It deserved another chance. The first time that I tried to watch Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" I gagged on it the first few minutes. Hitler and the Jews. Not that old story again!

History's Bad Boys don't make interesting stories, to me, since they become mere caricatures. The plots become so predictable: Good versus Evil. The history of a country and people gets simplified to the point that much of the real story is ignored. For instance, have you ever seen a movie that helped you experience the disasters (defeat, humiliation, a food embargo imposed by the Brits, starvation, aborted revolution, and hyper-inflation) that Germany experienced after the Great War?

History has seen many genocides, but few of them are remembered. Hitler himself is said to have asked the rhetorical question of 'who remembered the Turkish genocide against the Armenians.'

How many millions of fetuses have been aborted in America since Roe versus Wade? A Woman's Choice, you say? Very well then, as a good statist and socialist you should also be in favor of the Body Politick of a nation having the choice of aborting unwanted foreign tissue. That's exactly what the Nazis did to Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, mental defectives, etc.

Not many movies and books have been made about the victims of Stalin, Mao, the French Revolution, or Lincoln's Grand Army of the Republic compared to dozens about Hitler and the Jews. Those other groups' stories don't really count because they don't have many tribal members working in Hollywood or the New York entertainment industry. And that is the real 'sorrow and pity.'

Anyway, with prejudices like this you can see why I didn't like "The Pianist" the first time I tried. I needed a different angle to appreciate it. And Polanski provided it. On one level, it was the music. Like most viewers I was greatly affected by the scene near the end when a sympathetic German officer helps the Pianist after he plays some music for the officer.

The movie didn't try to shock the viewer with scenes from concentration camps. Over the years documentaries have already done that. It is appalling how quickly that can lose its effect on a viewer.

It was a petty and unexpected insult that made an impression on me. In one scene a Jew, labeled with the mandatory armband, was walking down a sidewalk when a German soldier ordered him to walk in the gutter instead of the sidewalk. The sidewalk belonged to mensch; the gutter to unterMensch. Perhaps it is gratuitous violence or cruelty like this that makes the villain look most despicable, since the more serious acts of cruelty have already been discounted in the viewer's mind.

All of a sudden I saw something that I could relate to. What if I was an American unterMensch? I must beg for the reader's indulgence in making a far-fetched leap. Polanski had done his part in trying to give the viewer a fresh point of view for the now-hackneyed 'Hitler and the Jews' morality tale, and I was trying to do the same.

But we are too enlightened and progressive to have that sort of thing, you say. We have civil rights laws. Yea well, they don't cover everybody.

To be continued...