading.

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Silent Hero

     Everybody knows Marcel Marceau, the world's most famous mime.

    Even those who might not know his name are familiar with the signature white face and graceful balletic moves of the silent actor who had a gift, as he described it, for creating objects where there were none, making the invisible visible.

     But who knew that Marcel Marceau was a World War II hero who fought with the French resistance and saved hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazis?
         Not me until last Friday night when I watched on Amazon Prime the movie "Resistance,"

...which starred Jesse Eisenberg as the French Jewish butcher's son,

...who took on the mission of shepherding orphans whose parents had been murdered or taken away by the Nazi occupiers over the alps from France to Switzerland and safety.

       As for the movie, critics generally panned it, not because it wasn't in and of itself a good movie, but because there was too much fictional drama dressing up the factual events. 
​       Apparently the hairpin escapes and heart-thumping  rescues in the movie were mostly made up,

 (though one would think there must have been a considerable degree of danger in belonging to the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France and smuggling children over the Swiss border);
... and there was actually no romance between Marcel and a fellow French Resistance fighter (played by Clémence Poésy).

       Marcel didn't have a teen-aged orphan side kick (Played by Bella Ramsey),

...and apparently his path never actually crossed that of Klaus Barbie (played to a terrifying tee by Matthias Schweighöfer ‎), the sadistic German Gestapo officer known as "The Butcher of Lyons." 

​        But in spite of - or maybe because of - dramatic liberties taken, I thought "Resistance" was a terrific movie, engaging, exciting, heart-gripping. And in spite of the embellishments, it told a remarkable story of a remarkably good man - and a remarkably evil one.
​      Juxtaposed in the film with Marcel Marceau was Klaus Barbie, 

...who took up residence with his lovely young wife and adorable baby daughter in a luxury hotel in Lyons, France, where he had a space converted into a sort of operating ​room where he personally tortured to death both adults and children.
      The story of of Klaus Barbie's reign of terror in Lyons as told in the movie was accurate. The story of Marcel Marceau as a rescuer of children (in real life of men and women as well) was also true. What was not true in the movie was that the two carried out their missions of good and evil in the same locale.
     "Resistance," however, took both their stories, Marcel Marceau's and Klaus Barbie's, and  interwove them into an engaging and thought-provoking fable of good vs. evil and a film well worth watching.
      In real life, as it turned out, the story took an incredible turn beyond what was told in the movie. 
       To be continued...